Franklin F. Snyder
Franklin Farison Snyder was born in Holgate, Ohio on 11 November 1910, the son of Samuel
L. and Nettie M. (nee Farison) Snyder. He graduated from Libby High School in Toledo in 1928
and attended the University of Toledo for two years. In 1930, he transferred to Ohio State
University, where he received a B.C.E. degree in 1932.
During the Great Depression, when promising engineers often encountered difficulties finding
employment, Snyder obtained work in state and federal agencies. His first position was as a
surveying foreman for the Ohio Division of Forestry. Afterwards, he joined the U.S. Geological
Survey as a junior hydraulic engineer and assisted in the studies of rainfall and runoff. Results
of his work were included in U.S.G.S. water supply paper #772, Studies of Relations of Rainfall
and Runoff in the United States (1936).
Although still young, Snyder rapidly gained a reputation for expertise in the relationship
between rainfall and runoff. He continued his work with the Tennessee Valley Authority in1935-
37. In Knoxville; he developed new flood routing procedures that were applied to existing and
planned reservoirs in the Tennessee River basin. These procedures enabled hydrologists to
calculate the course and character of floods as they progress through a river reach or a reservoir
system. Snyder then joined the Pennsylvania Department of Forests and Waters, where he
supervised studies of rainfall and runoff, part of a state effort to construct a statewide flood
forecasting and warning system.
Meanwhile, beginning with the Flood Control Act of 1936, the United States government had
initiated an ambitious flood control program to protect urban and rural areas. As the program
developed and expanded, the necessity to develop reliable hydrologic data became apparent. The
data was necessary to establish necessary reservoir and spillway capacity and to improve flood
forecasting. Given these circumstances, Snyder's work obtained a larger audience, and his skills
became more in demand.
In 1938, Snyder published the first of several papers in which he explained an important new
approach to the study of runoff. He called his idea the synthetic unit hydrograph. Hydrographs
show for a given point on a stream or channel the discharge, water surface elevation, stage,
velocity or some other property of water in relation to time. Their dependability rests on available
historical data from river and rain gauges, as well as on considerations of topography, channel
slopes, and storage capacity. Unit hydrographs, as used by Snyder, were discharge graphs for
one inch of surface runoff from a given area for a typical or specified type of storm over some
unit of time. By analyzing runoff conditions in a large number of basins, Snyder was able to
develop values for the duration of the runoff and flood peaks for different types of basins under
varying conditions. His procedure allowed hydrologists to study and analyze drainage basins in
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