Title: History of Sanitation
Author: Cosgrove, John Joseph
Language: English
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History of Sanitation


By J. J. COSGROVE

Author of

"Principles and Practice of Plumbing," "Sewage Purification
and Disposal," "Wrought Pipe Drainage Systems,"
and "Plumbing Plans and Specifications"


[Illustration]


Published by

Standard Sanitary Mfg. Co.

PITTSBURGH, U. S. A.


Copyright 1909 by Standard Sanitary Mfg. Co., Pittsburgh, U. S. A.



Preface


When the manuscript for this volume was prepared, there was no decided
intention of publishing it in book form. Originally it was intended to
appear as a serial in "Modern Sanitation," and grew out of a request
from the Editor of that magazine to write an article that would trace
the advancement made in sanitation from its earliest stages to the
present time.

Sanitation has been given but little thought by historians,
consequently, considerable study and research were necessary to
dig from musty tomes and ancient records a story that would prove
interesting and instructive. Having succeeded in gathering together
much of interest to sanitarians, and in view of the fact that no other
history of sanitation was ever written, the work was deemed worthy of a
more permanent place in literature, and it was decided to put it forth
in more enduring form. The book is therefore offered to the public with
the fervent hope that those who read its pages will derive as much
pleasure as did the author in preparing the manuscript.

      J. J. COSGROVE

  PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA

  February 15th, 1909



Publisher's Note


The primary object of our organization is, as is universally known,
to manufacture and market ~"Standard"~ Plumbing Fixtures, Brass Goods
and other products made in our factories. In the development of an
organization to accomplish this result, there has been established an
Advertising and Publishing Department of no small proportions, and the
"History of Sanitation" is simply the outgrowth of the work of this
department. This brief statement will, we believe, serve to give the
public a clear understanding of our somewhat unique position of being
at the same time manufacturers and publishers.

The first serious work of the Publishing Department on a large scale
was "Modern Sanitation" (established June, 1904). From this came
the publication, first in serial form and later as a book, of J. J.
Cosgrove's first work, "Principles and Practice of Plumbing" (book
published December, 1906). The phenomenal success of the book is a
matter of general knowledge, although it may not be widely known that
"Principles and Practice of Plumbing" has been adopted as a text book
in more than thirty universities and colleges in the United States,
and bids fair to be adopted in others. This magnificent achievement
has been accomplished solely on the merit of the work and without
solicitation on the part of either the author or publisher.

There is now offered almost simultaneously two new books by Mr.
Cosgrove, one being the volume in hand and the other "Sewage
Purification and Disposal."

In "History of Sanitation," "Sewage Purification and Disposal" and
"Principles and Practice of Plumbing" we feel that the literature of
the craft has been enriched in an enduring manner, and that we have
fully justified our appearance in the field of publishers as amply as
we have our standing as manufacturers of a world-wide known and used
product.

  =Standard Sanitary Mfg. Co.=

  =Pittsburgh, U. S. A.=

  Publishing Department



Explanatory Description of Full Page Illustrations


  ANCIENT ROMAN FOUNTAIN AT CORINTH      Page 6

An old fountain at Corinth, Greece, whose piping and stone construction
date from about the time of the Christian era. It was standing here
when St. Paul lived and taught in Corinth, and is still the only source
of water supply for a large contingent of Greek housekeepers. Drinking
water is carried home in jars, but washing is done on the spot, just as
it was centuries ago.


  THE ROMAN AQUEDUCT OF SEGOVIA, SPAIN      Page 36

This aqueduct is 937 feet long, and consists of 320 arches in two
tiers, the highest arch in the lower tier being 102 feet. It is
supposed to have been built in the time of Trajan.

Segovia was an ancient Roman city located in old Castile, Spain, and
was the residence of the kings of Leon and Castile.


  THE OLDEST BATHROOM IN THE WORLD      Page 76

This photograph was made at the ruined palace and fortress of Tiryns,
in Greece. It is regarded by archæologists as one of the oldest cities
in the world, and is mentioned by name in Greek poetry of 2,000 years
ago. Its rulers must have been men of great importance, as their stone
palace (parts of its walls and galleries are as firm and solid as ever)
was a structure of splendid dimensions and substantial character.

There is no doubt the 8 × 9-foot slab of stone seen in the picture
formed the floor of a bathroom. At the farther edge there still remains
the slanting groove cut in as an outlet for water.


  BATHING AND BURNING HINDU DEAD AT BENARES      Page 90

Dipping a corpse in the holy waters of the Ganges River before burning
it on the bank—a daily occurrence at Benares, India. Some worshipper
may very likely drink the water only twenty feet away.


  THE FOUNTAIN OF ELISHA      Page 108

The waters of this ancient fountain were miraculously sweetened by the
Prophet Elisha.



