Global History of Dams and Rivers

Throughout the nineteenth century, people built dams either for municipal storage, for water power, for flood control, or for irrigation. Many were privately built, some by local governments, but none by the federal government except for river navigation. With only a few late nineteenth-century exceptions, all dams were low and brought forth little modern engineering. By the end of that centurt, the problem associated with erecting masonry dams gave rise to their study, which Edward Wegmann summarized in the first edition of his classic text on The Design and Construction of Dams (1888). He considered only masonry gravity dams, and it was the Quaker Bridge Dam design, over 100 feet higher than any previous massonry dam, that stimulated.