Waller, Osmer Lysander

Osmer L. Waller was born in Ohio in 1857. His young adulthood was spent moving between Ohio and Michigan and seemed to have been characterized by uncertainty about the choice of a profession. He began by receiving the type of literary-religious education then offered in most American colleges, going so far as to receive a graduate degree of that nature. Then he attended the University of Michigan law school and was admitted to the bar, but instead of practicing law he became a public school teacher and administrator. About 1890 he moved to Washington state, where he was again admitted to the bar and where he again became a public school administrator, this time at Colfax, Washington. In 1893, he was suddenly appointed to a position wholly unrelated to any of his previous experience--Professor of Mathematics and Civil Engineering at the Washington Agricultural College and School of Science, the ancestor of the present Washington State University, in nearby Pullman, Washington. At the time Waller had only the limited mathematical background which had been included in his education. He probably knew nothing of engineering.

A few cram courses at the University of Chicago enabled him to teach the preparatory school mathematics which comprised the mathematics curriculum at the school in its early years. This process of self-education was repeated to an even greater degree as Waller took up civil engineering. Learning on the job, he not only taught the subject for years, but also developed an extensive consulting practice. Moreover, he acquired the reputation as one of the leading irrigation project engineers in the Northwest within a relatively few years. In spite of this reputation, Waller always exhibited a certain amatuerism about irrigation and reclamation, sometimes making serious errors, as in his early estimates on the Klickitat-Horse Heaven Project. Generally, however, he maintained his competency by adhering to a basic theory of hydrologic engineering which he seems to have derived for the great reclamation engineers of the British Empire, Sir William Willcocks and Robert Hanbury Brown. At times Waller was an almost pedantic advocate of their "natural" system of diversions and canals. He also seemed to shy away from the more typically American approach, with its mechanized features, big dams, flumes, pipes and pumps. Consequently it was not surprising to find that as he led in the search for a means to water the arid region of central Washington during the 1920s, Waller was one of the foremost opponents of the Grand Coulee dam proposals and also the foremost advocate of a "gravity plan" which would have reclaimed the area with water diverted from points hundreds of miles from the land which was to receive it.

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