page_title: Holyoke Testing Flume
section_title: Research programs
hierarchical_section_title: Holyoke Testing Flume / Research programs
caption_attribution_description: English: Workers at the ready to set up efficiency tests on a water turbine at the Holyoke Testing Flume. From other photos with known dates this appears to have been certainly after 1888 and sometime before 1900, most likely in the 1890s.
context_page_description: The Holyoke Testing Flume was a hydraulic testing laboratory and apparatus in Holyoke, Massachusetts, operated by the Holyoke Water Power Company from 1870 to 1932, and used to test the performance of water turbine designs, completing 3,176 tests of efficiency in that time. It was described by Robert E. Horton in court testimony as the only facility of its kind in the 19th and early 20th century, which made it possible for the standardization of American turbine designs. Indeed Clemens Herschel, who managed and redesigned the facility in the 1880s, later described it in Congressional testimony as the "first modern hydraulic laboratory" in the United States and the world. It was through Herschel's need to determine the water power consumption of different mills, and in this testing system that he would invent the Venturi meter, the first accurate means of measuring large-scale flows, which still retains widespread use in modern technology today.
context_section_description: In a 1906 report the research mission for the facility was described as threefold:
  1. The testing of all wheels installed in conjunction with the water power at Holyoke, in order that their discharge capacity may be determined and used as a means of estimating the quantity of water taken by the several mills.
  
  2. The testing of experimental wheels with a view to their improvement.
  
  3. [The t]esting of standard patterns of American type turbines which are to be installed in new plants.
caption: Workers at their stations prior to testing a turbine wheel design, c. 1895
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