Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
sluggish. The Europeans, to the contrary, forged ahead with several slow
sand filters, and in Buenos Aires in the 1880s experiments were conducted
on the suitability of various filtering materials. Information about the
experiments in filtration, as well as other crucial information about water
supplies, was disseminated more effectively because of the organization of
the American Water Works Association (1881) and the New England Water
Works Association (1882), both of which published their proceedings.
Other engineering societies and public health organizations added to the
rich body of data making its way even to the smallest town in the 1880s
and after.
Several Americans were pioneers in disseminating information about the
quality of water and the value of filtration in this period. Professor William
Ripley Nichols of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a leading
authority on water quality, had argued that sand was the only practical
medium for large filtration operations, but that evidence was poor on
whether sand filtration would purify polluted water efficiently. Colonel
John T. Fanning, a well-respected hydraulic engineer, published a major
treatise on water works in 1877, in which he discussed the water purifica-
tion methods used in Europe.
54
Along with experiments in filtration, a variety of pumping techniques
and changes in pipe technology helped to transform older proto-systems
into modern, centralized waterworks. Aside from gravity systems, steam
pumps were increasingly employed directly at the source (especially in the
1870s), and as a way of moving water to reservoirs, tanks, and standpipes.
55
Wooden pipe was adequate in low-pressure gravity systems, but could not
withstand the action of high-pressure pumping engines. Wooden mains
were sometimes modified by strapping iron bands around the staves. By
1850, iron pipe was coming into wider use in the United States, especially
in high-pressure systems. The transition from wood to iron, however, was
not uniform throughout the country. Some water utilities continued to use
wooden pipe until the 1930s. In the West, especially, wood was used for
large aqueducts, irrigation, hydroelectric plants, and hydraulic mining.
56
For all the improvements begun by private companies through munici-
pal franchises, accessibility to water supply was still largely linked to class.
Affluent neighborhoods and the central business district received the lion's
share of water, while the working class districts often relied on polluted
wells and other potentially unhealthy local sources. As Sam Bass Warner
astutely observed about a later period,“The mode of construction of water-
