An amazing thing happened in Kansas City around the turn of the 20th century, a phenomenon that proved to have enduring value even though few in Kansas City understand how profound that value is. Kansas City quietly began to emerge as the Mecca of America's consulting engineers. One could trace the beginning date to 1886 when maverick bridge engineer John Alexander Low Waddell opened a consulting practice in Kansas City. Another critical date was 1898 when two young Stanfor -trained engineers, Robert McDonnell and Clinton Burns, chose to set up shop in Kansas City only because there were so many towns around it that lacked clean water and sewage facilities. In 1914, the year war started in Europe, a new engineering firm opened its doors in Kansas City. Called Harrington, Howard & Ash, the firm was an offshoot of Waddell's firm, and it specialized in bridges. The fact that Kansas City was a major railroad center located on a river that required a bridge or two made it an attractive location. The company's first major project took it to the Williamette River in Oregon. That first bridge, now known as the Steel Bridge, still stands.

In 1941, the firm shifted its name once more to Howard Needles Tannen and Bergendoff, since shortened to HNTB, a name well known not only in Kansas City but also throughout the world.

In 1915, two young engineers, E.B. Black and Tom Veatch, decided to launch their own firm as well. Early projects included small power plants in the Midwest and later major transportation projects for Harry S. Truman when he served as a judge for Jackson County. The two founders of Black & Veatch were legendary in their demands for exacting professional standards and client service. Their professionalism paid off. By the turn of the next century, the company would rank among America's 100 largest privately owned companies with 90 offices worldwide.

Black & Veatch would also emerge as Kansas City's largest engineering firm with more than 1,300 engineers and architects in Kansas City alone. Amazingly, in a city that is only 150 years old, the three largest Kansas City engineering firms--Black & Veatch, Burns & McDonnell, and HNTB--were all established more than 87 years ago. They each grew steadily in the 1920s, survived the 1930s--a weeding out period for many a business--and surged during the 1940s as a result of war-related government contracts. By war's end each was positioned as a regional, indeed national, player of some significance. Today, among the three, they employ more than 5,000 engineers around the world and more than 5,000 employees locally.

Although no other firm among Kansas City's top 10 would be launched for nearly 50 years, these three older firms also provided a stable and enduring nucleus for the clustering of considerable engineering talent. "We do have a talent base--a large amount of engineering and technical people," observes Ken Burkhart, president of Bibb and Associates, Kansas City's fourth-largest firm, which was founded in 1979 and specializes in power, architecture, process and industrial industries. "The big boys are here," volunteers Rich Smith of Henderson Engineers when asked why Kansas City has proved so fertile a ground for engineering start-ups, adding "There have been a lot of spin-offs."

These three mega-firms, their spin-offs and offshoots would create a tradition that resonates to this very day. In fact, Kansas City today employs more consulting engineers and architects per capita than any other metropolitan area in the world. By "consulting" we refer here to those engineers who serve as an adjunct to the staffs of other companies and who have created and maintained America's infrastructure--bridges, tunnels, highways, airports, sewer systems, waste disposal projects, power plants, electric grids, industrial plants and the like.

To be fair, were we to include those who design machines that fit in boxes, Silicon Valley would surpass Kansas City, but there would be no Silicon Valley had the Burns and McDonnells, Blacks and Veatches, Howards, Needles, Tammens and Bergendoffs not figured out how to connect Silicon Valley to the rest of America and the world in the first place. Besides, as Burns & McDonnell CEO Dave Ruf notes wryly of his West Coast confreres, "They don't move much dirt out there."

The engineers of the 19th century moved a great deal of dirt. They spanned this raw-boned nation, bridging and tunneling, literally, from sea to shining sea. Yet for all of their efforts, as the founding fathers of Kansas City's engineering history understood upon setting up shop in Kansas City, the 20th century would offer more challenges still.

A century ago, the average Kansas Citian did not expect to live beyond 50 years of age, and one out of every four of their children would not live to be 10. A century ago, 50 Kansas-Citians would die of typhoid, a water-born disease, in the average year. If there were an outbreak of the disease, 500 or more might die. Cholera, influenza, tuberculosis, polio, whooping cough, scarlet fever, yellow fever and worse stalked the Kansas City family at every turn. No one was immune.

The privileged few Kansas Citians would have had electricity in their homes, indoor plumbing, maybe even a telephone--all very recent developments. If they were a working-class family, they probably had no such amenities. If they were a rural family, they surely did not. Indeed, as late as the 1940s, Burns & Mac's CEO Dave Ruf can recall winter trips to the outhouse and bathing in a galvanized tub next to the wood burning stove. The exper-ience has made him all the more appreciative of the engineer's work.

