Items9The creator’s order
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Croton AqueductThe honest starting point. New York lost 3,500 people to cholera in 1832, when its water came from wells, ponds and springs inside the city. The aqueduct's answer was a 41-mile channel carrying Croton River water, largely by gravity, which arrived on July 4, 1842.
Clean water reached the city, but…0 - 2
London sewer systemThe clearest natural experiment on the list came from the one district the system had not yet reached. Joseph Bazalgette's sewers were begun in 1859, after the Great Stink of 1858 finally forced Parliament to act over the state of the Thames, and completed in 1875.
In June 1866 cholera broke out…0 - 3
Paris sewersParis is the case for building supply and drainage together. Eugène Belgrand, a hydrologist, took over the city's water service in 1854 under Haussmann and worked both ends at once: spring water captured at its source began flowing through the network in 1865, and by 1867 the sewer galleries had…0 - 4
Chicago Sanitary and Ship CanalChicago fixed its drainage twice, and the first fix created the second problem. Ellis Chesbrough, brought from Boston in 1855 to build the city's sewers, found the streets too low to drain, so Chicago raised its streets over the new sewers and jacked its buildings up to match, the six-story Tremont…0 - 5
Lawrence Experiment StationThe Lawrence city filter, 1893
This is where American water treatment proved itself with numbers. Typhoid in Lawrence and neighboring Lowell, Massachusetts, killed more than 200 people in 1890 and 1891. The state's experiment station, directed by engineer Hiram Mills, had been studying water and…0 - 6
Kaltehofe Waterworks, HamburgHamburg learned the lesson at the worst possible price. In 1892 it and neighboring Altona both drew water from the Elbe, but only Altona passed its supply through sand. More than 8,000 Hamburg residents died of cholera in about three months, most of them within a few weeks, and Robert Koch observed…0 - 7
Old River Station, Cincinnati Water WorksCincinnati shows what filtration did for a city drinking from a busy river. The Old River Station, built from 1898 to 1907 on the Ohio about 10 miles upstream, used the rapid sand filtration process George W. Fuller had researched, with the Eden Park water works serving as the testing site, and the…0 - 8
Boonton ReservoirContinuous chlorination, September 26, 1908
The quietest revolution on the list. Jersey City's new reservoir at Boonton was in court over whether its water was always pure, in a city where typhoid deaths had regularly topped 60 per 100,000 a year between 1880 and 1895. John Leal, a physician…0 - 9
Clean Air Act 1956The one entry about air rather than water, and it earns its place on the death toll that prompted it. London's Great Smog of December 1952 killed an estimated 4,000 people across five days, with later estimates of 12,000 once the longer-term effects were counted.
The Clean Air Act 1956 created…0