Table of Contents


CHAPTER I

                                                 Page

Sanitation of Primitive Man—Early Wells—Rebekah at the Well—Joseph's
Well—Well at the Rancho Chack      1


CHAPTER II

Cisterns—Early Mention of Cisterns—Cisterns of Carthage—Early
Methods of Raising Water—Water Carriers—Pool of Siloam—Pool of
Solomon—Aqueducts—Carthagenian Aqueduct—Aqueducts of Rome—Aqueduct of
Segovia, Spain—Trophies of Marius      7


CHAPTER III

Early Sewage Disposal—Removal of Offensive Materials from Temples of
Jerusalem—Sewage Systems of a Pre-Babylonian City—Sewers of Rome—The
Cloaca Maxima—The Dejecti-Effusive Act      29


CHAPTER IV

Origin of Bathing—Early Greek Baths—Roman Private Baths—Public Baths of
Rome—Ruins of Baths of Caracalla—Description of the Thermæ—The Thermæ
of Titus at Rome—Baths of Pompeii—Heating Water for Roman Baths—Thermæ
of Titus Restored      37


CHAPTER V

Fall of the Roman Empire—Succeeding Period Known as the Dark
Ages—Sanitation During the Dark Ages—Beginning of Material Progress in
Sanitation—Pilgrimage to Juggernaut—Water Supply in Paris—London Water
Supply—Aqueduct of Zempoala, Mexico      63


CHAPTER VI

Introduction of Pumping Machinery into Waterworks Practice—The
Archimedes Screw—Use of Pumps in Hanover, Germany—First London Pump
on London Bridge—Savery and Newcomen's Pumping Engine—The Hydraulic
Ram—Pumping Engines Erected for the Philadelphia Waterworks—Pipes for
Distributing Water—Hydrants and Valves for Wooden Pipes—Data Regarding
the Use of Wooden Pipes—Modern Pumping Engines      77

CHAPTER VII

Early British Sewers—Sewer in the Great Hall of Westminster—Shape of
Early English Sewers—Adoption or Recommendation of Pipe Sewers—Early
Paris Sewers—Paris Sewers of To-day—Lack of Sewage Data in
America—Effect of Memphis Epidemics on Sanitary Progress      85


CHAPTER VIII

Sanitary Awakening—Realization of the Danger of Unwholesome
Water—Cholera in London Traced to the Broad Street Pump—An Historical
Stink      91


CHAPTER IX

Introduction of Water Filters—Striking Example of the Efficiency
and Value—Cholera at Altona and Hamburg—Purification of Sewage—The
Automatic Scavenger of Mouras—Investigations of the Massachusetts State
Board of Health—Garbage Destruction      109


CHAPTER X

Modern and Recent Plumbing Fixtures—Passing of the Marble
Lavatory—Public Wash Houses—Public Comfort Stations—Conclusion      119



