David Edward Hughes was born on September 21, 1861 at Palmyra, Ohio, the son of Evan and Ann Johns Hughes. His youth was spent in that locality attending school, farming for his widowed mother, and working in sandstone quarries. At the age of sixteen he moved to Dunigan in Northern California.

He was largely self-educated, devoting every spare moment to study in both medicine and engineering. He taught in country schools and at Pierce College, College City, California, and, although still in his early twenties, became a professor of mathematics. Hughes was one of the finest applied mathematicians of his generation. He evolved, calculated, and published a table on the perfect transition ("Sickle") curve, or American spiral, which was used on the construction of the Chicago elevated railroad, as well as on other projects.

In 1893, he accepted employment with the U.S. Engineer Department, remaining with that service until his retirement in 1932. His first work for the War Department was on the improvement of Humboldt Bay, California, stabilizing the entrance by jetty construction. In 1902 he was transferred to the newly created Los Angeles Engineer District and, for the following thirty years, was its ranking civilian engineer. He built jetties and fortifications at San Diego, Calif., and breakwaters and fortifications for Los Angeles-Long Beach Harbor. For a year he served as engineer for a board appointed by President Taft to determine the site and the design for San Carlos Dam, later Coolidge Dam, in Arizona. His was the guiding hand in the establishment of federal harbor lines along the Southern California coast. These lines determined the development of the harbors.

Hughes investigated tideland law and ownership and became an authority on the subject. Typically, he urged and aided in the litigation that restored the local tidelands to the people and resulted in municipally owned harbors. He experimented and wrote on surge and seiche. He evolved the idea of substitution of waste dredging for the costly stone in the strengthening of breakwaters, and the vast chain at San Pedro, or Los Angeles, Harbor, built from this design is a monument to him.

Hughes was married to Lydia Wiklund in 1913 at Florence, Arizona. He was elected a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers on September 6, 1905. He died on November 19, 1942.

Excerpted from: Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, v. 109 (1944), p. 1495-1497.