The History of Baths

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History of Water Through the Ages Part 5

Strangely the scientific conception of clean water and the laymen’s definition of clean water was sharply at odds. Scientists were beginning to classify the light, fresh, clear water so loved by nonprofessionals to be so because of dissolved nitrates. These properties came from night soil and leaked into water from the cesspits. Water the scientist declared to be clean and safe was often unpalatable because of iron or peat deposits.

The English chemist Edward Frankland, was the leading international authority on water analysis in the 1870s and 1880s. He favoured classifying water as to whether it had been subject to contamination in its passage over ground, and it was on this basis he determined whether water was safe to drink and local health authorities began to accept the same ideas. The term polluted became in common use rather than the classical word putrid.

This marked a great breakthrough foul water had been described up to then as a condition of the water, and anyone could taste whether that was so. However, now it was a matter for experts to determine whether water was polluted, because it could be accurately measured, and had been done to water rather than be an inherent condition.

It was not until 1850 that cholera was commonly associated with fecally contaminated water, and that was largely due to the statistical work of Florence Nightingale. However, there was no understood correlation between the quantity of contamination and the amount of the disease. In simple terms water that was clearly transmitting cholera was, according to available means of testing, substantially purer than water that evidently caused no harm. Florence Nightingale worked out that water was responsible for disease by efficient records, which recorded the streets which and disease and the source of the water to those streets.

In heavily populated city areas, the demands of industry and the Industrial revolution held that economic growth was more vital than concerns about public health and safety. Despite the fact, the European colony in Shanghai sent water samples to London to be analyzed by Frankland. By the early twentieth century, the institution of chlorination, and carefully monitored filtering led to greater public confidence in urban water supplies.

Most cities recognize that piped-in, potable water represents a universal standard of quality of living. It is one thing to provide potable water to an area that can be in the street via standpipes, it is another concept to pipe that water into each home. The ancient Romans had piped water and yet in Europe that did concept was not acknowledged until the nineteenth century. Water was piped into fountains; it was used in the streets to fight fires, it was used to clean the streets, but piped water in the home was not deemed to be important.

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