Louis Clarence Hill was an American engineer. He was a professor of hydraulics and electrical engineering.
Background
Hill was born on February 22, 1865 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. He was the oldest of four children of Alva Thomas and Frances (Bliss) Hill. He came almost entirely of English stock, his ancestors having emigrated to this country in the seventeenth century. His father was a jeweler and watchmaker and, after his retirement, an inventor of mechanical and electrical devices.
Young Hill's happy choice of a career was inspired by a great-uncle, who was principal engineer in the United States Engineer Office at St. Paul, Minnesota, in the 1880s.
Education
Hill graduated from the University of Michigan in 1886 with the Bachelor of Science degree in civil engineering, and later worked for a time on railroad location and construction in northern Minnesota and the Dakotas--a rigorous life that involved living in a tent one winter when temperatures fell as low as 50 degrees below zero.
He returned to the University of Michigan for a course in the then pioneer science of electrical engineering and received the degree of Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering in 1890.
Career
Hill's lifelong interest in hydraulics dated from some research he did during this period on the Pelton and Doble type of impulse water-wheel bucket. In 1890 Hill went to the Colorado School of Mines at Golden, Colorado, as professor of hydraulics and electrical engineering. He remained there until 1903, toward the end of his engagement also serving as acting president. The newly established United States Reclamation Service (later the Bureau of Reclamation), with which Hill was connected from 1903 to 1914, afforded plenty of scope for his engineering talent.
As engineer, project engineer, supervising engineer, and acting chief engineer for the Service at various times during this period, he was in charge of a number of its pioneer construction projects. Outstanding among these was the Salt River Project in Arizona, which included Roosevelt Dam. Begun in 1906 and completed in 1911, Roosevelt Dam was notable because its construction represented a departure from traditional stone masonry construction and a step toward the mass concrete methods used in building subsequent large dams. A cyclopean masonry-arch gravity structure, it was constructed of broken range man-sized rock laid so as to break joints and bond them together in all directions, with each stone laid in portland cement mortar. Before work on the dam could begin, it was necessary to build a sixty-mile road to the site from Mesa, Ariz. , through almost impassable terrain and with Apache Indians for labor. The project also involved construction and operation of a plant to make the needed cement.
Among Hill's other works for the Reclamation Service were the Yuma Project, which included Laguna Dam, a large inverted siphon under the Colorado River, and flood-protection structures; and the Rio Grande Project, which included the construction of a series of diversion dams along the Rio Grande, canal systems, drainage works, and the design and initial construction of Elephant Butte Dam. He was also in general charge of the Colorado Basin Project. He resigned from the Reclamation Service in 1914 to enter private practice in Los Angeles, though he continued to serve in a consulting capacity until his death.
As a member of the firm of Quinton, Code & Hill (later Quinton, Code & Hill - Leeds & Barnard) from 1914 until his death, Hill was connected with many engineering projects in California. Among the more important were Gibraltar Dam, a concrete-arch structure on the Santa Ynez River, constructed for the city of Santa Barbara; Pine Canyon Dam (later Morris Dam) on the San Gabriel River for the city of Pasadena; Big Tujunga Dam on the Big Tujunga; Bouquet Canyon Dam; and Sutherland and El Capitan dams for the city of San Diego.
He was the American member of a commission for the distribution of Rio Grande and Colorado River waters and represented the Reclamation Service on the consulting board on the Columbia Basin Project. He was also a member of the board of consulting engineers on Boulder Dam, Imperial Dam, and the All-American Canal. In addition, Hill was consultant to the Army Corps of Engineers on a number of dams, including the Fort Peck Dam on the Missouri River in Montana and the Bonneville Dam and locks and large power plant on the Columbia River near Portland.
He died in Los Angeles of coronary arteriosclerosis, and his body was cremated there.
Achievements
Membership
For many years Hill was active in the affairs of the American Society of Civil Engineers, which he served as president in 1937.
Connections
On August 26, 1890, Hill married Gertrude B. Rose of Ann Arbor, Michigan, by whom he had two children, Raymond Alva and Margaret Louise.