Member Directory,
1847 - 1922
H. Hobart Porter
Contracting Engineer
Centurion, 1905–1947
George W. Wickersham and Edward L. Patterson
New York (Manhattan), New York
New York (Manhattan), New York
Age forty
Hewlett, New York
Century Memorial
Henry Hobart Porter. [Born] 1865. Engineer; public utility official.
I have a cousin who operates a property of the American Water Works & Electric Company whom I visited a short time after Mr. Porter’s death and talking with my cousin about Mr. Porter I had quoted to me a statement made twenty years before:
“His friendly and human attitude permeates the entire ‘American’ organization. In some manner or other it is known to every operator that at the top of the organization sits a man of ready sympathies and understanding who is willing to give unlimited time and thought to any matter which comes before him and who prefers to be considered as a fellow workman rather than as a boss clothed with authority. It is easy to be loyal to this kind of leader.”
It is the movies, I think, that foster the notion that to be a big-shot executive consists in pushing buzzers and ordering others around to do the work. But the fact is that success in the highly competitive world of American business comes only from hard work, ideas, leadership of equals and a feel for a situation based on the realities of operation. Mr. Porter had all this. He was a graduate of the Columbia University School of Mines in its great days; he had adventurous years as a mining engineer in Mexico and in our Southwest. He supervised the planning and construction of one of the first of the country’s mine-mouth generating plants; he was one of the chief planners and operators of interconnected light and power systems which enormously increased our country’s industrial capacity with no expansion of generating facilities.
Through it all he pulled his weight in the boat of public service: an enthusiastic and hard-working Trustee of Columbia University, a member of the Board of the New York Botanical Garden.
He endeared himself to those whom he met in business, in the University and, above all, here.”
Source: Henry Allen Moe Papers, Mss.B.M722. Reproduced by permission of American Philosophical Society Library & Museum, Philadelphia
Henry Allen Moe
Henry Allen Moe Papers, 1947 Memorials
