{"id":8654,"date":"2016-06-08T17:45:53","date_gmt":"2016-06-08T17:45:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lichen.csd.sc.edu\/sce\/entries\/lebby-nathaniel-h\/"},"modified":"2022-08-09T18:32:13","modified_gmt":"2022-08-09T18:32:13","slug":"lebby-nathaniel-h","status":"publish","type":"entry","link":"https:\/\/www.scencyclopedia.org\/sce\/entries\/lebby-nathaniel-h\/","title":{"rendered":"Lebby, Nathaniel H"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Inventor. Lebby was born in Charleston on August 22, 1816, the son of William Lebby and Frances Scott. He conceived of the mechanism for the world\u2019s first hydraulic suction dredge, which became the standard method of modern dredging. The device was first employed in the dredge boat <em>General Moultrie <\/em>in the late 1850s to deepen a new channel through the Charleston harbor bar.<\/p>\n<p>Although it provided the city with an active and prosperous port for almost two centuries, Charleston\u2019s harbor had a serious drawback at its mouth\u2013a shifting barrier of sand and debris that lay between one and three miles offshore. As ships got larger, they drew increasingly deeper drafts, which made the problem of the bar more acute with each passing decade. By 1852 the U.S. Coast Survey found that shoaling in the main channel through the bar had reduced its depth to less than eleven feet at low tide, down from an estimated thirteen feet in 1780. As a result federal, state, and local officials began looking for ways to deepen the channel.<\/p>\n<p>By this time Lebby was employed by the South Carolina Railroad. In 1852 he had been awarded a patent for a \u201cwater raising apparatus,\u201d a steam-driven pump that found frequent employment on rice plantations to flood and drain fields. When in operation, his pumps discharged sizable amounts of mud, sand, and even rocks. Lebby believed that a similar pump would pass through dredged material as well. His working model for a dredge that used a pump to suck up materials through a pipe impressed Captain George Cullum of the U.S. Corps of Engineers, who had assumed charge of public works in the harbor in 1855. Lebby\u2019s machine was housed in a New York\u2013built dredge boat, which, christened the <em>General Moultrie, <\/em>went into service in early 1857. The results were spectacular. By June 1858 Lebby\u2019s suction pump had been used to remove some 145,000 cubic yards of material, an unprecedented dredging achievement.<\/p>\n<p>Patent and mechanical drawings for the dredging apparatus do not survive, but Captain Cullum recorded a description of Lebby\u2019s apparatus in 1857: \u201ca large centrifugal pump six feet in diameter, revolving on a vertical axis, to which an iron 19\u201d\u00a0(diameter) suction hose is attached, its lower, or bell-shaped, end resting on the bottom of the channel. The pump is placed in the center of a powerful propeller under the deck in the hold of the vessel and is powered by a steam engine, which is supplied by steam from the propeller boiler.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Lebby received three additional patents after the Civil War: one in 1867 and one in 1869, each for a \u201cCentrifugal Pump\u201d; and a third in 1870 for an \u201core washing machine.\u201d He never married. Lebby died of consumption in Charleston on February 11, 1880, and was buried at Magnolia Cemetery there.<\/p>\n<p>Bonds, John B. \u201cOpening the Bar: First Dredging at Charleston, 1853\u20131859.\u201d <em>South Carolina Historical Magazine <\/em>98 (July 1997): 230\u201350.<\/p>\n<p>Comfort, Jan. \u201cSouth Carolina Inventors and Inventions, 1790\u20131873.\u201d <em>South Carolina Magazine of Ancestral Research <\/em>25 (summer 1997): 123\u201336.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Inventor. Lebby was born in Charleston on August 22, 1816, the son of William Lebby and Frances Scott. He conceived of the mechanism for the world\u2019s first hydraulic suction dredge, which became the standard method of modern dredging. The device was first employed in the dredge boat General Moultrie in the late 1850s to deepen [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":-1,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","class_list":["post-8654","entry","type-entry","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","ecms-a-z","ecms-business-and-industry","ecms-charleston-county","ecms-encyclopedia","ecms-environment-and-geography","ecms-industry-and-the-gilded-age-1878-1889","ecms-l","ecms-lowcountry","ecms-reconstruction-1866-1877","ecms-science-and-medicine","ecms-the-antebellum-south-1816-1860","ecms-u-s-civil-war-1861-1865"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v25.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Lebby, Nathaniel H - South Carolina Encyclopedia<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.scencyclopedia.org\/sce\/entries\/lebby-nathaniel-h\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Lebby, Nathaniel H - South Carolina Encyclopedia\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Inventor. Lebby was born in Charleston on August 22, 1816, the son of William Lebby and Frances Scott. He conceived of the mechanism for the world\u2019s first hydraulic suction dredge, which became the standard method of modern dredging. 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