Margaret S. Petersen
It's no problem?
Right. Dam break studies are quite straightforward now.
Foreign Influences on Hydraulics in the United States
I wanted to ask about foreign influences? We've already discussed some of the French
influence on your work, but the Germans, the Italians, the Russian, the French, but especially
the Germans, had done a lot of hydraulics. Of course? they supported the Freeman Scholars
and all of those kinds of fellowships in the `30's and '40's. Did you notice a lot of that or was
it unimportant?
A:
When I was in Omaha and we were working on the sediment problems, river stabilization,
and navigation channels, the best current material, the most practical material in the
literature, was in the French magazine La
I studied French while we lived
in Omaha in order to translate articles in that magazine. I subscribed to that magazine for,
I don't know, twenty years, maybe. I haven't for sometime, and in the meantime, the
American literature caught up. There was a Frenchman, Antoine Craya, who published two
papers on variable flow regimes in open channels in 1945, 1946, in
We
used his work in the dam break study on the Missouri.
When I was involved in designing the navigation project on the Arkansas River
I found virtually nothing helpful in the European literature at WES. (This was before the fire
at WES in which they lost a lot of the older library material). However, some of the
descriptive material in Proceedings of the [Permanent]
Association of
Navigation Congresses (PIANC) concerning navigation development on European rivers was
interesting.
John Davis probably will tell you that our early lock designs were influenced by European
lock designs. Are you familiar with the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway?
In general.
A:
The "over and under" lock filling and emptying system design used at Bay Springs Lock on
the Tennessee-Tombigbee (and on the other Corps high-lift locks) was derived from French
designs. There was a hydraulic engineer in the Mobile District of the Corps, Francis
Escoffier, who was French. He was familiar with this French design and introduced it to the
Corps. I'm sure he's long dead because he was considerably older than me.
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