MATTHES

NETHERLANDS (see also List of Individuals)

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16.3.1874 Amsterdam/NL - 3.3.1959 New York/USA

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Gerard Hendrik Matthes graduated in 1895 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT as a civil engineer. He was first a draftsman in New York City and from 1897 a hydrographer with the US Geological Survey, where he was involved in stream gaging and irrigation surveys. He then joined the US Railroad Service as a supervising engineer from 1902 to 1907 to be for the following four years a design engineer in Denver CO and on the upper Colorado River. Matthes then moved to Pittsburgh PA to investigate flood damages and flood control measures on all streams of the State, and from 1915 to 1920 was a hydraulic engineer with the Miami Conservancy District in Dayton OH. Until 1923 he was an US assistant engineer with the War Department in charge of the Tennessee River in Chattanooga TE, and was from 1923 to 1928 a consulting engineer in New York City. Then he served for three years as a senior hydroelectric engineer in charge of hydraulic studies relating to water projects, flood control and navigation improvements in Norfolk VA. Finally, Matthes was from 1932 a principal engineer in Vicksburg MI on improvement of the Lower Mississippi River. There he was appointed director of the Waterways Experiment Station in 1941, and retired in 1945.

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Matthes was credited with making the War's Department's first aerial survey of rivers in the 1920s on Tennessee River. His is also credited with inventing tetrahedral block revetments for river bank protection and an automatically controlled aerial camera. Matthes won the Norman Gold Medal of the American Society of Civil Engineers ASCE in 1949. He was an Honorary ASCE Member from 1944. The Gerard Hendrik Matthes Papers are actually at the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections of the Cornell University Library, in Ithaca NY.

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_{Anonymous (1944). Gerard Hendrik Matthes. Civil Engineering 14(1): 38-39. P}

_{Anonymous (1945). Experiment Station head retires at Vicksburg. Engineering News-Record}

_{135(Sept. 27): 10. P}

_{Anonymous (1964). Gerard Hendrik Matthes. Who's who in engineering? Lewis: New York. Matthes, G.H. (1941). Basic aspects of stream-meanders. Trans. AGU 22: 632-636.}

_{Matthes, G.H. (1947). Macroturbulence in natural stream flow. Trans. AGU 28(2): 255-265. Matthes, G.H. (1948). Mississippi river cutoffs. Trans. ASCE 113: 1-39.}

_{Matthes, G.H. (1949). Solids in stream flow. Trans. AGU 30(3): 421-426. http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/EAD/htmldocs/RMM03017.html}