Henry Darcy
| Henry Darcy | |
|---|---|
Henry Darcy
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| Born | 10 June 1803 Dijon |
| Died |
3 January 1858 (aged 54) Paris |
| Nationality | French |
| Fields | Hydraulics |
| Alma mater |
École Polytechnique École des Ponts et Chaussées |
| Known for | Darcy's law |
| Notable awards | Légion d'honneur |
Henry Philibert Gaspard Darcy (pronounced: [ɑ̃ʁi daʁsi], 10 June 1803 – 3 January 1858) was a French engineer who made several important contributions to hydraulics including Darcy’s law for flow in porous media.
Darcy was born in Dijon, France. Despite his father's death in 1817 when he was 14, his mother was able to borrow money to pay for his tutors. In 1821 he enrolled at the École Polytechnique (Polytechnic School) in Paris, and transferred two years later to the School of Bridges and Roads, which led to employment in the Corps of Bridges and Roads.
Henry met an English woman, Henriette Carey, whose family had been living in Dijon, and married her in 1828.
As a member of the Corps, he built an impressive pressurized water distribution system in Dijon following the failure of attempts to supply adequate fresh water by drilling wells. The system carried water from Rosoir Spring 12.7 kilometres (7.9 mi) away through a covered aqueduct (watercourse) to reservoirs near the city, which then fed into a network of 28,000 meters of pressurized pipes delivering water to much of the city. The system was fully closed and driven by gravity, and thus required no pumps with just sand acting as a filter. He was also involved in many other public works in and around Dijon, as well as in the politics of the Dijon city government.
During this period he modified the Prony equation for calculating head loss due to friction, which after further modification by Julius Weisbach would become the well-known Darcy–Weisbach equation still in use today.
In 1848 he became Chief Engineer for the département of which Dijon is the capital. Soon thereafter he left Dijon due to political pressure, but was promoted to Chief Director for Water and Pavements and took up office in Paris. While in that position, he was able to focus more on his hydraulics research, especially on flow and friction losses in pipes. During this period he improved the design of the Pitot tube, into essentially the form used today.
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