Chézy, Antoine de
From HydroWiki
Picture
Figure 1. Antoine de Chézy
Biography
Antoine de Chézy was born on September 1, 1718 in Chalon-sur-Marne, France. Chézy received his formal education from the École des Ponts et Chaussées, or French School of Bridges and Highways. Chézy concentrated his studies on the work of Cornelius Velsen of Amsterdam and Albert Brahms of Hannover, Germany. Velsen and Brahms both worked on the general laws and theories of Torricelli and Bernoulli, but it was Chézy that ultimately created the first and longest lasting resistance equation of water in open channel systems.
Chézy was given the task to determine the cross section and discharge for a proposed canal located on the Yvette River. He had been collecting experimental data from the Courpalet Canal and the Seine River since 1969 that was applied to the Yvette River. The studies and conclusions were titled “Thesis on the velocity of the flow in a given ditch” and were eventually filed in the collection of manuscripts in the library of the Ecole in 1775 under the file No. 847, Ms. 1915. In 1776, Chézy also wrote another paper entitled “Formula to find the uniform velocity that water will have in a ditch or in a canal of which the slope is known” filed again under file No. 847, Ms. 1915. The latter report contained the famous Chézy formula known today in the form:
V=C×(Rh×So)^1/2
Unfortunately, Chézy’s work was not rediscovered and republished by his own students until 1797. In this rediscovery, there was also evidence that Chézy also worked on the water distribution system of Rennes, France sometime after 1775, but the details are unknown. It was only after this rediscovery that the application and study of Chézy’s work became widespread. Chézy had officially retired in 1790 under conditions of severe poverty, but was honored with the appointment as director of the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées one year before his death on October 4, 1798. Chézy’s work and fundamental theories have survived and have been used as a corner stone for the future work of many future hydrologists, including Manning and Darcy.
