AMERICA MEETS HENRY DARCY: 1959-2009

This presentation will document the American hydrogeology community's process of getting to know Henry Darcy's life and work over the last 50 years. Early on, American authors including Hunter Rouse, Simon Ince, and Asit Biswas provided information from Darcy's obituary. In 1983 Allan Freeze published a translation of 4 pages of Darcy's major work, “The Public Fountains of the City of Dijon” and in 1994Freeze wrote the most complete Darcy biography to date, based largely on a Darcy family biography and knowledge of French history. In 2004, this author published an unabridged English translation of Darcy's Public Fountains. This publication describes the context in which Darcy conducted his experiments and gives the English-speaking scientific community insight into Darcy the man and engineer, in his own words. The 2004 publication has generated additional research about Darcy and his collaboration with other engineers of his time, including Jules Dupuit.