Background
Hiram Francis Mills was born on November 1, 1836, at Bangor, Maine. He was the son of Preserved Brayton and Jane (Lunt) Mills.
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Hiram Francis Mills was born on November 1, 1836, at Bangor, Maine. He was the son of Preserved Brayton and Jane (Lunt) Mills.
In 1856, Mills was graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
While Mills was serving an apprenticeship under several distinguished engineers, he assisted in the construction of the Bergen Tunnel and the Hoosac Tunnel; he erected dams on the Deerfield River and on the Penobscot River; and he conducted various studies in connection with water-power developments at Cohoes, New York, and North Billerica, Massachusetts. In 1868, he opened his own office in Boston, where he soon attained a high place in his profession. Although he was consulted by many corporations and municipalities throughout the United States and Mexico, his principal work was done in Massachusetts, where he became chief engineer of the Essex Company, of Lawrence, and of the Locks and Canals Company, of Lowell. At Lowell, he undertook a series of experiments on the flow of water in natural and artificial channels which led to the perfection of the piezometer and advanced materially the development of the turbine. Owing to the pressure of other duties, however, he early abandoned his interest in this phase of hydraulics, and his conclusions were not systematized until the posthumous publication of Flow of Water in Pipes (1923). As consulting engineer to the Boston Metropolitan Water and Sewerage Board, he was chiefly responsible for the design of the water supply, drainage, and sewerage systems of the areas under its jurisdiction. Possibly because his father was a physician, he had always been interested in epidemiology. When the Massachusetts State Board of Health was organized in 1886, he, therefore, accepted the chairmanship of the committee on water supply and sewerage, a position which he held for twenty-eight years. His death occurred in Hingham, Massachusetts.
Much of the success of the Board was due to his efforts, for he not only standardized methods of sampling and analysis but he also initiated far-reaching experiments on the purification of water and sewage. From these investigations emerged the great experiment station at Lawrence, which has long been recognized as the foremost in America, if not in the world. As a result of the studies completed under his direction, the death rate from typhoid throughout Massachusetts was reduced eight-ninths. Since Mills had always been skeptical of the theory of self-purification of streams by rapid flow which was popular in his day, he constructed at Lawrence a slow-sand filter which, because of its obvious efficiency, marked the beginning of a new era in municipal engineering. Absorbed as he was in his professional activities, he nevertheless wrote numerous articles, brochures, and memoirs in his special field. Among these, his contributions to the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of which he was a fellow, the Journal of the Franklin Institute, the Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the Journal of the New England Water Works Association, are especially significant. His name is perpetuated by foundations in Lawrence and Lowell.
Although Mills, who was inclined to be a recluse and a mystic, shrank from publicity of any kind, he dedicated his life wholeheartedly to the welfare of the community. To the cause of education he devoted no inconsiderable share of his energy, serving on a number of local boards and on important committees at both the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Mills was a successful man of affairs, director and president of several corporations; and he accumulated a fortune which enabled him to remember in his will the institutions to which he was especially devoted and to found, at Harvard University, the Elizabeth Worcester Mills Fund for cancer research in memory of his wife.
On October 8, 1873, Mills married Elizabeth Worcester. She died March 23, 1917.
