Franklin F. Snyder
other research on streams in that area. I collected a lot of data and made a lot of
studies. I used that data later on in some other papers, but I never did publish a
paper just on that work in Knoxville.
Q ..
Now this was still relatively early in the development of hydrology in the United
States.
A ..
Yes.
Q ..
I mean, it hadn't progressed to the state it is today, certainly, and there was still a
lot of work going on.
,
A
One of the interesting things, while I was back in Washington on the rainfall studies,
there was a standard Geological Survey publication on groundwater. Meinzer was
the author's name. At that time, he was the authority on groundwater. The
groundwater they considered at that time was a base flow that went on forever.
It didn't make any sense to me that, in studying the hydrographs that we were
analyzing there, that after a rainstorm, why, no matter how slow you figured the
water moved true surface runoff would all have to be out of the basin within a fairly
short time, and yet the hydrographs were way above what Meinzer called "ground
water. So it just became obvious that there was "sub-surface storm flow, which
was water that actually entered the ground, but came out of the ground rather
quickly and was not part of the real base flow.
There were others who were developing the same ideas at the same time, but,
anyhow, within my circle, I was the originator of the idea of this second type of
direct runoff along with the true surface run-off. I looked through' the project
report, Water Supply Paper 772, the other day and that idea was not even mentioned
in our report. But, within a year or two, I published papers in which I expounded
that theory.
Things were going on okay with the TVA, but there didn't seem to be any great
room for advancement, although one of the men-we had bowling teams and softball
teams. One of the men that was in the same bullpen I was in, who worked for the
power section, later on became chairman of the TVA. I tried to think of what his
name was, but I don't remember. That was some years ago, but that was quite an
advancement for him.
Previous Page
