This episode is a tale about an abandoned one-of-a-kind facility recently discovered in a middle of a South Carolina river, a famous sediment transport researcher and Albert Einstein. Yes, Albert Einstein.
Special thanks to Dr. Robert Ettema and Theresa Slack for contributing to this episode. Learn more about the lab here.
Transcript
Robert Osborne:
I was on a mission and didn’t have much time. It was going to be 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 river bank. And there it was. The concrete in the river matched the black and white photo I was holding in my hand. Could this be it?
Robert Osborne:
Hey, this is Robert. And welcome to the Outfall, where we share the backstories about our water world. In this show, we uncover a forgotten and one-of-a-kind lab in a river and in the process discover a hydraulic scientist and his dad, the most influential scientist of the 20th century. This is the story of Hans Albert Einstein, the second child and first son of Albert Einstein.
Robert Ettema:
Around the end of World War II, when all the difficulties associated with the war were coming to an end, the attention of the agencies and so on turned to all the sediment problems that this country was facing, and other countries too, in rivers, where they just built a lot of dams and so forth and issues with navigation. And so he was the man of the moment. He was the top guy.
Robert Osborne:
This is Dr. Robert Ettema, an author of a book about Hans Albert Einstein and a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Colorado State University.
Robert Ettema:
He came up first with maybe one of the first physics-based approaches to sediment transport, and how to model that, how to estimate that, how to determine the rate of bed sediment transport in a river, like the Enoree, or the Rio Grande, or Missouri River. He became the leading expert in sediment transport in this country, I would say.
Robert Osborne:
Hans represented a new generation of researchers. Many researchers in the early 19th century characterized rivers as wild and untamed beasts, home to just trial and error empirical equations. Engineers could not calculate terms such as bed sediment, which is the sand, the silt or the gravel that comprises the river’s bed or the sediment load, which is the rate at which water moves the bed sediment along.
Robert Ettema:
It’s very important to determine how much sediment a river channel transports. It’s very important for determining designing dams, for instance, determining the life of a dam or reservoir, for determining flood control works and so on, and just generally categorizing the behavior of a river or a channel. A lot of the sediment that gets eroded from the land by farming or clear felling of trees and so forth, of forests, leads to erosion. And a lot of that, the products of the erosion end up in a river.
Robert Osborne:
Many of us do not think of rivers in terms of sediment loads, but in the early 1930s, this information was needed by engineers and scientists to determine how rivers and streams responded to engineering works like dams or river improvements that alter these channels or flow and the amount of sediment entering them. This desire to better understand these variables led Hans Albert eventually to South Carolina and to the little Enoree River. But first, how did Hans become a civil engineer under dad’s imposing shadow?
Robert Ettema:
I think his dad had a major influence on him, both in directing him in his career and directing him toward the problem of sediment transport, which was in the ’30s, was seen to be a major aspect, which was engineers and others had to get to better know. So his father directed him to the topic of research sediment transport.
Robert Osborne:
Hans Albert was born in the Swiss town of Bern in 1904. Hans followed his parent’s footsteps at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. In 1926, he was awarded a diploma in civil engineering. For Hans Albert, engineering was a perfect middle ground. It was close enough to physics to use his father’s professional guidance, yet it was distant enough from physics to avoid comparison with his father. When asked why he had not followed his father’s career, he was quoted as saying, “Hey, when someone else has picked up all the good shells from a beach, you go to another beach.”
Robert Ettema:
Albert wanted his son away, out of Europe, out of Germany particularly, because they were Jewish. When he came to the United States, Albert was able to talk to notable flood technicians, engineers, trying to find a job for his son.
Robert Osborne:
After some help from dad, the Soil Conservation Service offered Hans a position at a brand new lab along the Enoree River. This lab could measure the entire sediment load of a river. How did they do it? Well, they had slotted concrete bays that opened into the river bed along the whole width of the river. The 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. This way they could figure out the relationship between the sediment load and the river flow. The Soil Conservation Service hoped to apply these results to other similar rivers.
Robert Osborne:
Hans and his family arrived in Greenville, South Carolina in 1938 and worked at the facility for over five years. Now, even though it was only five years, there are still stories about Hans and Albert floating around in the community. I met a local historian in Greenville for coffee. She had just written an article about Hans and was surprised by the stories this article generated.
Theresa Slack:
My name is Theresa Slack. Worked as an accountant for many years, until I could retire and go into history full-time. So that’s what I do now, is historical research for Greenville County. Somebody actually, after I wrote the article, sent me a picture of their father. We are Hans’ children. So I have that picture. I know that they proved he was here. Then, of course, stories came out about Albert Einstein visiting his son. And those stories were interesting or fun.
Robert Osborne:
So tell us a couple of these stories.
Theresa Slack:
These stories? The one I find most fascinating was apparently, well, Albert Einstein liked to walk. He liked to take walks. Anybody that’s lived in Greenville long enough knows you don’t ever go around the block in Greenville. You’re going to get lost. And he did get lost. This one lady said that he would knock on her grandmother’s door and try to find his way back to Hans’ house. All he knew was the address. So they’d have to tell him. She didn’t believe her grandmother, because Albert Einstein walking through the streets of Greenville? Okay. Come on, grandma. Well, it was real. It was real. He’d get lost. And he would have to ask for directions to get back home. So that was really neat.
Robert Osborne:
I love the fact that these stories are still around. However, you will never guess what caused the ultimate demise of this lab. The downfall was not about money or staff. Do you know what it was? It was all about water. That’s right. There was not enough river flow to produce results two to three times a year, leading the Soil Conservation Service to abandon the lab. Hans moved to California, where he became a respected authority on sediment transport.
Robert Osborne:
Overlooking the remnants of the lab, I realized one thing, everything in the river still looked good after 80 years. But everything on the land was utterly gone. Enoree River had, in a way, protected the lab from change. Hans was still there.
Robert Osborne:
We want to give some high fives out to Dr. Robert Ettema and Theresa Slack for contributing to this episode. To see some cool black and white pictures of the lab, Hans, or even Albert Einstein, click on the link in the show notes. We have one favor for you. If you enjoy our podcast, take 10 seconds and share the podcast with a friend. Thank you. And we’ll see you next time.
