Franklin F. Snyder
Q ..
Okay.
A ..
Just a mention on the publications, there's one paper labeled "The Conception of
Runoff Phenomena," which I think is the best paper, best work I ever did, and yet
no one has ever paid much attention to it. Yet there's stuff in there that they're still
discovering and thinking--of course, nothing is ever new. There's always something
happened before, but there's some ideas in that conception there that they thought
was great stuff when they discovered it recently.
Q ..
Now, that's the paper that you published in The Transactions of the American
Geophysical Union in 1939. What led you to write that paper? Was that a product
of your Pennsylvania work?
A ..
Well, it was also, I mentioned before, that when I was with the Geological Survey,
I developed this idea of this third-type of runoff, of the sub-surface runoff. It was
not until `39 that I had a chance to really present it. The synthetic unit graphs came
out fast, but it was another situation. So it was `39, when, by that time, all of the
research I'd done while I was with TVA and the Pennsylvania studies just came
together, I had a rather `more complete picture of the runoff phenomena.
In other words, when I was down at TVA on weekends, if it was raining, I used to
go up in the mountains and watched the water to see where it came from. You could
see the places where the surface runoff goes off quick. But after the stream had
gone down, the water would still be coming out of the banks, coming out of the
ground, but coming out rather quickly. That was just a verification of that
subsurface runoff that comes off in between the surface runoff and the ground water
runoff. But, I was ready by that time to put out my ideas.
Q.
Now, most of this work was research that you did. It was, basically, office work
l
and then you went out and you verified it by field observation?
A ..
Well, I always say, my hobby was hydrology as well as my work, so I did an awful
lot of it on my own time.
Q ..
You seemed to spend a lot of time outdoors in going, working in farms, and
surveying. Did that contribute to your ability to observe these natural phenomena?
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