John L. Savage

John Lucian Savage was an American civil engineer, born December 25, 1879 in Cooksville, Wisconsin and died December 28, 1967 in Englewood, Colorado, who served as chief designing engineer of the United States Bureau of Reclamation from 1924 to 1945. After earning a civil engineering degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1903, he supervised the designs of roughly sixty major dams over his career, most notably Hoover Dam, Shasta Dam, Parker Dam and Grand Coulee Dam, each a major hydroelectric power source for the American West. His engineering reputation carried him abroad as a consultant to nineteen countries, including a survey of the Three Gorges site on China's Yangtze River decades before that dam was eventually built along broadly similar lines. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and received the John Fritz Medal in 1945.