List of Illustrations


                            Page

 1  Rebekah at the Well      2

 2  Well at the Rancho Chack       4

 3  Ancient Roman Fountain at Corinth       6

 4  The Cisterns at Carthage      7

 5  Pole and Bucket for Raising Water      8

 6  Ruins of Ancient Cisterns      8

 7  Old Roman Water-Wheel      9

 8  Water Carrier with Jar      9

 9  Water Carrier with Goat-Skin Bag      11

10 Pool of Siloam      12

11 Pool of Solomon      13

12 Aqueduct near Tunis, Leading to Ancient Carthage       14

13 Ancient Roman Well      15

14 Ruins of a Roman Aqueduct      17

15 Distant View of the Claudia Aqueduct  18

16 Near View of the Claudia Aqueduct      19

17 Aqueduct in Ruins, Ephesus       20

18 Roman Aqueduct, Segovia, Spain       22

19 Water Tower and Roman Ruins, Chester, England       23

20 Roman Water Pipes, made of Bored-out Blocks of Stone       24

21 Trophies of Marius       25

22 Old Roman Lead and Terra Cotta Pipe       26

23 The Women's Baths, Pompeii      28

24 The Cloaca Maxima. From an old woodcut      31

25 The Cloaca Maxima. From a recent photograph      32

26 Egyptian Lady Having Head Sprayed, 1700 B. C.      33

27 Greek Women Bathing      34

28 Greek Bath Tubs      34

29 The Roman Aqueduct of Segovia, Spain      36

30 Mosaic from Floor of Baths of Caracalla      37

31 Ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, Rome      38

32 Interior of the Frigidarium, Caracalla      39

33 Outer Row of Baths, Caracalla, Rome      41

34 Thermæ of Titus at Rome      46

35 Clipeus. From an old woodcut      46

36 Floor Plan of the Baths of Pompeii      47

37 Frigidarium. From an old woodcut      48

38 Atlantes      50

39 Coppers for Heating Water in Roman Baths      52

40 Ground Plan of Thermæ of Caracalla      55

41 Hypocaust for Heating Water, Thermæ of Caracalla      57

42 Restoration of Thermæ of Titus. (Restored by Leclerc)       58

43 Plan of the Thermæ of Titus, Rome. (Restored by Leclerc)       59

44 Sectional Elevation, Thermæ of Titus, Rome       60

45 Frigidarium, Thermæ of Caracalla, Rome. (Restored by
Viollet-le-Duc.)      61

46 Interior View of Aqueduct, Lisbon, Portugal      62

47 Destroyed Lead Font, Great Plumstead, Norfolk      64

48 Leaden Cup, of the time of Vespasian      65

49 Lead Pipehead and Pipe     66

50 Lead Cistern with the Arms of the Fishmongers' Company      67

51 Car of Juggernaut      68

52 Distant View of Zempoala Aqueduct, Queretaro, Mexico      70

53  Near View of Zempoala Aqueduct, Mexico      71

54 Zempoala Aqueduct. From an old print      72

55 The Oldest Bathroom in the World      76

56 Savery's Engine      77

57 Newcomen's Engine      78

58 Pump House, Philadelphia      79

59 Wooden Boilers used in Philadelphia Water Supply      80

60 Bored-out Log Pipe, used in British Columbia      81

61 Valve for Wooden Pipes used in Philadelphia Water Supply      82

62 Hydrant for Wooden Pipes used in Philadelphia Water Supply      82

63 Modern Vertical Triple-Expansion Pumping Engine      83

64 Aqueduct Crossing the Alcantara Valley      84

65 Bathing and Burning Hindu Dead at Benares      90

66 Map Showing Relation of Cholera and the Broad Street Pump      92

67 York Survey of the Broad Street Pump       101

68 The Fountain of Elisha       108

69 Map Showing Location of Cases of Cholera in Hamburg and Altona      110

70 New York Public Baths      118

71 Bathroom of the Early Seventies   119

72 One Stage in the Evolution of the Porcelain Enameled Bath       120

73 A Slop Sink of Long Ago       120

74 Bath Tub Encased in Woodwork       121

75 An Old Marble-Top Lavatory       121

76 A Modern Porcelain Enameled Lavatory       122

77 Present Stage in the Evolution of Porcelain Enameled Baths      123

78 A Twentieth Century Bathroom      124

[Illustration: LAOCOÖN AND HIS SONS

STATVARY FOVND IN THE BATHS OF TITVS

This group of statuary is now in the Vatican, Rome]



[Illustration: History of Sanitation: CHAPTER I]

 SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTER. Sanitation of Primitive Man—Early Wells—Rebekah
 at the Well—Joseph's Well—The Rancho Chack.


History repeats itself. The march of progress is onward, ever
onward, but it moves in cycles. A center of civilization springs up,
flourishes for a time then decays; and from the ashes of the perished
civilization, phœnix-like, there springs a larger, grander, more
enduring civilization. Nowhere in the cycle of progress is this more
noticeable than in the history of sanitation. Centers of civilization,
like Jerusalem, Athens, Rome and Carthage, arose to pre-eminence in
sanitary matters, built sewers, constructed aqueducts and provided for
the inhabitants magnificent baths the equal of which the world has
never since seen. After the splendors of Carthage and Rome, darkness
succeeded; a darkness from which we slowly emerged in the sixteenth
century and are now speeding on to eclipse the sanitary splendors of
even the old Roman empire.

In its broadest sense, a history of sanitation is a story of the
world's struggle for an adequate supply of wholesome water, and its
efforts to dispose of the resultant sewage without menace to health
nor offence to the sense of sight or smell. In ancient as in modern
times, water was the chief consideration of a community. Centers of
population sprung up in localities where water was plentiful, and
where for commercial, strategetic or other reasons, a city was built
remote from a water course, great expenditures of labor and treasure
were made constructing works to conduct water to the city from distant
springs, lakes or water courses. Ruins—still standing—of some of those
engineering works give us some idea of the magnitude of the water
supply for ancient cities belonging to the Roman empire.

[Illustration: Rebekah at the Well]

In the early days of primitive man, sanitation was among his least
concerns. He obtained water from the most convenient source, and
disposed of his sewage in the least laborious way. Those who lived
in the vicinity of streams solved the problem by moving to the bank,
where, like their more highly civilized descendants of to-day, they
drew water from the up side of the stream and returned the sewage to
the water to pollute and possibly contaminate it for their neighbors
lower down.

Communities living remote from natural water courses soon learned the
value of wells as a source of water supply. Many mentions of wells are
made in the Book of Genesis, and it is affirmed by Blackstone that at
that period wells were the cause of violent and frequent contention;
that the exclusive property or title to a well appeared to be vested in
the first digger or occupant, even in such places where the ground and
herbage remained in common.

While this statement might be true of many instances, there can be no
doubt that public wells were dug even in those remote times. Indeed,
the first mention made of a well, in the Book of Genesis, would
indicate that its waters were free to all. Abraham's oldest servant,
Eliezer, had been entrusted with the duty of selecting a wife for
Abraham's son, Isaac. The servant journeyed to the ancient city of
Nahor, and there "he made his camels to kneel down without the city by
a well of water at the time of the evening that women go out to draw
water." And he said: "Behold, I stand here by the well of water; and
the daughters of the men of the city come out to draw water, and let it
come to pass that the damsel to whom I shall say, Let down thy pitcher,
I pray thee, that I may drink; and she shall say, Drink, and I will
give thy camel drink also; Let the same be she that Thou hast appointed
for thy servant, Isaac. And it came to pass that Rebekah came out, and
the damsel was very fair to look upon, and she went down to the well
and filled her pitcher, and the servant said, Let me I pray thee drink
a little water of thy pitcher. And she said, Drink, my lord, and when
she had done giving him drink, she said, I will draw water for thy
camel also. And she hastened to empty her pitcher in the trough and ran
again unto the well to draw water for all the camels."

In Assyria and Persia from earliest times, water has been conveyed to
towns from astonishing distances in open channels, and in Egypt, also
in China, gigantic works for conveying water both for domestic use and
for irrigation have been in existence from remote antiquity. In China,
a knowledge of the art of well drilling has existed for centuries.
Travelers speak of wells drilled by Chinese, centuries ago, to a depth
of 1,500 feet.

In the valley of the Nile are many famous wells. Joseph's Well[1] at
Cairo, near the Pyramids, is perhaps the most famous of ancient wells.
It is excavated in solid rock to a depth of 297 feet and consists of
two stories or lifts. The upper shaft is 18 by 24 feet and 165 feet
deep; the lower shaft is 9 by 15 feet and reaches to a further depth of
132 feet. Water is raised in two lifts by means of buckets on endless
chains, those for the lower level being operated by mules in a chamber
at the bottom of the upper shaft, to which access is had by means of a
spiral stairway winding about the well.

