John Frank Stevens, one of America's foremost civil engineers of the past 150 years was as a railway reconnaissance and location engineer whose reputation was made in the rugged Selkirks, Rockies, and Cascades on the Canadian Pacific and Great Northern lines. As the second chief engineer of the Panama Canal, he laid out the canal as we know it today: a technical achievement far ahead of its time, with multiple high-lock passage and a huge interior lake. Stevens served as head of the Advisory Commission of Railway Experts to Russia, dispatched by President Wilson to aid Russia's new Provisional Government of 1917. As a consultant, he contributed to many engineering feats, including the control of the Mississippi River after the disastrous floods of 1927 and construction of the Boulder (Hoover) Dam. Carefully researched, An Urge to Engineer utilizes not only Stevens's surviving papers but also materials from projects with which he was associated.