Engineer and Metallurgist
Born in Lakeville, Conn., July 20, 1832
Died in Brooklyn, N.Y., January 29, 1882

Alexander Lyman Holley was drawn to manufacturing interests (for cutlery) established by his family, who were prominent citizens in the northwest-Connecticut area. Born into New England affluence, from several generations of iron magnates, he was the son of a former governor of Connecticut, Alexander Hamilton Holley and mother Jane M. Lyman. The Holley House (built in 1808) still remains open as a museum, displaying 173 years of Holley family history, although very little of it about Alexander Lyman Holley's lineage. Holley eloped with Mary Slade (of New York City) in 1855 and they had two daughters, one of whom was Gertrude, whose descendents still live in the New York area.

Before and during his college career, he developed his literary talents and began drawing, favoring at first the machinery in his father's knife factory and his avid interest in locomotives. (He retained a fondness for art and would later count among his friends many of the Hudson Rivers artists of his generation.) Holley was educated in academies in Salisbury and Farmington, Conn., and Stockbridge, Mass. In 1850 he was among the first students enrolled for the new science program at Brown University, Providence, R.I. On March 22, 1932, Brown Daily Herald, a professor recalled that, as a school boy, Holley's "whole interest centered in the whirling wheels, engines and tools in his father's factory," rather than the Latin and Greek classics that were to have prepared him to study law.

During college, he invented a steam-engine cut-off described in Appletons' Mechanics' Magazine and Engineers' Journal, July 1852, for which he received his first patent. His obituary notes that his technical studies were supplemented by a year's practice as a locomotive engineer on the Stonington Railroad. Upon graduation in 1853, he gave an oration on the "natural motors." Railroad engineering, which was then state of the art, was his early passion. He would soon find employment at Corliss & Nightingale near Providence, R.I. There he worked on an experimental locomotive with a Corliss valve gearing that, according to the Brown Daily Herald, he later referred to as "a cross between Mephistopheles and a Colorado mule, having an inborn cussedness."

He next worked for the New Jersey Locomotive Works in Jersey City, N.J., where he met rail editor Zerah Colburn from whom he bought and then published a journal called Holley's Railroad Advocate for several years, until the financial crash of 1857. In that time, he became well known by rail engineers of two continents. He and Colburn later traveled through Europe to study railroad practices of the day. Their report, "American and European Railroad Practice," contained documented engineering data and complete drawings (of Holley's) that revealed ideas far in advance of American thinking, which in turn both disturbed and invigorated the rail industry.

Pursuing his engineering interests all the while, Holley continued to make significant contributions in published works. For nearly 30 years, between 1858 and 1875, Holley worked as a foreign technical correspondent for The New York Times, providing nearly 300 articles, and he also became technical editor for the American Railway Review. Beginning with his trip to England on the first transatlantic voyage of the S.S. Great Eastern, Holley became acquainted with Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Edwin Stevens and other pre-eminent engineers worldwide. His writing expertise expanded to ordnance and armor in relation to naval armament, in a book that was widely accepted as a standard textbook.

In 1863, however, he purchased the U.S. rights to the Bessemer process for manufacturing steel and soon pursued steel manufacturing almost to the exclusion of all his many interests. In 1865, he built the first U.S. plant employing the Bessemer process in Troy, N.Y., followed by one in Harrisburg, Pa. He planned or was consulted on a dozen others, including the design of the Cambria Steel, Bethlehem Steel, and Scranton Steel works. His original improvements in large-scale steel manufacture led to his reputation as founder of the U.S. steel industry. Ten of his fifteen patents were improvements in the Bessemer process. Sir Henry Bessemer had announced in 1857 how to make steel cheaply by blowing air through a molten mass of iron. Lacking knowledge of the chemical reactions involved and relying on unsuitable refractories and crude machines, the process failed to demonstrate its potential. With remarkable accuracy, Holley identified the weaknesses, implemented radical solutions, designed new massive machinery and attained immediate results in producing excellent Bessemer steel.

A 1947 tribute in Mechanical Engineering magazine noted that "Holley's greatness as an engineer lay in his talent to comprehend the utility of things and in his ability to gather and digest facts and theories bearing on any engineering problem, without prejudice to any side of the question, and to reach with almost unerring accuracy a true evaluation of a new idea or development."

Holley was a leader in engineering societies of the day, becoming a member in the first year (1871) of the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers (and serving as its third president in 1876). He then joined the American Society of Civil Engineers and later became a vice president. By the late 1870s, he launched an effort to unite mechanical engineers into a professional society. He chaired the first meeting of ASME founders in the offices of the American Machinist on Feb. 16, 1880, and is credited for establishing the intellectual boundaries of the mechanical engineering profession and ASME. He is the principal author of ASME's first bylaws and rules and was called a leading spirit in the organization of the Society.

One of the highest honors bestowed by ASME is the Holley Medal, which since 1923 has been conferred on any person "who by some great and unique act of genius of an engineering nature has accomplished a great and timely public benefit . . . . of such importance to be worthy of the gratitude of the nation and call forth the admiration of engineers." Recipients include Henry Ford, Elmer Sperry, Charles Draper, Soichiro Honda and Jack Kilby, to name a few.

Holley also was a member of the British Iron and Steel Institute of Great Britain and of the Institution of Civil Engineers in England, and he was a member of the US. Board for Testing Structural Materials. He was a trustee of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.

Even as his health began to fail from the strain of his activities, his ideals and his personality were key to the pulling people together. He fell ill while traveling in Europe in 1881 and returned to his Brooklyn Heights home, dying of "peritonitis, due to a complication of diseases," according to the January 30, 1882, obituary in The New York Times. Popular pastor Henry Ward Beecher, whose statue stands in Brooklyn, presided over his funeral service, calling Holley "richly endowed, holding in himself the legacy of the past . . . there may be better, but not on this soil."

His heart and mind were that of an engineer. "Holley was known and loved by men whose hearts and fortunes were in things of iron and steel," said the 1947 Mechanical Engineering tribute. "In an age of industrial-empire building, when jealousy and secrecy were the order of the day, engineers, inventors, and industrialists were eager to disclose their plans and to listen to his criticism. With his brilliant mind brimful of engineering detail, his excellent memory retaining all that he heard, Holley was a welcome visitor because he could be counted upon to leave behind more than he took away. . . . He had tremendous energy and above all a will to direct the power of his whole personality toward a good end."

Three societies bound by their affection and respect for Alexander Lyman Holley jointly raised the funds to commission the memorial that now stands in Washington Square Park. At the time of his death, Holley was organizing an international meeting of engineers that finally took place in 1890, in time for the erection of his monument. These same three societies initiated the support for current restoration efforts. Although many years of exposure of the soft Indiana limestone have left the inscription difficult to read, in the beauty of the bronze on the beaux-arts pedestal there remain traces of remembrance for the man. Recognition of Holley as a great thinker in America, as noted in the Save Outdoor Sculpture! program that matched ASME Foundation funding, offers a tribute to a great engineer and metallurgist. In the blending of private and public funding, restoration efforts have revisited the spirit of collaboration embodied in his life. And if inquiring visitors can look further, they would be rewarded with a broader appreciation for the inventive and practical contributions of engineering to our society.