The compleat Darcy: New lessons learned from the first English translation of les fontaines publiques de la Ville de Dijon

With apologies to Isaak Walton (1668), another classic, ‘‘The Compleat Darcy’’ (1856), is now available and translated into English by Bobeck (2004). Like avid fisherman love The Compleat Angler, ground water and surface water hydrologists, water resources engineers, water planners and managers, and historians of science will find Patricia Bobeck’s translation of Henry Darcy’s monumental text Les Fontaines Publiques de la Ville de Dijon (Darcy 1856) informational and probably inspirational. Copies of Darcy’s original monograph are very rare, and few scientists have ever seen it. This new translation fills that void. Darcy is immortalized by Darcy’s law, the basic equation for flow of fluids in porous media including ground water. Darcy’s law is fundamental to hydrology, hydrogeology, civil engineering, petroleum engineering, chemical engineering, geography, geomorphology, water resources planning and management, and ground water remediation. However, readers of Darcy will find much more than the results of the 1855 experiments conducted with Charles Ritter in the courtyard of the hospital in Dijon, France. For example, the work on Dijon’s water supply (the public fountains of the title of the book) was undertaken earlier in Darcy’s career, in the period 1835 to 1840, and reflects Darcy’s conviction that the public had the right to clean water: ‘‘A city that cares for the interest of the poor class should not limit their water, just as daytime and light are not limited’’ (p. 42). The year 2003 was the bicentennial of Henry Darcy’s birth, and Bobeck’s work gives us the first complete English translation of his monograph as a kind of birthday present. There have been a number of short historical analyses that lend insight into Darcy’s work and times (e.g., Caudemberg 1858; Marsaines 1858; his great nephew, Paul Darcy 1957; Hubbert 1969; Freeze and Back 1983; Freeze 1994; Philip 1995; Brown 2002; Simmons 2003; and Bobeck 2003) and some reviews/commentaries of Bobeck’s translation (Sharp 2004; Simmons 2004). We summarize the historical significance of Darcy and his times and also review Bobeck’s translation to celebrate both Darcy’s contributions and the English translation of the monograph. Henry Philibert Gaspard Darcy was born on June 10, 1803, in Dijon, France, and died in Dijon on January 3, 1858. He recalled (Darcy 1957) the terrible quality of the water in Dijon that he was exposed to in childhood. The improvement of Dijon’s water supply was a lifelong goal. Dijon converted from using highly polluted water from shallow wells and streams to a centralized water distribution system designed by Darcy, which in 1840 made Dijon’s public water supply one of the best in Europe in terms of quantity and quality, perhaps second only to Rome’s (Darcy 1957). When good-quality spring water was available in fountains within 50 m of all dwellings, Darcy fulfilled one of his life’s major goals. In 1821, Darcy entered L’Ecole Polytechnique in Paris to study science and engineering and in 1823 was admitted to L’Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées (School of Bridges and Roads), also in Paris, which was the academic arm of the Le Corps des Ponts et Chaussées, ‘‘an elite fraternity of engineers that had influential status in mid-nineteenth century France’’ (Freeze 1983). The Ecole was headed by Prony, whose equation for flow in pipes was similar to Forchheimer’s (1901) equation. Other students at the Ecole included, among others, Pitot, Chézy, Cauchy, Navier, Dupuit, St. Venant, Bazin, and Coriolis, who also taught at the Ecole Polytechnique during Darcy’s student days. Darcy joined the Corps upon graduating in 1826 and spent most of his working life with the Corps stationed in Dijon. He rose to prominence in the period 1834 to 1848 as he carried out a number of significant projects, including the development of the public water supply for Dijon as well as other projects involving roads, navigation works, and bridges. In 1840, he was appointed chief engineer for the Department of Cote d’Or. 1Department of Geological Sciences, The University of Texas, Austin, TX 78712-0254; jmsharp@mail.utexas. edu 2School of Chemistry, Physics, and Earth Sciences, Flinders University, Adelaide SA5001, Australia; craig.simmons@flinders.edu. au Copyright a 2005 National Ground Water Association.