Born in 1844, Harriet Williams Russell Strong was an American social activist, conservationist, and inventor inducted into the National Women’s hall of Fame as well as the National Inventors Hall of Fame, Via Wikipedia

Harriet Strong made a study about the shortage of water, including the control of floodwaters and water storage. She advocated source conservation as a flood remedy, proposing a succession of dams in the Grand Canyon of the Colorado river to conserve the water for irrigation purposes and the generation of electricity. On Dec. 6, 1887, she was granted a patent for a dam and reservoir construction. Her invention consists of a series of dams, one behind the other, to be constructed in a valley, canyon or watercourse in such a way that when the water has filled the lower dam it will extend up to a certain height upon the lower face of the second dam, and thus act as a brace and support for the dam above it. She obtained another patent, Nov. 6, 1894, on a new method for impounding debris and storing water. She was awarded two medals for these inventions by the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, IL, in 1893. In 1918 she appeared before the congressional committee on water power and urged the government to store the floodwaters of the Colorado River by constructing a series of dams by her method in the Grand Canyon, (which in its full capacity is 150 miles (240 km) long), and thus control floods and increase irrigation water, making available thousands of acres of land and unlimited power for generating electricity.