[Illustration: Well at the Rancho Chack]

In America, the use of wells as a means of water supply is of great
antiquity, dating back to pre-historic races. In the United States,
along the valley of the Mississippi, artificially walled wells have
been found that are believed to have been built by a race of people
who preceded the Indians. Primitive tribes that lived in the hills
sometimes had their ingenuity taxed to provide a water supply. In the
hills or mountains of Yucatan, at Santa Ana, in the Sierra de Yucatan,
there exists a well of great antiquity that shows the difficulty under
which the aborigines labored in their search for water. The well is
located on the Rancho Chack. It is not known whether this well was
constructed by hand labor or is one of the numerous caverns in the
rock, fashioned by the boundless forces of nature, and with which the
hills abound. Water is reached after descending by ladder a distance
of over 100 feet and traversing a passage 2,700 feet long or about
half a mile in length. The rocky sides of the tunnel are worn smooth
by the friction of clothes or bodies brushing against the surface, and
the roof of the tunnel is black from soot and smoke from countless
torches that have lighted water bearers to the spot where a pool of
clear, lukewarm water bars the passage. How many centuries this little
subterranean pool has supplied water to the natives of this region
there is no means of ascertaining. The well is used at the present
time, and perhaps when Carthage was a village, Rome a wilderness,
and Christianity unthought of, this little pool of water hidden in
the bowels of the earth and accessible only after traversing a dark,
slippery, perilous passage, was to the Indians of that locality
what the old oaken bucket was to the New England villagers of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

[Illustration]

[Illustration: ANCIENT ROMAN FOVNTAIN AT CORINTH

GREEK PEASANTS WASHING CLOTHES

From Stereograph, copyright 1908 by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.

(See page iv)]



[Illustration: CHAPTER II]

 SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTER. Cisterns—Early Mention of Cisterns—Cisterns
 of Carthage—Early Methods of Raising Water—Water Carriers—Pool of
 Siloam—Pool of Solomon—Aqueducts—Carthagenian Aqueduct—Aqueducts of
 Rome—Aqueducts of Segovia, Spain—Trophies of Marius.


The storage of water in cisterns or reservoirs is by no means a modern
practice. The earliest tribes of whom we have any traditions or records
resorted to this method for providing a supply of water. In xi Kings,
18-31, the first mention is made of cisterns in "Drink ye every one
the water of his cistern." The methods employed by the ancients to
construct cisterns must have been laborious and unsatisfactory. Cement
at that time was unknown and bricks were not made, so that the modern
cistern, as we know it, could not have existed. No doubt in some
localities where clay was plentiful the cisterns were scooped out of
the earth and puddled with clay, just as many reservoirs of to-day are
made. This method of constructing a cistern, however, would limit the
form to a cup-shaped affair, which would be very difficult to roof
over. If the cisterns were not covered, as much water might be lost by
evaporation as would be used by the inhabitants, so that at its best a
clay-puddled cistern must have been an unsatisfactory affair. In the
locality of mountains and quarries, cisterns were hewn out of the solid
rock. "They have forsaken me the fountain of living waters and hewed
them out cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water."—Jer. 2-3.
Rock-hewn cisterns must have made ideal storage reservoirs for water.
The darkness of the cavern would prevent the growth of vegetation,
while the thick walls of rock, affording a shelter from the sun, would
keep the water cool and refreshing.

[Illustration: The Cisterns at Carthage. All that is left of the
Ancient City]

[Illustration: Pole and Bucket for Raising Water]

[Illustration: Ruins of Ancient Cisterns]

It is worthy of noting here that the ancients seem to have been aware
of the movement of ground water through the soil, a fact that was
forgotten and rediscovered in comparatively recent times. In Prov.
5-15 the statement, "Drink waters out of thine own cistern and running
waters out of thine own well," would lead to this conclusion, unless,
indeed, they classed a bubbling spring as a well.

The earliest known cistern or reservoir of which we have any authentic
knowledge are the masonry cisterns or reservoirs that stored water for
the supply of the ancient city of Carthage. These cisterns, which are
wonderfully well preserved, are still to be seen on the site of the
ancient Punic city, but outside of what was the walled city, before it
was totally destroyed by the Romans.

[Illustration: Old Roman Water Wheel]

[Illustration: Water Carrier with Jar]

These cisterns were originally covered with earth, and it is due to
that fact, perhaps, that they escaped destruction when the Romans razed
the city. It is easy to criticise the judgment of others, and no doubt
if all the facts were known, there were good and sufficient reasons
why the Roman general did not destroy the cisterns and cut off the
supply of water from Carthage during the siege of that city. But in
the light of our present knowledge of warfare, when a water supply is
considered a vulnerable point, most carefully guarded by the besieged,
and the point of most furious attack by the besiegers, when the fall
of the city is considered almost accomplished when its water supply
is taken, it seems an oversight on the part of the Romans not to have
discovered and destroyed the cisterns, particularly as the destruction
of everything in the city and environs was their mission at Carthage.
It is an oversight, however, for which we may be thankful, since it
preserved for future times an interesting engineering work of great
magnitude for that period.

The cisterns of Carthage are eighteen in number, and each 100 feet
long, 20 feet wide and nearly 20 feet deep. They lie in two long
parallel rows and empty into a common gallery situated between the
rows. From this center collecting gallery the water was delivered
through conduits direct to the city of Carthage.

