Parched City (15 page)

Alongside its daily water-testing regime, the laboratory carried out extensive research. This science project would influence water treatment across Europe and America, largely through the dialogue its findings generated in professional journals. For instance, when Berlin-based bacteriologist Rudolf Abel published
A Laboratory Handbook of Bacteriology
in 1907, Houston authored the section on water analysis as
the
world expert.
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The laboratory’s first research project, documented in 1908, tackled a subject that had preoccupied Dr Houston for some time, which was the effect of storage on water quality.
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His interest stemmed from the Franklands’ comment on its neglect as a topic of bacteriological research. From Houston’s direct allusion to their observation, it is obviously something he was itching to gain more evidence of, whether of positive significance to water safety or not.
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Like all science, the process of elimination was a critical part of developing theories. First under the microscope were samples injected with cultures of typhoid bacillus, to test their lifespan during storage. Such samples were often extracted from a ‘freshly removed’ human spleen.
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The researchers found that the decline of the deadly bacillus was rapid during the first week
of storage and, over eighteen experiments, the data proved that storage was unfavourable to typhoid’s survival. Houston concluded that storage dramatically reduced the total number of bacteria and ‘the number of microbes capable of growing at blood-heat’.
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In the published results, his excitement about this sphere of enquiry is palpable. It was fortuitous that a storage system devised for functional reasons had significant implications, he wrote, for ‘the ultimate death of the microbes causing epidemic disease’.
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Houston thus proposed that the system of storage across the Board’s reservoirs be standardised. Parliamentary powers were obtained for the construction of massive new reservoirs.
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He noted that the Board’s arbitrarily unequal complement of storage facilities was a legacy from the private companies. They merely used reservoirs to store turbid river water until it looked bright and clear i.e. to the naked eye. To the bacteriological mind, this was irrational, even ridiculous.

Time was also a critical factor in the storage-equals-safety hypothesis. The bacilli did not expire immediately, though most did die off in the first week, but the optimum period for storage was still unknown.
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Initially Houston thought that a one-to-two month storage period was needed for ‘raw’ river water prior to filtering. In the thorough procedures under Houston’s watch, no other element of the established treatment process, such as filtration, was to be altered until more convincing evidence of the new system’s use had been accrued. For instance, the laboratory conditions that caused the use of artificially bred ‘naked’ bacilli were somewhat different from what Houston called typhoid bacilli in ‘their pathological clothing’ i.e. fresh from the excreta of someone with the infection.
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As with all of the department’s reports, reams of charts detailing the experiments’ results were published. In later years, it was claimed that he personally drank multiple samples of typhoid-infused water after the proposed safe storage period, to demonstrate his own faith in the efficacy
of the measure.
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Cholera was the next bacilli in line for the storage test. In 1909 cholera plagued Russia and there were fears that the disease might reach British shores.
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Cultures of cholera vibrios were securely transported to the London water examination department from Russian victims. Under the lens, Houston resembled their ‘darting motility’ to ‘a swarm of gnats’.
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Similarly to typhoid, the bacilli obligingly perished in the storage tanks. Not one could be detected after three weeks.

In the laboratory’s 1909 report, Dr Houston underscored the difference in abstracted and storage-treated water when he wrote that Londoners were not ‘really drinking raw river water but river water, most of which has undergone a remarkable transformation in storage reservoirs’.
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During storage nothing was added to the water, or taken away, apart from an all-important ingredient. Time, quite simply, was that ingredient. The leap of faith required to believe that fatal diseases disappeared of their own accord now had scientific proof. Without the investment in a specialist institution for water examination, such time-dependent research could never have been conducted and therefore such significant evidence amassed.

Four years into his tenure as Director of Water Examination, Houston believed that the Board’s policy should be to achieve ‘epidemiologically sterile’ water, even before it reached the final filtration stage. He explained this category as follows: ‘I mean water which has undergone such a transformation in the storage reservoirs, as judged by b. coli death rate, that the survival in it of any of the microbes associated with epidemic water-borne disease is almost, if not quite, inconceivable.’
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But there were fresh scientific discoveries from other researchers to factor into the water treatment and safety equation. The discovery in 1910 that typhoid could be ‘carried‘, following the case in America of Mary Mallon, or ‘Typhoid Mary‘, who infected others without displaying any symptoms of the disease herself, raised new
questions.
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An employee working at the purification and distribution works could be such a carrier. Despite the importance of this possibility, Dr Houston took some comfort from the fact that he had yet to find any typhoid bacilli in the Thames.
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Proof of the typhoid-carrier phenomena raised the spectre of uncertainty about how it, or other unknown behaviours of waterborne diseases, might render public water at risk. Dr Houston had no doubt that sufficient storage could prevent any vulnerability from pathogenic bacteria, however he was not advocating that river water known to be of poor quality should be abstracted, just because storage would eventually make it safe to drink. Given that storage depended on time, he needed to reduce the risk of any water entering supplies that had not been adequately stored. Adding something other than time to drinking water therefore had to be entertained.

When Houston wrote about his laboratory’s experiments with using chloride of lime in the water treatment process, in 1912, he was quick to point out to his readers that the method was not being explored because of the weight of popular opinion about the ill effects of London’s hard water on health — not to mention the unsatisfactory soap suds it produced — but because of chloride of lime’s germicidal properties.
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Houston dismissed claims that hard or soft water had any impact on health. He reassured his readers with the following explanation about perceptions of different watery tastes: ‘The first thing that occurs when a water is softened is the neutralisation of the free carbonic acid dissolved in the water, which reputedly gives the water its “bite” and flavour. Thus a softened water, in the opinion of many persons, has a mawkish and flat taste. On the other hand, people accustomed to drink a softened water are apt to consider that a hard water has a sharp, almost “steely” taste. The truth is that people get so easily and rapidly accustomed to the change in the taste of a water, produced by its softening that the matter soon ceases to attract any attention.’
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He clearly had a finely-tuned
water tasting palate by this stage.

