LANSFORD

LANSFORD 28.02. 1900 Shobonier IL/USA 01.01. 1996 Urbana IL/USA Wallace Monroe Lansford received education from the University of Illinois, Urbana IL, from where he graduated with the BS degree in 1924, the MS degree in 1929, and the civil engineering degree in 1931. He had been from 1924 to 1927 assistant to the city engineer, Champaign IL, from 1928 to 1929 special research assistant at Engineering Experiment Station, the University of Illinois, from when he became staff member there. He was then appointed professor of theoretical and applied mechanics at its Talbot Laboratory. Lansford was a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers ASCE, serving in the 1950s within its Technical Division Executive Committees, and of the American Society of Engineering Education ASEE. Lansford authored numerous papers in hydraulics and in engineering in general. He also published the notable sections Hydraulic machinery, and Diving in the 1944 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Further, he presented chapters on Theoretical mechanics, Materials, or Mechanics of fluids in the 1947 edition of the Handbook of engineering. The 1936 paper deals with elbows as used to measure discharge in pipes, then a popular method due to low cost, small cost of upkeep and no major additional headloss in the piping system. Up to then, this ‘discharge meter’ had not received much attention, but it was later more widespread, although its accuracy has been considered average, as compared for instance with the weir discharge measurement. The measuring principle involves the pressure difference in front of and downstream the elbow, by which a unique relation for a certain element may be experimentally determined. The velocity coefficient was found to be constant for a certain design if the approach flow velocity was in excess of about 1 m/s, pointing at Reynolds effects. A second notable work of Lansford is concerned with backwater profiles of open channel flow, in which it was demonstrated that the theoretically predicted profiles agree well with laboratory data. Anonymous (1953). W.M. Lansford. Civil Engineering 23(8): 560. P Anonymous (1964). Lansford, W.M. Who’s who in engineering 9: 1067. Lewis: New York. Lansford, W.M. (1934). Discharge coefficients for pipe orifices. Civil Engineering 4(5): 245-247. Lansford, W.M. (1936). The use of an elbow in a pipe line for determining the rate of flow in a pipe. Bulletin 289. Engineering Experiment Station EES, University of Illinois: Urbana. Lansford, W.M., Mitchell, W.D. (1949). An investigation of the backwater profile for steady flow in prismatic channels. Bulletin 381. EES, University of Illinois: Urbana.