The earliest method of raising water from a well, cistern or other
source of supply was by hand. This method, however, was laborious and
unsatisfactory, particularly when necessary to raise large quantities
of water for irrigation purposes, or to supply the inhabitants of
a community at a great distance or high elevation, and it was not
long before the mechanical ingenuity of our ancestors devised means
for transferring this arduous duty to oxen, asses or other beasts of
burden. Sometimes, as in the case of the Romans, this work is made a
penal punishment, and persons found guilty of certain offenses were
sentenced to the water-wheel.

About the earliest known device for raising small quantities of water
was the pole and bucket, which was commonly employed in Italy, Greece
and Egypt. The great antiquity of this method of raising water is
proved by representations of it in Egyptian paintings. It consisted of
a bucket attached to a pole that was suspended by trunnions so located
that when the bucket was filled with water the thick end of the pole
would just balance the combined weight of bucket and water. This
permitted its use for many hours at a time, when raising water for
irrigation without greatly fatiguing the operator.

[Illustration: Water Carrier with Goat-skin Bag]

The most ingenious and highly involved form of ancient water-raising
machine was a water-wheel. The method of operating a water-wheel
depended much on the region where used. In Egypt, along the Nile, oxen
were employed for this purpose. In China, coolies were found more
satisfactory even in raising large quantities of water for irrigation
purposes, which they did by walking a simple form of treadmill on the
outer edges of the water-wheel. The Romans, slow at originating, but,
like the Japanese, quick to recognize the value of anything new and
adapt it to their purposes, borrowed the idea of the water-wheel from
the Greeks or Egyptians, but made it automatic when used in streams
and rivers by adding paddles that dipped into the running water and
were moved by the current of the stream. Water-wheels operated by oxen
were in use at Cairo up to the twelfth century, where they raised water
vertically a distance of 80 feet from the Nile to an aqueduct that
supplied the citadel of Cairo.

Our present elaborate system of water distribution was of humble
origin. It was not a rapid growth, but a gradual evolution. Its four
principal stages were: First, distribution from natural sources by
water carriers; second, aqueducts conveying water to communities where
a system of sub-conduits or aqueducts conveyed the water from the main
aqueduct to reservoirs at different points in a city; third, a system
of distributing mains through which water was furnished to householders
at certain hours only during the day; and fourth, our present system
of continuous supply at all hours of the day and night. In the first
stages of water distribution, water was carried on the backs of water
carriers in earthenware jars constructed especially for the purpose,
or in goat or other animal skins properly tanned and sewed to hold
water. While this method of water distribution is of great antiquity,
it is still practiced in most tropical countries, and to this day water
carriers, some with the burdens on their backs, others with goatskins
of water on donkeys' backs or with jars of water in two-wheeled carts,
may be seen plying their trade in Mexican and Egyptian cities.

The earliest record we have of any effort to supply a community with
water conveyed in tunnels or aqueducts from a great distance, dates
from the year 727 B. C. King Hezekiah or Ezekias, who reigned in
Jerusalem at that time, was much troubled over the poor quality of
water furnished to the city and undertook to provide a better supply.

[Illustration: Pool of Siloam]

[Illustration: Pool of Solomon]

He had built at the gates of the city a vast reservoir, the "Pool of
Siloam," but when it was completed, found that a sufficient quantity
of water could not be had without conveying it from a distant source
on the easterly side of a range of hills of solid rock, over which it
would be impossible to convey it. In no way daunted he set to work
to pierce the hills with a tunnel or aqueduct, capable of supplying
the city with water. Work was commenced simultaneously at both ends
of the tunnel and progressed uninterruptedly until the workmen met
in the center under the mountain or hill. An inscription in old
Hebrew characters, found close to Jerusalem and preserved in the
Constantinople Museum, throws some interesting light on this, for that
period, remarkable engineering work. Translated, the inscription reads:
"The piercing is terminated. When the pick of one had not yet struck
against the pick of the other, and while there was yet a distance of 3
ells, it was possible to hear the voice of one man calling to another
across the rock separating them, and the last day of the piercing, the
miner's pick met against pick. The height of rock above the heads of
the miners was 100 ells. Then the water flowed into the reservoir over
a length of 1,200 ells." This tunnel was cut through a mountain of
solid rock. The tunnel varied in dimensions from ⅝ of a yard to a yard
in width, and from 1 to 3 yards in height, according to the hardness of
the rock.

[Illustration: Aqueduct near Tunis, leading to Ancient Carthage]

The magnitude of this undertaking can be realized only when it is
considered that the tunnel was constructed without the aid of blasting
agents, machine drills, steam, electricity or any of the great forces
or devices now controlled by man and used in modern engineering
construction.

At a later period in the world's history, Roman engineers, tunneling
through the rock, used fire as well as chisels to disintegrate the
rock. The usual method of procedure was to build an intensely hot
fire against the rock, and when the rock had been heated to the right
temperature it was drenched with cold water to crack and disintegrate
it. According to Pliny, vinegar was sometimes used instead of water,
under the impression that it was more effective in disintegrating rock.


It is doubtful if this method was used in constructing the tunnel at
Jerusalem. In fact it can be stated with considerable assurance that
the entire tunnel was cut by drilling and chiseling, as the tool marks
are plainly discernible. It further is evident that, as stated in the
tablet found near Jerusalem, the tunnel was worked from both ends until
the miners met in the center. This is evidenced by the direction of the
tool marks, which plainly show that the cutting on each side of the
center was done in different directions.

Prior to the construction of the tunnel, the ancient city of Jerusalem
was supplied with water through two aqueducts, one of which supplied
water from the famous pools of Solomon, to the south of the city, and
the other poured its contents into the pools of Hezekiah, outside the
walls of the city.

