ABSTRACT
SUTRO A.H.J. 29.04. 1830 Aachen/D 08.08. 1898 San Francisco CA/USA Adolph Heinrich Joseph Sutro was born in Prussia. After the father had passed away in 1847, his mother emigrated in 1850 with the 11 children to the USA. Fired by Californian gold discoveries, Sutro arrived in 1851 at San Francisco CA, to be engaged for nine years in mercantile pursuits. In 1860 he established a quartz-reducing mill at East Dayton NV, working with a new process of amalgamation und thus laid the basis of his later fortune. Impressed by the oldfashioned mining methods, he drove a tunnel 3 m high and wide, and 5 km long into Mount Davidson from Carson River to Comstock Lode, providing the ventilation, drainage and ease of transportation. He formed the Sutro Tunnel Company then, obtained a charter in 1865, and persuaded mine owners to sign contracts to pay the company two dollars per ton for all ore mined after the opening of the tunnel for their use. However, Sutro’s California supporters turned against him, to get control of the tunnel and thereby reap the immense profits which were anticipated. Sutro in 1867 went to Europe to visit mines, studying their tunnels, consulting engineers, and obtaining the indorsement for his own plans. He published in 1868 his pamphlet on the Sutro Tunnel. After having secured money from Nevada and Europe, works began in 1869, the tunnel was completed in 1878, and a new era in western mining started. The project proved immediately and immensely profitable, so that Sutro sold his interests already in 1879, returning to San Francisco, where he invested into real estate. He at one time owned almost 10% of San Francisco city and county. In 1892 he began construction of the enormous Sutro salt-water baths for almost 1 million of US dollars, forming the finest bathing pavilion then in existence. In 1894 he was elected for two years mayor of San Francisco. He then collected rare books in technology and science, his library including finally more than 200,000 volumes, half of which were destroyed in the fire of 1906. Anonymous (1936). Sutro, Adolph Heinrich Joseph. Dictionary of American biography 18: 223-224. Scribner’s: New York. Capen, C.H. (1943). History of Sutro weirs. Engineering News-Record 131(17): 585. Sutro, A. (1868). The mineral resources of the United States and the importance and necessity of inaugurating a rational system of mining with special reference to the Comstock Lode and the Sutro Tunnel in Nevada. Murphy: Baltimore. https://www.sfmuseum.org/sutro/bio.html P
SUTRO H.H. 02.01. 1877 New York NY/USA 21.01. 1913 New York NY/USA Harry Herbert Sutro graduated with a BS degree in chemistry from Columbia University, New York NY, in 1898. Few is known on his professional career, and whether he was associated to the family of A.H. Sutro (1830-1898). The Sutro weir was in any case described first in the 1912 paper, based on a patent submitted in 1907, and issued in 1911, referring to a drainage system. Sutro committed suicide jumping from the seventh floor of his apartment. The Sutro weir is a liquid measuring notch shaped so that the quantity of water discharged always is in direct proportion to the approach flow head, rather than to an exponent differing from 1. The notch shape is parabolic, tending to infinite width at the base, which was modified however for practical purposes. The original Sutro weir had one vertical side and one curved side to approximately allow for the linear head-discharge relation. Ernest W. Rettger (1871-1938) was the first to devise a symmetrical proportional weir shape, as described in his 1914 paper. Edmund A. Pratt (1887-1961) developed the theory of the Sutro weir in 1914, which was in 1915 also experimentally investigated by a thesis. Clemens Herschel described the weir in articles published around 1920, as stated by Charles H. Capen (1895-1987) in his 1943 account. He further stated that ‘there is little available at the moment to indicate just when someone conceived the idea of converting the Sutro weir into a symmetrical form similar to the Rettger type. It may be that the advantages of both types were recognized and combined’. These weirs were particularly used to control the approach flow to grit chambers. Capen, C.H. (1943). History of Sutro weirs. Engineering News-Record 131(17): 585. Dodge, M.G., ed. (1902). Harry Herbert Sutro. Delta Upsilon Fraternity catalogue: 827. Pratt, E.A. (1914). Another proportional-flow weir: Sutro weir. Engineering News 72(14): 462-463. Pratt, E.A. (1936). Sutro weir formula. Engineering News-Record 117(26): 904. Rettger, E.W. (1914). A proportional-flow weir. Engineering News 71(26): 1409-1410; 72(9): 462-463. Rettger, E.W. (1915). The inverted weir. Engineering News 73(2): 72-73; 74(6): 277; 74(22): 1018-1019. https://www.google.de/patents?id=r6dCAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4&hl=de#v https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pages/US1138700-0.png (P)
