Joint Project - Frank McNally on the great Limerick-born engineer MM O’Shaughnessy

Near the village of Glin in Co Limerick, there is — or at least used to be — a house named Jointer Cottage.

I don’t know the derivation of the name but it seems apt in any case, because the cottage was in 1864 the birthplace of a great engineer, one Michael Maurice O’Shaughnessy, whose own name is now attached to several landmarks in the American city where he did his best work.

When you visit San Francisco, you can drive along O’Shaughnessy Boulevard, a winding, picturesque route that follows the contours of Glen Canyon Park.

The undeveloped land west of that road, meanwhile, is called O’Shaughnessy Hollow. And if you don’t have a car, you can access both via the municipal bus route, 44 O’Shaughnessy, the “Muni” transit system (which also includes light rail and cable cars) being another part of his legacy as San Francisco’s chief engineer for 20 years from 1912. But the Irishman’s biggest monument is 257km east of the city, in Yosemite National Park. There, the O’Shaughnessy Dam, built between 1919 and 1923, harnesses the Toulumne river into a giant reservoir that has been supplying San Francisco and other places with water ever since.

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One of nine children born to a farming couple, O’Shaughnessy was himself farmed out — to his mother’s parents — aged two, before being educated at Mount Trenchard National School, then Rockwell College, and later at the universities of Cork and Galway, where he completed training as a civil engineer.

Having first hoped for a career in London, he was encouraged to try California instead and travelled there with several letters of introduction, none of which landed him a job. His early experiences in San Francisco were an education in themselves, albeit a bitter one. In 1890 and again in 1891, he was contracted to carry out survey work for the San Francisco board of supervisors, the city’s legislative body. The first contract was in the gift of the Democratic Party, the second of the Republicans. Both cheated him out of his fees, $5,000 each.

Despite this baptism in political treachery, a generation later, he agreed to take the job of chief engineer in a city that had been ravaged by the 1906 earthquake, accepting a salary that was only half what he was by then used to earning in private practice.

For the next two decades, he presided over a series of huge infrastructural projects, including the municipal railway, highways, tunnels, sewers, and a high-pressure firefighting system of the kind that had been sorely wanted in 1906 when fires did worse damage than the quake itself.

O’Shaughnessy became popularly known by his initials, “MM”, which in time spawned a joke. Because his work was funded by government bond issues, frequent and extensive, the MM was said to be stand for “more money”. But the man himself stood for fiscal rectitude, control of costs and an intolerance of political interference. Of his biggest project, the $100 million water scheme, he was able boast that “not a crooked finger has been able to chisel a dollar out of it”.

He made it back to the old country at least once. During a 1920 visit to Limerick he took a photograph of Jointer Cottage, now in the archives of the University of Galway. Three years later, his fame at home was cemented by a write-up in The Irish Times, which marvelled at his eponymous dam as “one of the largest structures of its kind in the world, being 341 feet from foundation to crest”.

But memories of the great engineer have become hazy, even (or especially) in California. Hence one of the more dubious compliments to his genius, from Hollywood, via the 2008 “stoner” movie, Pineapple Express.

In that, a character played by James Franco rolls two cannabis joints, threads them through each other crossways, and assures his friend (Seth Rogan) that the four-ended result is the ultimate smoking experience, adding: “It’s rumoured that MM O’Shaughnessy designed the first one — the guy who, uh, designed the Golden Gate Bridge.”

Alas, O’Shaughnessy did not design the Golden Gate Bridge. Nor, almost certainly and despite being born in a Jointer Cottage, did he design the ultimate marijuana experience.

Strange to say, that may have been another O’Shaughnessy from Limerick. Or at least, the unrelated William Brooke O’Shaughnessy (1809-1899) was the man the stoners were trying to remember. He spent most of his life in British India, where he oversaw construction of the telegraph system. But he was, by training, a doctor. And among his life’s other projects was a period spent researching the therapeutic effects of cannabis.