Generations of Engineers Keep Coming

By Rachel Davis

Editor’s Note: This story originally ran in the April 2000 issue of Engineering Times, published by the National Society of Professional Engineers. It takes on current significance because the Bellamy family was recently designated the Wyoming Family of the Year by the Associated Parents of the University of Wyoming. In addition, both sons of John Bellamy, Bill and John II, have been elected to the university’s College of Engineering Hall of Fame, joining John. The university has awarded 13 degrees to family members, more than half from the College of Engineering, and one family member is currently enrolled in the college.

When 84-year-old John Bellamy steps outside his house in Laramie, Wyoming, he’s greeted by the breathtaking peaks of the Snowy Range of the Rocky Mountains, set against acres of western sky. He watches the rolling hills of the Laramie Mountains climb into the east and spots the University of Wyoming in the plains to the north.

Here, he is truly home. Within this scenery lies a familial engineering history that spans more than four generations. John (the third generation), his father, his uncle, and his sons all graduated from the University of Wyoming as engineers and went on to make significant contributions to their chosen profession. John’s grandfather Charles Bellamy named one of the prettiest lakes in that same Snowy Range after his wife Mary while surveying the water supply potentials of the range. Besides christening Lake Marie, Charles also named nearby Bellamy Lake.

But John’s grandfather Charles did much more than give names to lakes. According to the Wyoming licensing board’s records, he was the nation’s first professional engineer, licensed in 1907. The son of a French goods importer, Charles happened to be caught at age 19 in the 1870 Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. Holed up in his brother’s grocery store during the siege, “he became one of the best billiard players around because the store had a pool table and he didn’t have much else to do,” says John.

Charles also studied enough astronomy that when he returned from Paris to his birthplace, Boston, he became a charter member of the Boston Scientific Society. “He happened to be in the room with Watson when Bell first asked him to 'come here’ and do experiments to develop the first telephone,” John says. Alexander Graham Bell met Thomas Watson, a young electrician who became his assistant, at a Boston electrician shop in 1874.

As an admired engineer and land surveyor in Wyoming, Charles established section corners that subdivided the public lands. He was a deputy mineral specialist in the field, and he also located a railroad and several irrigation ditches. After working for years in contracts with the U.S. government, he obtained the first engineering license at the age of 56. Charles was so renowned by the time he sat for the licensure exam that “the guy who gave the exam remarked that he shouldn’t be giving the exam, he should be taking it from Charles,” says John.

In 1913, Charles founded the private engineering and land surveying firm Bellamy & Sons, Engineers. When he died, the second Bellamy generation, Benjamin and Fulton, carried on his name. Wyoming’s Bellamy Chapter of NSPE was named after Charles, and members of the family have been actively involved in NSPE since his death. Fulton, Benjamin, John, and John’s two sons all went on to earn licenses.

A civil engineering graduate, Fulton (John’s uncle) was an artillery lieutenant in France in World War I, an assistant state engineer of Wyoming, and a district airport engineer for the Federal Aviation Administration.

Benjamin (John’s father), also a civil engineering graduate, served as Laramie’s city engineer. He then went to New York to work as a ventilation engineer for the Lincoln Tunnel. After the stock market crashed in 1929 and the project closed down, he became a consultant to New York City concerning the hydrology of its water supply. In Wyoming, Benjamin discovered and developed Ferris Oil Field and served as a field engineer on the Bureau of Reclamation Heart Mountain project near Cody.

John became a partner of Bellamy & Sons with his father from 1938 to 1942 after earning a civil engineering degree at UW and a master’s degree in nuclear physics from the University of Wisconsin. As part of the World War II effort, John obtained a private pilot license, took a meteorological training course at the University of Chicago in 1942, and stayed on as an assistant professor until 1948.

During this time, John successfully tested his “Bellamy Drift” navigational technique in a weather reconnaissance aircraft over the North Atlantic. He also served as a special consultant to the U.S. Air Force in Guam, where he developed techniques used to forecast the winds to and over the Japanese Empire. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for this work. After earning a Ph.D. in meteorology, John became the associate director of Chicago’s Cook Research Laboratories and a civil engineering professor at the University of Wyoming, among other accomplishments. He came full circle by finishing up his career at Bellamy & Sons, this time incorporating forecasting techniques and meteorology.

John’s retired now, and he says Bellamy & Sons will stop with him. His oldest son, John II, is an electrical engineer doing cutting-edge telecommunications work on fiber network synchronization and timing with clients such as MCI. His civil/environmental engineer son William, an officer of CH2M HILL, helped solve water supply problems in Sydney, Australia (site of the 2000 Olympics), among many other achievements. Bill is also the corporate representative of CH2M HILL to the Wyoming State Board of Registration for PEs and Professional Land Surveyors.

Both John II and his father say their family played a definite role in their decision to become engineers, but they were drawn to the career from the start. “I don’t know whether it was environmental or genetic,” says John II. Currently, Bill’s son Michael is a freshman at the University of Wyoming majoring in architectural engineering.

John II, now 58, does attribute some of his initial attraction to engineering to his relatives’ fascination with it. He has a vivid memory from when he was 13 years old of his grandfather Benjamin driving him to see the AT&T cross-country microwave tower that had just been built outside of Laramie. Years later, as an engineer, John II was involved with the conversion of cross-country microwave systems from analog to digital. Now he and his computer-programming sister Louise pass along the new developments in computers to their father, who stays active through the Internet and his own computer programming.

With sentiment, John senior refers to a more personal gift his son gave him—a dedication in the third edition of John II’s respected book, Digital Telephony. It reads simply, “To my father / for passing on the enjoyment of being an engineer.”

Rachel Davis was a staff writer for Engineering Times when she wrote this in 2000