The Greeks were the next in point of time to construct tunnels in
connection with the building of aqueducts. In 625 B. C. the Greek
engineer Eupalinus constructed a tunnel 8 feet broad by 8 feet high and
4,200 feet long, through which was built a channel to supply the city
of Athens with water.

[Illustration: Ancient Roman Well]

This period marks the beginning in Greece and Rome of a school of
architects and engineers whose works have left a lasting impression
on art and engineering science, and to this day are monuments of
proportion and beauty of design that are studied by all students of
architecture and engineering. It is quite probable that Greece supplied
the first engineers that constructed aqueducts in Carthage and Rome.
The similarity in design of these various works points forcibly to the
conclusion that they were all designed by disciples of one school.

Whether the first aqueducts were built in Carthage or in Rome is a
matter of some uncertainty, although the fact that an aqueduct supplied
Carthage with water at the time it was destroyed by the Romans would
point to the Carthagenian aqueduct as the prior. The first Roman
aqueduct was built in the year 312 B. C., and the city of Carthage,
which, after a protracted struggle of 118 years, from 265 B. C. to 147
B. C., was finally conquered and destroyed by the Romans, was at that
time supplied with water from distant springs through an aqueduct.

It is quite probable that Carthage was supplied with water from
two different sources. The cisterns already mentioned provided a
supply of rain water for industrial and most domestic uses, while
the aqueduct, the channel of which had a cross-section of 10 inches
square, brought drinking water from springs in the Zaghorn Mountains,
some 60 kilometers distant. The aqueduct contoured the hillside for a
considerable distance, at times went under ground, and on approaching
the city was carried on arches of magnitude seemingly out of proportion
to the size of the channel. At present it is suffering the fate of most
ancient ruins. It is used as a quarry from which stones are taken to
construct buildings in nearby towns and villages.

While the ruins of aqueducts and tunnels at Jerusalem, Athens and
Carthage give some idea of the skill and knowledge of hydraulic and
sanitary matters possessed by the engineers of that period, we must
turn to Rome and study their system of water supply, drains for sewage
and the ruins of their magnificent baths to form a true conception
of the skill of the early school of Roman engineers and the lavish
expenditures of treasure by the inhabitants to secure an adequate
water supply for Rome. No aqueducts were built in Rome before the year
312 B. C. Prior to that time the inhabitants supplied themselves with
water from the Tiber or from wells, cisterns or springs. The first
aqueduct was begun by Appius Claudius, the censor, and was named after
him the Aqua Appia. This aqueduct had an extreme length of 11 miles,
and almost all of the work was entirely under ground. Remains of this
work no longer exist. After the Aqua Appia was completed the building
of aqueducts seems to have become almost a habit of the Romans, and
it was not long—272 B. C.—before M. Aurius Dentatus began a second
one called the Anio Vetus, which brought water from the river Anio, a
distance of 43 miles. This aqueduct was constructed of stone and the
water channel was lined with a thick coat of cement—no doubt Pozzolana
cement—made from rock of volcanic origin, which, upon being pulverized
and mixed with lime, possessed the hydraulic property of setting under
water. Indeed, there can be but little doubt that were it not for this
natural cement the construction of Roman aqueducts would have been more
difficult to accomplish.

[Illustration: Ruins of a Roman Aqueduct]

The water furnished by the Anio Vetus was of such poor quality that
it was almost unfit for drinking. A further supply being found
indispensable, the Senate commissioned Quintus Marcius Rex, the
man who had superintended the repairs of the two already built, to
undertake a third, which was called after him the Aqua Marcia. This was
the most pretentious aqueduct undertaken. It was 61 miles long, about 7
of which were above ground, carried on arches, and of such height that
water could be delivered to the loftiest part of Capitoline Mount. A
considerable number of the arches of this aqueduct are still standing.
Remains are also standing of the Aqueduct Tepula (127 B. C.) and the
Aqua Julia (35 B. C.), which, if we except the Herculea branch, are
next in point of date. Near the city of Rome the three aqueducts were
united in one line of structure, forming three separate water courses,
one above another, the lowermost of which formed the channel of the
Aqua Marcia and the uppermost that of the Aqua Julia.

[Illustration: Distant View of the Claudia Aqueduct]

Thirteen years after the Julia, the Virgo aqueduct was built. This
aqueduct was 14 miles long and is said to be so named because the
spring from which it is supplied was first pointed out by a girl
to some soldiers who were in search of water. This aqueduct still
exists entire, having been partly restored by Nicholas V and the work
completed by Pope Pius IV in 1568.

[Illustration: Near View of the Claudia Aqueduct]

In the tenth year of the Christian era, the Augusta aqueduct was built.
This aqueduct was only 6 miles long, and the water that it brought
from Lake Aluetimus was of such bad quality as to be scarcely fit for
drinking, on which account it is supposed that the founder, Augustus,
intended it chiefly for his naumachia.

It might be interesting at this point to deviate a little from the
history of the Roman aqueducts and draw aside the curtain to catch a
glimpse of the aquatic sports or pastimes of a Roman emperor of that
period. The naumachia of Augustus was a rectangular basin 1,800 feet
long by 1,200 feet wide, in which actual sea fights between rival
fleets were held for the amusement of the emperor and his friends. The
combatants in these sea fights were usually captives, or criminals
condemned to death, who fought as in gladiatorial combats, until one
party was killed, unless saved by the clemency of the emperor. The
vessels engaged in the sea fight were divided into two parties, called
respectively by names of different maritime nations, as Persians and
Athenians. The sea fights were conducted on the same magnificent scale
and with the same disregard of life as characterized the gladiatorial
combats and other public games of the Romans held in the Colosseum. In
Nero's naumachia, sea monsters were swimming around in the artificial
lake to make short work of any poor unfortunate that was unlucky enough
to go overboard.