An ‘excess lime method’ was developed by the laboratory to maximise sterilisation impact whilst minimising chlorine’s lingering after-taste. Houston commented that the method presented a solution to the considerable challenges with water quality in urban wells, which suggested that they were still a presence in some parts of the city.
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A problem with the lime technique, however, was the substantial cost of the equipment and maintenance. On the other hand, Houston argued that it reduced the need for building new, expensive storage reservoirs. His ninth research report ended with an evangelical statement in favour of the excess lime method: ‘Its complete fulfilment would raise the purity of the Metropolitan Water Supply to a pitch of perfection never before attained, if ever seriously contemplated as possible, by any water-works authority in the world, dealing with sources of supply comparable to London.’
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Public Water under threat

World War One disrupted the methodological pace of the laboratory’s work. Houston had two fears about the war’s effect on water security. The first was the greater mobility of international pathogens in an increased quantity of people moving to and from London.
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His second concern was the likelihood of reduced funding for advancing purification techniques. In 1915, Parliament approved the excess lime treatment to commence in addition to the Metropolitan Water Board’s armoury of water treatment along with ‘storage for seven days and filtration at double the ordinary rate’.
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These plans were stalled by the economic impact of the war on the price of coal. The fuel was essential for all pumping, including transferring stored water out of reservoirs and back into supply.

Chemicals had never been systematically added to London’s public water supply before, but the war forced the pace of progress. Houston’s review of 1916 documented: ‘In these
circumstances, the Staines chlorination experiments started on 1
^st
May 1916 and they have been continued without intermission up to the date of writing this report (October 1916).’
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Varying chloride of lime doses were poured directly into the aqueduct at Staines, bypassing the need to pump water from out of the plant’s reservoir, until a quantity of ‘15lbs of chloride of lime per million gallons of water’ was settled upon.
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Trials transitioned to treatment in June 1916.
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Houston was satisfied that the level of chlorine saturation could not be detected, when reporting ‘nor was a single complaint received from the consumers of the treated water’.
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This was not an insignificant result, considering the supply was serving approximately 2,000,000 homes. If Houston and his colleagues tested copiously from the Staines supply before that momentous release, he did not reveal what went on behind-the-scenes in his report.

Despite chlorination’s success, something made Houston uneasy about the need to opt for chemical treatment and he acknowledged that it could be seen as a ‘retrograde step’.
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His ambivalence about chlorination was understandable, given his progress with developing methods that harnessed nature’s own processes of purification. He reassured his readers about the reasons for the move to chlorination because of the exceptional wartime circumstances in 1916: ‘In times of great prosperity, this view would (rightly or wrongly) have many advocates. Under war conditions, sentiment ought to give way to expediency.’
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Amidst the war’s profound social upheavals chlorination was not a headline-grabbing story. A brief article in
The Times
in November
1916, Sterilising Thames Water
, reported an ‘inexpensive and innocuous substance’ was being trialled to improve water quality and reduce the Metropolitan Water Board’s expenditure (by £30 a day).
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Chlorine was not mentioned in the article. The chemical’s title might have been deliberately obscured by editors in the interests of national security, given the unsavoury associations with chlorine’s other
use as a weapon of chemical warfare in its more lethal, gaseous form. Treatment at Staines was rapidly followed by the introduction of the chemical at waterworks in East London, Kempton Park, Hampton and Kew, and West Middlesex.
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This swift move to chlorination would never have happened outside the economic climate of war and the profound change in the treatment of London’s public water supply caused no furore, largely because it went unnoticed outside the professional water sphere. People were, understandably, focused on the more tragic consequences of the war. Like many large, young and male workforces, the Metropolitan Water Board suffered its own losses as Houston sombrely recorded in a post-war report.

Whilst on the war’s frontline, the Chairman of the United Alkali Company claimed that his corporation’s supply of thousands of tons of chloride of lime for disinfecting water for British troops on the front had contributed greatly to the low losses of life from waterborne disease. This was remarkable for a product that had apparently been ‘barely remunerative’ before the war.
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Chlorination of Water
, by the Canadian bacteriologist and chemist Joseph Race, was published in the last year of World War One. The book was dedicated to Alexander Houston in recognition of his world leadership in water treatment. Two American chlorination pioneers were also credited by Race, but the dedication clearly singled Houston out.
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Notably, it was addressed to
Sir
Alexander Houston. In 1918 he had been knighted by King George V so at least his work did receive recognition during his lifetime.
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Joseph Race noted chlorine’s controversy in his experience of leading water treatment policy for the city of Ottawa. Typical complaints were that the chemical killed fish and birds, destroyed plants and flowers, and that animals’ refusal to drink it proved that the substance was not to be trusted.
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To counter these charges, Race kept a tank of minnows in chlorinated water
over a period of months and announced that none of them died (perhaps he had read about Houston’s goldfish tests before flooding Lincoln with chlorinated water).
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Race was convinced that chlorine was an agent of health rather than harm. To counter the public concentration of chlorine in public water supplies, the Canadian made a pioneering move of his own when he discovered that adding ammonia prior to chlorination did wonders for the tell-tale after taste of the chemical. Race’s method was adopted in London, in an example of how dialogue about water treatment was leading to the creation of internationally recognised practices and standards in the western world.
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