Prize-winning English translation of Darcy's classic
Henry Darcy wrote Les Fontaines publiques de la ville de Dijon in 1856 to describe the construction of Dijon’s water supply system. In an appendix, he describes his experiments on water flow through sand and the empirical law he concluded from the results.
Patricia Bobeck’s translation of the complete Darcy book was published in 2004 under the title of The Public Fountains of the City of Dijon. The translation contains 28 plates of engineering drawings that were originally published as a separate volume.
The hydrogeology community has greeted the translation with great enthusiasm. Darcy’s original publication is now a rare book, with only about 10 copies available in the US, so that anyone who wanted to read it had to go to a rare book library and struggle through mid-19th-century-style French prose. The translation makes Darcy easily accessible to modern day scientists.
In 2004, the American Foundation for Translation and Interpretation awarded the inaugural S. Edmund Berger Prize for Excellence in Scientific and Technical Translation to Patricia Bobeck for the Darcy book.
