Effort to establish a hydraulics laboratory proved successful

7 Jan 2007 -- Vicksburg, Miss. -- Did you know . . . that the Corps of Engineers fought against the establishment of a national hydraulics laboratory?

Maj. Gen. Edgar Jadwin, the chief of engineers, established the WES June 18, 1929. This action formalized the Corps of Engineers research and development program. The action was also a remarkable "about face" by an agency that had been unreceptive to the concept of hydraulics modeling just a few years earlier.

During the early 1920s, John R. Freeman, a prominent civil engineer apresident of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), led a movement to establish a national hydraulics laboratory in the United States. Freeman had traveled to Europe and returned home impressed with the widespread use of hydraulic models abroad and the surprising results that the models produced. Fearing American engineers were falling behind their European counterparts in the field of hydraulics research, Freeman used his presidential address to the ASCE to launch his campaign for a national hydraulics laboratory.

Freeman found a Congressional proponent for his movement in Louisiana Sen. Joseph Ransdell, the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee. Ransdell's committee promptly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a national hydraulics laboratory and scheduled committee hearings on the resolution in September 1922. During the hearings, the American engineering community was unanimous in its support for such a laboratory. Freeman and nearly every highly regarded civil engineer--including Herbert Hoover--spoke of the need and importance of a hydraulics laboratory.

Up until the hearings, the Corps of Engineers had been relatively quiet on the subject, but behind the scenes, Maj. Gen. Lansing Beach, the chief of engineers from 1920 to 1924, had been busily evaluating the opinions of his officers. The prevailing sentiment passed to Beach wthat it was impossible to duplicate the conditions of a sediment-bearinstream in a laboratory setting, leaving him to conclude that the proposed hydraulics laboratory "would have no value whatever in solving flood control."

Beach selected John Ockerson, a member of the Mississippi River Commission (MRC) from 1898 to 1924, to represent the Corps of Engineers and the commission at the hearings. Ockerson was a tall and dignified man with a strong presence--a presence made stronger by his more than 45 years of experience with Mississippi River improvements. He, too, had served as president of the ASCE, giving his words equal weight with those of Freeman. In his testimony, Ockerson argued vehemently that the Corps of Engineers and the MRC had been gathering hands-on observations and data for 43 years while working in "nature's own laboratory, the river itself," and that those actual hands-on observations supplied much more reliable data than experiments with scale models.

Ockerson's argument apparently won the day as the Senate took no action on the committee resolution. The Great Flood of 1927, though, revived the debate, and Ransdell again proffered a resolution calling for the establishment of hydraulics laboratory--this time under the control of the Bureau of Standards. Jadwin, who had since replaced Beach as chief of engineers, recognized that it was but a matter of time before Congress would establish a hydraulics laboratory under some authority other than the Corps of Engineers. He shrewdly inserted into his flood control plan a provision allowing him to establish a hydraulics laboratory. The 1928 Flood Control Act authorized Jadwin's plan and led to the establishment of WES.