In some of the sea fights exhibited by different emperors, the ships
were almost equal in number to real fleets. In one battle there were
19,000 combatants and 50 ships on each side.

It was for the purpose then of supplying one of these artificial lakes
with water that the Augusta aqueduct was constructed.

[Illustration: Aqueduct in Ruins, Ephesus]

Perhaps the best known aqueducts of Rome are the Claudia and the Anio
Novus. The completion of these waterways, which was accomplished
respectively in 50 and 52 A. D., doubled the supply of water to Rome.
The Claudia aqueduct was 46 miles in length and the Anio Novus 58 miles
in length. The Claudia was commenced by Caligula in the year 38, but
was completed, as was the Anio Novus, by the Emperor Claudius.

Many other aqueducts besides those mentioned were built at different
periods to add to the water supply of Rome. A table is given below
showing the date of the constructions and their lengths.

The magnificence displayed by the Romans in the construction of
aqueducts was not confined to the capital. Wherever Roman colonies
were established, it would appear that vast sums were expended in
providing the community with a suitable supply of water. Ruins of
aqueducts built by the Romans may still be seen at many points in
Spain, France, Africa, Greece, and even England can point to the ruins
of a water tower built by this prolific school of Roman engineers. At
the present time there are probably one hundred or more structures
of this kind in existence, some of which are in daily use, supplying
water to inhabitants of communities for whose ancestors they were built
centuries ago.


ROMAN AQUEDUCTS, ARRANGED IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

  Name of                    Date of       Length
  Aqueduct                 Construction    Miles

  Appia                      313 B. C.       11
  Anio Vetus                 273 B. C.       43
  Marcia                     145 B. C.       61
  Herculea branch                             3
  Tepula                     127 B. C.       13
  Julia                       35 B. C.       15
  Virgo                       21 B. C.       14
  Augusta                     10 A. D.        6
  Absietina                   10 A. D.       22
  Claudia                     50 A. D.       46
  Anio Novus                  52 A. D.       58
  Neronian branch             97 A. D.        2
  Trajana                    111 A. D.       42
  Hadriana              117-1585 A. D.       15
  Aurelia                    162 A. D.       16
  Severiana                  200 A. D.       10
  Antoniniana branch         212 A. D.        3
  Sabina-Augusta         130-300 A. D.       15
  Alexandrina                230 A. D.       15
  Jova                       300 A. D.

  (The miles above given are Roman miles, of 4,854 feet. The
  entire length of aqueduct in English miles would be 398.)

[Illustration: Aqueduct of Segovia, Spain]

The aqueduct of Segovia, Spain, is one of the most perfect and
magnificent works of the kind remaining. It is built without mortar,
is entirely of stone and of great solidity. The piers are 8 feet wide
by 11 feet deep, and where the aqueduct approaches the city it attains
a height of about 100 feet. This aqueduct is over 2,400 feet long, is
built in two tiers of arches and although almost eighteen hundred years
old, still supplies water to the city. Of the 109 arches, however, 30
are of modern construction, being reproductions of the ancient arches.

[Illustration: Water Tower and Roman Ruins, Chester, England]

The constructive details of these old water courses are as interesting
as are their general design. At the mouth of each aqueduct there
generally was constructed a reservoir in which to collect water from
the springs or streams that supplied it, and in which impurities could
settle before the clarified water was delivered into the channel. The
water channel was usually formed either of stone or brick coated on the
inside with cement to make it water-tight. It was arched over on top,
and at certain intervals vent holes were provided through which access
could be had to the channel to make repairs. When two or more channels
were carried one above another, the vent holes of the lower ones were
placed in the sides. When possible, aqueducts were carried in a direct
line, but frequently they were given a tortuous course either to avoid
boring through hills, where their construction would have entailed
too great expense, or else to avoid very deep valleys or soft marshy
ground. In every aqueduct, besides the principal reservoirs at its
mouth and terminal, there were intermediate ones at certain distances
along its course, in which any remaining sediment might be deposited.
In addition to serving as sediment basins, these reservoirs made it
more easy to superintend and keep in repair the different sections,
and provided service reservoirs to furnish irrigation water for fields
and gardens and water for stock. The principal reservoir was that in
which the aqueduct terminated. This reservoir or castella, as it was
called, far exceeded any of the others in grandeur of architecture, or
in magnitude and solidity of construction. The ruins of a work of this
kind that still exist on the Esquiline Hill at Rome, are about 200 feet
long by 130 feet wide, and had a vaulted roof that rested on 48 immense
pillars disposed to form rows so as to form 5 aisles and 75 arches.
From the description of this interesting reservoir, the interior must
have greatly resembled many of the covered slow-sand fillers recently
constructed in this country, in which elliptical groined arches form
the roof, which is carried on brick columns spaced as in the reservoirs
at Rome, about 15 feet from center to center. Judging from the fact
that not only the aqueducts but also the reservoirs were covered to
exclude light, it seems reasonable to conclude that Roman engineers
were aware that absence of light prevented or altogether checked the
growth of algæ and other objectionable forms of water vegetation.
Nowhere in the writings of the early historians is any mention made of
trouble due to this cause, but as the water supply of Rome was obtained
from both ground (spring) and surface sources, which in many cases
were mixed together, the resultant mixture would have furnished the
best possible soil for algæ, the ground water providing the necessary
mineral food and the surface water furnishing the seed. It is quite
probable, therefore, that the aqueducts and reservoirs were covered to
prevent such growths.

