1st Edition

Water-Supply and Public Health Engineering

Edited By Denis Smith Copyright 1999

    This volume traces the evolution of the concept of Public Health and reveals the importance of political will and public spending in this field of civil engineering. Design, construction, operation and maintenance of water-supply and main drainage works are discussed. The period covered extends from Roman engineering through to the early 20th century, with examples from Europe, America and Japan.

    Contents: Introduction; Urban Water-Supply: Attitudes to Roman engineering and the question of the inverted siphon, Norman A. F. Smith; Our debt to Roman engineering: the water supply of Lincoln to the present day, M. J. T. Lewis; Sir Hugh Myddelton and the New River, G. C. Berry; George Sorocold of Derby: a pioneer of water supply, F. Williamson; The old water-supply of Seville, George Higgin; Portsmouth’s water supply, 1800-1860, Mary Hallett; The impounding reservoirs of the Newcastle and Gateshead Water Company,1845-1905, R. W. Rennison; The old Croton Aqueduct, George H. Rappole; Bringing water to the Crescent City: Benjamin Latrobe and the New Orleans waterworks system, Gary A. Donaldson; Urban sanitation in preindustrial Japan, Susan B. Hanley; Sanitary Reform: The development of Victorian infrastructures: the example of Portsmouth, Robert A. Otter; Edwin Chadwick and the engineers, 1842-1854: systems and antisystems in the pipe-and-brick sewers war, Christopher Hamlin; The separate vs. combined sewer problem: a case study in urban technology and design choice, Joel A. Tarr; Sir Joseph William Bazalgette (1819-1891): engineer to the Metropolitan Board of Works, Denis Smith; Eugène Belgrand (1810-1878): civil engineer, geologist, and pioneer hydrologist, George Atkinson; Index.

    Biography

    Denis Smith

    'The aim of Ashgate's twelve volume series is to bring together collections of important papers on particular topics from scholarly journals, conference proceedings and other hard-to-access sources. This is a wholly laudable objective. Some of the papers in the volume under review [The Civil Engineering of Canals and Railways before 1850] cannot be found even in abundantly-resourced academic libraries. The series opens up, directly or indirectly, debates over the nature of historical evidence which arise from the profoundly different approaches to the past of historians of technology, whose works are principally represented in these volumes, industrial archaeologists and social and economic historians.' Industrial Archaeology Review, Vol. XXI, No. 1