Henry Sturgis Drinker

Henry Sturgis Drinker (8 November 1850 – 27 July 1937) was an American mechanical engineer, lawyer, author, and the fifth president of Lehigh University. Biography Drinker was born in Hong Kong, the third child of expatriate Philadelphia Quaker merchant Sandwith B. Drinker (1808–1858) and Susannah Budd Shober (1813–1860). Sandwith made his first trading voyage to China about 1845, and was joined there about 1849, by his wife and two children, Catherine (1841–1922) and Robert (1842–1890). Their fourth child, Elizabeth (1855–1919), was born in Macau. Sandwith died at Macau in January 1858, and Susannah and the children returned to the United States. They settled in Baltimore, where she opened Mrs. Drinker's Academy for Young Ladies. Susannah developed uterine cancer and died two years later, leaving the children orphans. Henry Sturgis Drinker graduated from Lehigh University with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1871. Hired by the Lehigh Valley Railroad, the following year he was put in charge of construction of a two-mile tunnel through New Jersey's Musconetcong Mountains. The tunnel was completed in 1875, and enabled the Easton and Amboy Railroad (a LVRR subsidiary) to bypass canals and deliver Pennsylvania coal directly to its terminal at Perth Amboy, New Jersey, on New York Harbor. Drinker published books and articles on drilling, blasting, and buttressing tunnels. He became an expert on legal matters related to railroad construction, and edited a revised edition of Ball's General Railroad and Telegraph Laws of Pennsylvania (1884). He completed a law degree, and served as general solicitor for the Lehigh Valley Railroad from 1885 to 1905.