Parched City (12 page)

Germ Theory and Table Water

When Dr Robert Koch’s observations of bacteria’s reproduction on slices of potato led to his ‘germ theory’ of disease being
reported in the early 1880s, the theory was met with scepticism in some sanitary circles. A report from the 1884
International Congress of Hygiene
in The Hague referred to the ‘supposed germ of cholera’ and, the following year, a journalist attending the Annual Sanitary Institute Congress in Leicester reminded his readers of the doubt which shrouded the German doctor’s analyses: ‘…even if the germ theory of cholera were accepted to be true.’
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But, as one science historian claims: ‘The development of solidified culture media by Koch was without a doubt the most important single development in the history of microbiology after the perfection of sterilisation techniques.’
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Germs were still the preserve of scientific professionals for a few years, as the discipline of bacteriology became more widely practised in London’s laboratories and was applied to water analysis.

In the domestic sphere, a drinking water filter from the first half of the 1880s and the appearance of a new drinking water product by the end of that decade shows how germs entered the public domain.

Advertisement for Maignen’s Patent Filter Rapide, 1883. Wellcome Library,
London.

An 1883 advertisement for a dining room filter for the London-based purveyors of the
Maignen’s Patent Filtre Rapide
assured would-be customers that ‘it removes all organic matter, lead, copper and poisonous gases’.
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Germs were not mentioned. Customers could opt for a plain brown Cottage Filter or a Bijou Filter; the latter was decorative white porcelain. Whatever ones aesthetic preference might be, from a functional point of view the size was commensurate with the rate of filtration. The most expensive filter, at £1 15d. was said to produce three gallons of filtered water an hour. Maignen’s filter was apparently superior to other brands on the market (at least according to its promoter) because it ‘is so easily cleaned and renewed’.
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Other filters, claimed a chemist vouching for the product, were feared to do more harm than good to health because they gathered dirt.

By 1889, the negative publicity about germs relationship to public water supply opened up the market for new drinking
water products, such as
Puralis
by the Pure Water Company.
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A reporter from the
Pall Mall Gazette
visited its producer’s premises in Battersea the same year. There, ‘pure’ water was being produced through distillation, for use as ‘table water’ and even for a luxurious, lime-free bath as a beauty treatment for ladies.
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Advertisement of the Pure Water Company, Battersea, ca. 1889.
Wellcome Library, London.

The Pure Water Company’s proprietor pronounced to the Gazette’s reporter ‘we cater for the masses’ and his sales testified to a successful product, with figures doubling in ten years from 10,000 to 20,000.
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Not all of these purchases were for the London market. Mr Hartley’s product was also being shipped to Egypt and South America, where the gospel of temperance had spread. His advertisement’s claim that distilled water was the only reliably pure water was backed up with a quote from Professor Frankland, no less, reminding consumers that boiling water was not a guarantee against germs. Perhaps Frankland did not trust the general public to sufficiently boil their water. Either that, or his product endorsement was highly lucrative. The Pure Water Company was also conscious of the need to differentiate its product from mineral water brands: ‘It is well to bear in mind that aerated distilled water, not being a mineral water, does not lower the system. It can be drunk daily.’
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The Balfour Commission

The same year that the Pure Water Company was touting its wares (1889), the London County Council was formed. It was not long before the infamous London water question arose as a governance issue for the Council.
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Should it be the controller of London’s water supply? That question was central to the proceedings of the Balfour Commission (named after its Chairman Lord Balfour), or the
Royal Commission to Inquire into the Water Supply of the Metropolis
, which held its first session in Charing Cross, on a spring day in 1892.
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Discussion of depleted water supplies dominated the Commission, amidst fears that London’s water was running out.

A contributor to the Commission’s enquiry, Mr William Booth Bryan, engineer to the East London Water Company, blamed people rather than the hydrological cycle for the low reserves. In Booth Bryan’s view, shortages were the result of ‘the carelessness of the poorer class of their customers. The alien immigration in the east of London had especially caused an immense amount of waste’.
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He cited clothes washing techniques by the ‘aliens’ as one cause of lavish water use and the engineer relayed to the commission how he had personally observed taps that had been left running from a train (it must have been slow-moving for Booth Bryan to catch such details). East London’s growing demand, with population growth, did raise the topic of where water might come from other than the Lee River. Drawing from The Chalk aquifer beneath London was one option but there were concerns that its use might deplete the New River’s sources for middle and upper class homes in Islington.

