[1] He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the recipient of numerous awards including the John Fritz Medal.

[3] Interestingly, the Savage House was not far from the historic sawmill that village founder John Cook built in 1842 on the Badfish Creek outside of Cooksville.

Savage later attended the Hillside Home School near Spring Green, Wisconsin (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1887) after he earned tuition and board for two years.

Wiley and buying a cattle ranch in Idaho, Savage returned to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in the office of the Chief Engineer.

[2][4] While with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Savage became a renowned expert on dams and civil engineering; he consulted in 19 countries on hundreds of projects.

Savage refused any payments and offered his services anyway, writing his superiors: "Any assistance will be gratis and I shall not accept any reimbursement for expenses.

"[2] After serving Mexico, in 1941, the United States Congress unanimously passed legislation allowing Savage to officially consult in India, Australia, and other countries.

On June 3, 1946, the first of the dams he suggested, the Upper Tsing Yuan Tung, began but was halted on August 15, 1947, because of the Chinese Civil War.

[2] John L. Savage retired from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in 1945 but continued to consult in countries such as Afghanistan, South Africa, India, Singapore, Formosa, Japan, Mexico, Canada and Australia.

He also introduced the trial load method of arch analysis, which removed theorized and actual stresses in a finished structure.

[2] Savage and his associates developed methods and equipment that determined the stress on penstocks — pipes responsible for directly transferring water to generators in hydroelectricity power plants.

They also studied the behavior of concrete and rolled-earth dams as well as the seismic and land subsidence effects caused by the weight of large reservoirs.