21 Facts About Ole Singstad

Ole Knutsen Singstad was a Norwegian-American civil engineer best known for his work on underwater vehicular tunnels in New York City.

In 1946, the Triborough Bridge Authority under Robert Moses took over tunnel construction in New York, and Ole Singstad was sidelined as Moses favored bridges over tunnels.

Ole Singstad was born at Singstad farm in the Lensvik area of Rissa Municipality, Norway.

Ole Singstad was the seventh of nine children born to Knut Jacobsen Singstad and Anne Mikkelsdatter Auset Singstad.

Ole Singstad studied in Trondheim at the Trondheim Technical School from 1901 to 1905, where he was chairman of the student body.

Ole Singstad first worked for the Central Railroad of New Jersey.

Ole Singstad is widely known for work on the underwater road tunnels in New York City and for designing the ventilation system that made long underwater road tunnels possible, first used in the Holland Tunnel under the Hudson River.

Ole Singstad began working under chief engineer Clifford Milburn Holland in 1915, and he finished directing construction of the Holland Tunnel after the death of Holland in the fall of 1924 and of Holland's successor Milton H Freeman, who died in March 1925.

Ole Singstad couldn't take it over so he wanted to wreck the whole damned project.

In 1946, the Tunnel Authority was taken over by the Triborough Bridge Authority, forming the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, whereupon Ole Singstad was fired, and the incomplete Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel was finished to specifications by TBTA chief engineer Ralph Smillie, which were mostly based on Ole Singstad's original designs.

Ole Singstad later claimed that Smillie had caused "excessive" leakage by not using Ole Singstad's experimental caulking design to prevent leaks.

However, a tunnel of the Hudson River Tunnel's length required an efficient method of ventilation, so Chief Engineer Ole Singstad pioneered a system of ventilating the tunnel transversely.

In October 1920, General George R Dyer, the chairman of the New York Tunnel Commission, published a report in which he stated that Singstad had devised a feasible ventilation system for the Hudson River Tunnel.

In October 1921, Ole Singstad concluded that a conventional, longitudinal ventilation system would have to be pressurized to an air flow rate of 27 cubic meters per second along the tunnel.

The public and the press proclaimed air conditions were better in the tubes than in some streets of New York City; after the tunnel opened, Ole Singstad stated that the carbon monoxide content in the tubes were half of those recorded on the streets.

Ole Singstad returned to Norway five times in his life: first for his mother's 80th birthday in 1923, to Lensvik in 1930, and again in 1933 while working on the tunnel at the river Schelde.

Ole Singstad missed his mother's 100th birthday in 1943 because of World War II, but he returned in 1953 and again a final time in 1967 at age 85, while he was still active in his consulting firm.

Ole Singstad is buried at the Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York.

Ole Singstad received honorary doctorates from the Stevens Institute of Technology of Hoboken, New Jersey; the New York Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn; St Olaf College of Northfield, Minnesota; and the College of Engineering Newark, New Jersey.

Ole Singstad was named 1933 Officer of the Order of the Crown of Belgium, received the 1939 Ridder order of First Class, the 1956 Medal of Honor from the American Society of Engineers and the 1960 Commander of the Order of Merit.

At age 48, Ole Singstad received the Royal Norwegian Academy of Science Society, an award normally reserved for much older people.