A PRACTICAL TREATISE ON WATER-SUPPLY ENGINEERING: RELATING TO THE HYDROLOGY, HYDRODYNAMICS, AND PRACTICAL WITH NUMEROUS TABLES AND ILLUSTRATIONS, BY J. T. FANNING, C. E., MEMBER OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CIVIL ENGINEERS. NEW YORK: D. VAN NOSTRAND, PUBLISHER, 1877. PREFACE. THE HERE is at present no sanitary subject of more general interest, or attracting more general attention, than that relating to the abundance and wholesomeness of domestic water supplies. Each citizen of a densely populated municipality must of necessity be personally interested in either its physiological or its financial bearing, or in both. Each closely settled town and city must give the subject earnest consideration early in its existence. At the close of the year 1875, fifty of the chief cities of the American Union had provided themselves with public water supplies at an aggregate cost of not less than ninety-five million dollars, and two hundred and fifty lesser cities and towns were also provided with liberal public water supplies at an aggregate cost of not less than fifty-five million dollars. The amount of capital annually invested in newly inaugurated water-works is already a large sum, and is increasing, yet the entire American literature relating to water-supply engineering exists, as yet, almost wholly in reports upon individual works, usually in pamphlet form, and accessible each to but comparatively few of those especially interested in the subject. Scores of municipal water commissions receive appointment each year in the growing young cities of the Union, who have to inform themselves, and pass judgment upon, sources and systems of water supply, which are to become helpful or burdensome to the communities they are intended to encourage accordingly as the works prove successful or partially failures. The individual members of these "Boards of Water Commissioners," resident in towns where water supplies upon an extended scale are not in operation, have rarely had opportunity to observe and become familiar with the varied practical details and apparatus of a water supply, or to acquaint themselves with even the elementary principles governing the design of the several different systems of supply, or reasons why one system is most advantageous under one set of local circumstances and another system is superior and preferable under other circumstances. A numerous band of engineering students are graduated each year and enter the field, many of whom choose the specialty of hydraulics, and soon discover that their chosen science is great among the most noble of the sciences, and that its mastery, in theory and practice, is a work of many years of studious acquirement and labor. They discover also that the accessible literature of their profession, in the English language, is intended for the class-room rather than the field, and that its formulæ are based chiefly upon very limited philosophical experiments of a century and more ago but partially applicable to the extended range of modern practice. Among the objects of the author in the compilation of the following pioneer treatise upon American Water-works are, to supply water-commissioners with a general review of the best methods practised in supplying towns and cities with water, and with facts and suggestions that will enable them to compare intelligently the merits and objectionable features of the different potable water sources within their reach; to present to junior and assistant hydraulic engineers a condensed summary of those elementary theoretical principles and the involved formulas adapted to modern practice, which they will have frequently to apply, together with some useful practical observations; to construct and gather, for the convenience of the older busy practitioners, |