PARTIOT

FRANCE (see also List of Individuals)

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31.3.1825 Agen/F - 1.1.1904 Paris/F

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Henri-Léon Partiot graduated in 1845 from Ecole Polytechnique and continued then in the Corps of Bridges and Roads. He finally became an Inspector General of his Corps.

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Partiot is known for several papers published in the Annales, the Corps' journal. The 1861 work refers to mascarets, or moving bores as occur in large rivers mainly due to tidal action. Before River Seine had been dammed, these bores could be observed as far as upstream of the city of Paris during high-tide. Usually, the front of the bore extends all across the river such that mascarets were also referred to as bars. Their front is easily visible because of the air entrainment, and the tail of a bore may either be undular for relatively small surface elevation, or almost horizontal for a large increase of flow depth. Bores have attracted people over centuries, such as on the Yellow River in China, the Ganges River in India or the Amazon River in Brazil. Partiot has given a first physical description of mascarets although the mechanism of hydraulic jumps was only poorly understood at his time. The latter may be considered the steady-state form of a bore and were at the same time investigated by Henry Bazin (1829-1917). Partiot mentioned methods to reduce bore heights to lessen problems in navigation. Partiot's 1871 paper relates to sand deposits in the estuary of Seine River and consequences again for river navigation. In his 1898 paper, Partiot verified the equation of Joseph Boussinesq (1842-1929) for the propagation velocity of tidal bores with observations conducted on Seine River. He resumed his works and those of his colleague Médéric-Clément Lechalas (1820-1904) in his 1901 book on river estuaries.

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_{Partiot, H.L. (1861). Mémoire sur le mascaret. Annales des Ponts et Chaussées 31(1): 17-48. Partiot, H.L. (1871). Mémoire sur les sables de la Loire. Annales des Ponts et Chaussées 41(1): 233-292.}

_{Partiot, H.L. (1871). Mémoire sur les marées fluviales. Comptes Rendus AS Paris 73(2): 91-95. Partiot, H.L. (1892). Etude sur les rivières à marée et sur les estuaires. Baudry: Paris.}

_{Partiot, H.L. (1894). Estuaries. Minutes Institution of Civil Engineers 118: 47-77; 119: 198-208. Partiot, H.L. (1898). Tidal waves in rivers. Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences, Paris 126: 1613-1615.}

_{Partiot, H.L. (1901). Recherches sur les rivières à marée. Bernard: Paris. Partiot, X. (2006). Henri-Léon Partiot. Personal communication. P}

_{Richou, G. (1889). Amélioration de l'estuaire de la Seine. Le Génie Civil 15(14): 290-293. Sekutowicz, L. (1902). La Seine maritime. Le Génie Civil 41(12): 181-188.}