The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Swain, George Fillmore

SWAIN, swān, George Fillmore, American civil engineer: b. San Francisco, Cal., 2 March 1857. He was graduated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1877 and then studied in Berlin, Germany. In 1887 he accepted the chair of civil engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he remained until 1909. He also served as consulting engineer of the Massachusetts Railroad Commission and was member of the Boston Transit Commission and its chairman in 1913. In 1909 he was made professor of civil engineering at the Harvard Graduate School of Applied Science. He is the author of ‘Notes on Hydraulics’ (1885); ‘Notes on Theory of Structures’ (1893); ‘Report on the Water Power of the Atlantic Watershed’ (in Vol. XVII of the ‘Tenth United States Census’) and ‘Conservation of Water by Storage’ (1915).