Paris sewers

Paris 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 been heightened so workers could move through them. The record is less tidy than London's, which is worth knowing. Cholera still struck Paris in 1849 and again in 1884, and the network was only complete enough to carry solid waste as well as liquid sewage by 1894. Read it as a long, piecemeal job rather than a single triumph.