Enoree River was difficult to find in the center of everything. I was a stone’s throw from the largest airport in Upstate South Carolina. In the distance, I could hear the interstate that binds the southeast, but I didn’t see anyone.
All I saw were two trailers perched on top of a bare Piedmont hill, overlooking a self-storage lot that had seen better days. The sun was setting as I parked my car facing a rusted cattle gate. Was this private property? I suppose. But I was on a mission and didn’t have much time; it was going to get dark soon. I jumped the gate and picked my way through a field of briars until I could hear the river.
A stand of older trees kept the briars at bay when I reached the riverbank. And there it was. What I was looking for. This had to be it. The concrete matched the black-and-white photo I had seen of the facility. What was this forgotten place? It was the one-of-a-kind facility where Hans Albert Einstein worked.
So, who is Hans Albert Einstein? He was a civil engineer and educator best known for his research on sediment transport. Also, he happened to be the second child and first son of Albert Einstein. Hans represented a new generation of researchers. Many researchers in the early nineteenth century characterized rivers as wild and untamed beasts—home to trial-and-error empirical equations. Engineers could not calculate such terms as bed sediment: the sand, silt, or gravel that comprises the river’s bed—not static but alive and always moving. Or bed-sediment load: the rate at which water moves bed sediment along. Or suspended-bed load: the sediment that becomes suspended in a river flow.
The desire to better understand these variables led Hans Albert to South Carolina. The Soil Conservation Service (SCS) had just built a lab along the Enoree River. It was a sediment-sensing Fitbit that could measure the entire sediment load of a river, something no one had calculated before. The purpose of the lab was to figure out the relationship between sediment load and river flow, and SCS hoped to apply the results to other similar rivers. After some help from Dad, SCS offered Hans a position at the facility. He and his family arrived in July 1938.
How did this lab work? Slotted concrete bays opened into the riverbed. Lab staff opened the individual slots and pumped water from each bay to a settling tank on the side of the river. Here they collected and weighed the sediment and determined its particle-size distribution. They then returned the water to the river through a flume, as shown in the picture.
Hans lived in Greenville, SC, and worked at the facility for over five years. The lab expanded the body of knowledge of sediment transport—the term “wash load” was born there. Wash load defines the fine clay silt particles in the bed load that move at different rates.
However, the lab faced a problem. And it was a problem they could not control with concrete or different measuring devices. There was only enough river flow to produce results two to three times a year. Also, the river flow changed to greater levels than they could measure. This, combined with the competing demands of World War II, saw the lab abandoned. Hans Albert moved to the SCS lab at Pasadena, California, where he became a respected authority on sediment transport.
I needed to go. It was getting cold, and I was not quite ready to test my excuses for why I was standing here. Overlooking the remnants of the eighty-year-old lab, I realized one thing. Everything in the river still looked good after eighty years, but everything on the land was gone. Enoree river had protected the lab from change. All that remained was in the river. Einstein was still here in the river. -Robert