Rich or poor, Kansas Citians of a century ago had no refrigerators and were thus much more susceptible to food poisoning. They had no washing machines or vacuum cleaners or dishwashers, and the absence of these conveniences left women, in particular, very few options as to how they would spend their day--or their life. They had no automobiles, and if a horse and carriage seems now to have a whiff of romance about it, then it had a very real whiff of dung and danger. Carriages were 10 times as lethal as cars per mile driven, and the all too ample horse manure, like that of pigs and goats and whatever else ran wild, ended up unfiltered in the streams and rivers.

But not since Rome had the world seen a race of engineers like those America created. They would not only connect America, but they would light it, heat it, cool it, pave it, purify it, and advance it in ways unimaginable even to the ever-inventive Romans. In 1850, 512 Americans listed "engineer" as their profession. By 1900, there were some 45,000, and almost from the beginning Kansas City would get far more than its fair share.

This should not be surprising. So many of America's children were pioneers or of pioneer stock, and in the Kansas City area, the last great outpost of the Midwest, a disproportionately high percentage of people grew up on or near farms. Dave Ruf was one of them. "On a farm you get all kind of respons-ibilities at a young age," says Ruf. "And if anything breaks you've got to fix it."

Their relative isolation forced rural Americans to rely on their own resources. And the spirit of free enterprise encouraged their Yankee "ingenuity," a word which itself derives from the Latin word ingenium-- (clever thought or invention), the root word for "engineer."

Rich Smith, Director of Business Development for Henderson Engineers, sees this virtue in his company's own founding father, Fran Henderson, who launched the company in 1970. Henderson, says Smith, "had a free-thinking way of how business should be done" this philosophy in turn "drew in a lot of good employees and helped make us successful."

"People from rural America are more technically minded," argues Kim Mastalio, President of Black & Veatch's Energy Services Division, who himself worked as a mechanic at his father's gas station at a pit stop of a central Illinois town called Toluca. Mastalio notes that even the Japanese he works with have commented on the "hard work and values" of the Midwestern engineer. HNTB Senior Vice President Scott Smith, who also hails from central Illinois, has a similar take. "There is a certain practicality among Midwesterners," says Smith, "that makes them good engineers"

Michael Lorenz, Kansas City representative of CRB Engineers, feels much the same. "A lot of our employees grew up on farms," he notes, "and have been working on machinery all their lives." Lorenz' father was a homebuilder in Atchison, Kan., and was always interested in putting things together. "Midwesterners are no frills kind of people," adds Rich Smith, who himself hails from Topeka, "honest, hard-working, and down home."

Kansas City prospered due to one accident of geography, our access to the countryside, and one accident of history, the happy clustering of the big three. The third principle reason for Kansas City's success in the world of engineering was no accident at all, and that has to do with education. As Kim Mastalio of Black & Veatch comments, "Many kids from rural areas go to Midwestern universities to find a better life." He was one of them. So are most of his colleagues, virtually all of whom hail from the four-state area of Missouri, Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska.

The three principals of CRB-- Doyle Clark, Gerry Richardson, and Jeff Biskup--all attended state universities in Missouri and Kansas. Despite their seemingly provincial roots, the threesome launched one of the most sophisticated engineering firms in America, one that is primarily involved in facility and process design for high technology industries around the world. Although not initiated until 1984, CRB is the seventh-largest engineering firm in greater Kansas City.

If the land grant schools of the Big 12 have not produced many Nobel Prize winners, they have produced some of America's best engineers. When asked to cite their preferred recruiting grounds, each of the executives interviewed cited the Missouri University-Columbia, the University of Missouri-Rolla, the University of Kansas and Kansas State University without fail. In fact, they showed--and in some cases expressed--a bias toward the northern half of the Big 12. Indeed, even the Houston office of Henderson Engineers recruits first from KU and KSU.

"I think we have some very good engineering schools," says Scott Smith of HNTB, a firm that could successfully recruit anywhere it chooses. Lorenz of CRB cites the quality of these schools as the very reason that engineering has thrived in Kansas City. "Universities produce well-trained talent across the Midwest," acknowledges Brian Larson, CEO of TranSystems, a top-five Kansas City engineering company that specializes in transportation.

Whatever their university, whatever their epoch, the great, enduring gift of Kansas City engineers has been that they genuinely believed in what they were doing. To them, providing power or clean water or highways or environmental clean-ups wasn't just a job. It was a mission, a calling. Collectively, Kansas City engineering firms have provided countless thousands of communities around the world with the fruits of progress undreamed in the first tens of thousands of years of human experience. And this is one of the great untold stories of the Kansas City legacy.