FANNING, John Thomas, American civil and hydraulic engineer: b. Norwich, Conn., 31 Dec. 1837; d. 1911. He was educated in public and normal schools, studied engineering and architecture, and had begun to practise engi neering in his native town when the Civil War broke out. He enlisted and attained the rank of lieutenant-colonel. At the close of the war he resumed engineering practice in Norwich and soon began to specialize in hydraulics. During the next 10 years he was engineer for a number of municipal waterworks in New England. In 1877 he published to Treatise on Hydraulic and Water Supply Engineering' which, as the first and for many years the lead ing American work on that subject, went through many editions and gave the author much prestige. At that time less than 500 cities in the United States had waterworks. He was subsequently employed as consulting engineer for many waterworks plants, municipal and private. In 1885 he made a report on the improvement of water power on the Mississippi River at Minneapolis, Minn., and in the
following year he was appointed chief engineer of the Saint Anthony Falls Water-Power Com pany in that city, where he lived until his death. He prepared a comprehensive plan for the drainage of 3,000 square miles of the hard wheat land in the valley of the Red River of the North; was consulting engineer for many large water-power projects, among which were early plants on the Missouri River, al Great Falls and Helena, Mont., and on the Spokane River at Spokane, Wash., and was also asso ciated as consulting engineer with several of the leading railroad companies the West. He was for 38 years a member, and in 1910-11 a vice-president of the American Society of Civil Engineers and contributed to its Trans actions, but as a writer he is best known for the pioneer American treatise already men tioned.