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HISTORY of HYDRAULICS and FLUID MECHANICS at COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY Pierre Y. Julien 1 and Robert N. Meroney 2 presented at DARCY MEMORIAL SYMPOSIUM ON THE HISTORY OF HYDRAULICS World Water & Environmental Resources Congress 2003 June 23-26, Philadelphia, PA USA 1Borland Professor of Hydraulics 2Director Emeritus of the Fluid Mechanics and Wind Engineering Program Department of Civil Engineering Colorado State University Fort Collins, CO 80523. 1 HISTORY of HYDRAULICS and FLUID MECHANICS at COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY Pierre Y. Julien 1 and Robert N. Meroney 2 In 1862, the United States Congress passed the Morrill Act granting land to each state in the amount of 30,000 acres for every senator and representative, thus Colorado received 90,000 acres. The receipts from the sale of this land were to form a perpetual fund with interest to support “at least one college to teach agriculture and the mechanic arts. Although the 1862 Act gave the state a grant of federal land for a college, it was not necessary to locate the college on the grant. In 1870 Governor Edward M. McCook signed the Territorial Bill establishing the Agricultural College of Colorado at Fort Collins. In November of 1874 the first small building, called the “claim shanty,” was completed. According to tradition, it was built in eight days in order to prevent the site of the college from being moved to some other town. It is known that both Greeley and Boulder were circulating petitions to get the college away from Fort Collins. Colorado was admitted to statehood in 1876, and the first State Legislature established the State Board of Agriculture in 1877, governing body for the agricultural college. The Agricultural College of Colorado was to be governed by a Board of Agriculture of eight men, at least four of whom had to be practicing farmers. It was about this time that a member of the legislature stated he felt money spent for an agricultural college would be money thrown away, as Colorado would never be an agricultural state – it was only fit for cow pasture and mining. Not until 1878 were funds for the College actually appropriated. Ground was broken for the “college building” later known as Old Main about June 20, 1878, and the formal laying of the cornerstone was on July 27 at public ceremonies. The Pioneers The staff member who was to play the initial role in hydraulics was originally employed by the College - in 1882 - as an instructor in mathematics. This was Elwood Mead (1858-1936) who had studied civil engineering at Purdue and Iowa State. In 1883, Mead received approval of his proposal to teach a two-term senior course on irrigation, one term to be “devoted to the pressure and flow of water, and methods of determining the same;” and the other “to the survey and construction of canals and reservoirs.” That year Mead also became assistant state engineer doing practical field work in irrigation. It is said that the State Board of Agriculture was interested in Mead because he would accept a position without the promise of a professorship the second year. In view of the shortage of 1 Borland Professor of Hydraulics, Department of Civil Engineering, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523. 2 Director Emeritus of the Fluid Mechanics and Wind Engineering Program, Department of Civil Engineering, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523. 2 funds, this could well be true. Mead evidently believed that the opportunity to serve in a needful area was more to be desired than rank. And immediately he was thrown almost literally and physically into the complicated problems of irrigation as they were developing in the Cache la Poudre Valley. Irrigation was neither a new thing in the world nor even unknown in Colorado when the farmers in Larimer County unknowingly began to develop a laboratory that was to become world famous and where faculty men from the College would work long hours. If any place ever needed irrigation, it was this area. When men fought and threatened to kill in order to obtain water for irrigation, a way of measuring water so that each man might receive his fair share was an urgent need. Serving as assistant to the State Engineer, E.S. Nettleton, Mead struggled with problems of measuring water, building ditches to get water onto the land, and storage of water. Few laws were in existence, even in the United States, to control the use of water for irrigation. And before laws could be passed, a concept of water as property had to be accepted. How was a man to acquire a right to water and to how much water? How was running water to be measured? These were questions of great social and economic importance. In 1886, Mead became the first professor of irrigation engineering in the United States. At the College, Mead taught courses in “measurement and flow of water for irrigation.” This was followed by work in hydraulics, canals, and dams. One of their first projects as a class was not how to get water onto the land, but how to get it off. Working through head-high cattails, they surveyed and drained the swampy streams that crossed the campus. It is said that President Ingersoll and the State Board of Agriculture created the professor position in an attempt to hold Mead on campus. At any rate, he left in 1888 to go to Wyoming where he wrote the irrigation code for that territory. As Wyoming’s first State Engineer, Elwood Mead framed a revolutionary code of water law for arid and semiarid regions which was written into Wyoming’s constitution and which became a model for irrigation laws adopted not only by four-fifths of the western states but also Canada, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. This new water law rejected the old English common-law principle of riparian rights as inappropriate for arid regions and instead declared all water, surface and underground, to be state property, thus giving them the same status as minerals and land and thereby ending legal conflicts between those who owned the land through which the water flowed and those who wished to use the water. He was subsequently employed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington in 1899, the Australian Water Supply Commission, the University of California, and finally the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in 1923, with which he served a dozen years as commissioner. The Board’s findings were influential in the writing of the Reclamation Act of 1924. No doubt the caliber of the work Dr. Mead did on this board was one reason for his being appointed, also in 1924, as Chief of the Bureau of Reclamation, in which capacity he served for 12 years, until his death in 1936. F.D.Roosevelt said of Elwood Mead: “He was a builder with vision.” 3 His work as State Engineer had made him familiar with the terrain of northern Colorado and Wyoming. He and a young assistant had surveyed for the first time much of Yellowstone, traveling by buckboard. He knew “Buffalo Bill” Cody and explored with him in 1888 some of Wyoming’s wild rivers. As commissioner of Reclamation he toured the West every year; indeed, he was out West planning for a new project only a few weeks before his death. Today, the lake above Hoover Dam now bears his name. Engineering grew more rapidly than agriculture because of the very urgent demand for engineers in irrigation. Also, engineering as a profession had long been standardized while agriculture had not. The American Society of Civil Engineers had been founded in 1852. Engineering had a body of accumulated and tested principles it could make use of; but agriculture did not have this background – not nationally or in the state. A common attitude was “if my boy wants to be an engineer, I’ll send him to college; but if he wants to be a farmer, I can teach him all he needs to know.” About the turn of the century a controversy arose in Colorado concerning the emphasis of engineering over agriculture at the Agricultural College. One editorial writer pointed out that one student trained in irrigation engineering at the college was worth more to the state of Colorado than all the institution had cost. By 1903 the school had grown to an enrollment of 448. Included in the graduating class of 1904 in Civil and Irrigation Engineering (C&IE) was Ralph L. Parshall. Had the college kept a guest book during the early 1900's, many famous names would have been recorded. In August 1904, a commissioner and a prince from Ceylon, and a representative from Egypt came to the college to learn of Colorado agriculture and irrigation. Then about the time the new C&IE building was first occupied, an expert sent by the Chilean government to study methods of irrigation and instruction in irrigation engineering in America, Egypt, Europe, and India reported that there was only one other institution in the world that had equipment for teaching and investigation in irrigation engineering equal to that of Colorado Agricultural College (CAC). In 1910, the U.S. Department of Agriculture stationed Victor M. Cone (1883-1970) at Fort Collins to take charge of U.S. Irrigation Investigations, Bureau of Public Roads. This agency (forerunner of the Agricultural Research Service) in cooperation with the Colorado Agricultural Experiment Station was instrumental in building the new hydraulics laboratory of the C&IE department, and in 1912 Cone and Parshall were involved in its design. The next year Parshall was promoted to assistant professor, but then he resigned from the college to accept a position with the USDA - remaining in residence, however, in the C&IE building.

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