Such tensions over future water resources and their distribution between different corporate providers, and their diverse customers, renewed the question of municipalising London’s water supply. Within the debate on that subject, one pro-munici-palisation representative from the London County Council voiced his concern that the Council might be obliged to supply public fountains for free.
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This reference to drinking fountains is a rare mention of the public sources in official sanitation discourse, but it suggests their prominence in daily life at that point. Despite the fears germ theory unleashed in some London circles, 16,452 people were recorded drinking from three fountains maintained by the Metropolitan Drinking Fountains Association, over twenty-four hours at Clapham Common, Bishopsgate Church and London Bridge in 1891.
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The Association’s drinking fountains count in the capital was 690 in 1892.
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If the London County Council official read the organi-sation’s latest report then he may have known that it was struggling to cover the costs of building, maintaining and supplying
the fountains with water. In fact, the Association was refusing to construct any more because of financial restraints. It may seem like a minor issue in the vast urban water network, but the drinking fountains were a highly visible public emblem of Victorian London’s water politics. If water supply moved to state governance and ownership, then should free drinking water be a public service rather than the work of a charity? Free drinking water was an issue far removed from the quantity of supply that concerned the engineers contributing to the deliberations of the Royal Commission.

An engineer from East London Waterworks was convinced that the River Lee’s capacity should be boosted ‘by means of a system of storage reservoirs’.
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Other engineers agreed about similar proposals for west London. Mr C.J. More, engineer to the Conservators of the Thames proposed that ‘the storage of water in reservoirs at the upper end of the Thames basin would be the most beneficial arrangement which could be adopted for the river generally’.
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In the Commission’s report, storage reservoirs were also recommended for abstractions from both the rivers Lee and Thames, with a combined capacity of 352,000,000 litres but the need for reservoir construction was not immediately enforced on the water companies by law (the significance of this stasis will become apparent in the next chapter). Quality issues also featured strongly in the Commission’s final report. On the munic-ipalisation question, the jury was still out.

The Balfour Commission’s 1893 report acknowledged that the science of water quality for human consumption had ‘passed from the domain of chemistry into that of biology’.
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Pathogenic bacteria were now accepted as an official threat to drinking water’s safety. The report concluded that London’s water quality was excellent and pure, citing the lack of Asiatic cholera as one reflection of the supply standard.
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Even so, recommendations for quality assurance were made: ‘In order to preserve the wholesomeness of the water as delivered to the consumer and in order
further to meet the not unnatural sentiment against drinking water, which, though wholesome, has been polluted at an earlier stage, all possible vigilance should be exercised to prevent unnecessary contamination of the Thames and Lea and their respective tributaries, to ensure the thorough treatment of all sewage, before it is allowed to pass into the rivers, by the most efficacious methods that science and experience may dictate, and to enforce the adequate storage and filtration of such water as is abstracted at the intakes.’
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Filtration regulations were also to be stepped up and enforced by the Public Water Examiner.

A new understanding of the interdependence of drinking water quality and sanitation was becoming integrated into environmental and urban policy decisions. 1894’s Thames Conservancy Act legalised the Commission’s recommendations and instituted the prevention of pollution in the river’s catchment area, specifically for the protection of water for ‘domestic supply’.
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For the first time in its history, London’s primary water source became a conservation area.

The Franklands

Also in 1894, a seminal text that applied germ theory to water quality was published. One of the authors of
Micro-Organisms in Water
was Edward Frankland’s son, Percy. Initially he followed in his father’s footsteps as a chemist, but was seduced by the modern lure of bacteriology. The book’s second author was Percy Frankland’s talented research colleague. She was his wife.

Grace Frankland was a scientist, a writer and an illustrator. When the husband-and-wife team’s book hit the international science shelves, her drawings of bacilli showed the frail intricacies of the world she routinely viewed through her microscope.

The rational style of her translation of bacillus from the lens to the page shows how the era of sensationalist animalcules had evolved with the establishment of microbiology as an official science. The Franklands’ research was groundbreaking in applying bacteriology, as a branch of microbiology, to drinking water. This explained how they realised that after Koch’s ‘the possibility was at once opened up of approaching the solution of problems connected with water-supply which had long been matters of dispute and speculation amongst hygienic author-ities’.
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In practice, they had already been working on developing solutions in the context of London’s water supply.

Grace Frankland’s sketches of bacilli, Plate 2.
Micro-Organisms in Water
,
Percy Frankland and Mrs Percy Frankland (London: Longmans and
Green, 1894). Wellcome Library, London.