He obtained a BS in civil engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1908, and then joined the bridge department of the Missouri Pacific Railroad in St. Louis, where he remained for a year, after which he returned to Norfolk Academy in 1909[clarification needed].
He left Illinois in 1937 to become the chair of the civil engineering department at Yale University, a position from which he retired in 1953.
Accurate structural analysis of statically indeterminate beams and frames could be performed by hand using the moment distribution method.
The Hardy Cross method is essentially the Jacobi iterative scheme applied to the displacement formulation of structural analysis.
Another Hardy Cross method is also famous for modeling flows in complex water supply networks.