How He Met an Emergency.
In the building of one of the trolley tunnels under the Hudson, a careless opening of the doors of the shield—the cylindrical cup pushed along at the head of the bore, and by means of which all the digging is done—caused the flooding of one hundred feet of the tunnel. It would be as hopeless a task to try to bail that mixture of mud and water out as it would be to drain the Hudson River and the bay adjacent thereto. Jacobs saved the situation by a very simple expedient.
The cup defender Reliance had just been stripped of her canvas, and Jacobs got this big spread of sail, sank it flat over the flooded part of the tunnel, weighted it with a mixture of clay and stone, and thus mended the bottom of the river so that it didn't continue to leak in mud and water. It was so very simple that few people would have thought of it.
He completed his first Hudson tunneling work on the 11th of March, 1905, and all he said when the work was done and he had walked through was:
"There isn't much to tell, except that Henry Hudson was the first man who crossed over the river and Jacobs was the first man who crossed under it."