[Illustration: Roman Water Pipes made of Bored-out Blocks of Stone]

Besides the principal reservoir, each aqueduct had a number of smaller
ones at different points in the sections they supplied, to provide that
neighborhood with water. It is estimated that all told there were 247
of the auxiliary public reservoirs scattered throughout the city. These
reservoirs were supplied from the principal reservoir through pipes
of lead, burned earthenware, and in some cases bored out blocks of
stone. Burned earthenware pipes were generally used not only on account
of their greater cheapness, but because the Romans were aware of the
injurious effect of lead poisoning, and looked with suspicion on water
that had been conducted through lead pipes.

When a number of individuals living in the same neighborhood had
obtained a grant of water, they clubbed together and built a private
reservoir into which the whole quantity allotted to them collectively
was transmitted from the public reservoir. The object of private
reservoirs was to facilitate the distribution of the proper amount of
water to each person and to avoid puncturing the main aqueduct in too
many places. When a supply of water from the aqueduct was first granted
for private use, each householder granted the privilege obtained his
quantity by tapping a branch supply pipe into the main aqueduct, and
conducting the branch to a domestic reservoir within his own house.
Later when the system of private reservoirs was adopted, each domestic
supply of water was obtained from the private reservoir and piped to
the domestic reservoir which was made of lead.

[Illustration: Trophies of Marius]

The façade of an aqueduct reservoir known as the "Trophies of Marius"
may be seen in the accompanying reproduction of a woodcut made in
the sixteenth century. The ground plan shows part of the internal
construction. The stream of water is first divided by the round
projecting buttress into two courses which are again sub-divided into
five minor streams that discharge into the reservoir as indicated in
the cut.

[Illustration: Old Roman Lead and Terra-cotta Pipe]

The quantity of water supplied to Rome compared favorably with the
per capita allowance of water provided at the present time for the
principal cities of the United States, and was far in excess of the
water supplied at the present time to British and European cities.
According to Clemens Herschel, however, Rome, with a population of
1,000,000 people, had a daily water supply of only 32,000,000 U. S.
gallons. In estimating the quantity of water brought to the city by
the system of aqueducts, Mr. Herschel makes due allowance for and
deducts what he thinks might be lost by leakage, theft, water supplied
to artificial lakes for sea fights, and also assumes that a certain
percentage of the channels at all times were cut out of service for
repairs. He makes no allowance, however, for water obtained from
different sources, such as wells, springs and the Tiber River, from
which, no doubt, many of the inhabitants obtained their entire supply
of water. Indeed, in the year 35 B. C., M. Agrippa, as the head of the
water supply system of Rome, in addition to repairing the Aqua Julia
and Marcia aqueduct, supplied the city with 700 wells and 150 springs.

There is no reason to believe that conditions in Rome were different
from those existing to-day in our large cities, and it is more than
probable that the poor people of Rome were but scantily supplied with
water from the aqueducts. The supply obtained by them from ground
sources should therefore be added to that supplied by the aqueducts,
and it would then be found, as most writers assert, that the per
capita daily supply of water to Rome was equal to about 100 U. S.
gallons.

Such enormous quantities of water could not be poured daily into
a limited area without material and physical injury resulting if
provision were not made to dispose of the surplus. Hence it was that
a system of drains was evolved in Rome, which, while not the first
in point of time, nevertheless were the only ones known to have been
constructed by the ancients, until within a comparatively recent date
ruins of sewerage systems were unearthed in Bismya, an ancient Symerian
or pre-Babylonian city.

[Illustration]

[Illustration: · THE · WOMEN'S · BATHS · POMPEII ·]



[Illustration: CHAPTER III]

 SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTER. Early Sewage Disposal—Removal of Offensive
 Materials from Temples of Jerusalem—Sewage System of a Pre-Babylonian
 City—Sewers of Rome—The Cloaca Maxima—The Dejecti Effusive Act.


Before describing the sewerage system of Rome, it might be interesting
to glance backward at the efforts made prior to that time to dispose of
excreta and household wastes.

It is in Deuteronomy, one of the Books of Moses, that first mention is
made of the disposal of excreta: "Thou shalt have a place also without
the camp, whither thou shalt go forth abroad.

"And thou shalt have a paddle upon thy weapon; and it shall be when
thou wilt ease thyself abroad, thou shalt dig therewith, and shall turn
back and cover that which cometh from thee."

No doubt the object of Moses in promulgating that law was to preserve
cleanliness about camp and to hide offensive matter from sight in the
least odorous way. Nevertheless no more sanitary method could have
been adopted. Deposited as the soil was, in small quantities, just
underneath the surface of the ground it was soon reduced to harmless
compounds by the teeming bacteria in the living earth.

Recent explorations in Jerusalem have brought to light extensive
drains for the removal from the vicinity of the temples of offensive
matters peculiar to the bloody sacrifices of that ancient people; and
in an August, 1905, issue of the _Scientific American_, Edgar James
Banks, field director of the Babylonian expedition of the University
of Chicago, gives an interesting description of house drains and
sewage disposal wells constructed at Bismya some 4,500 years ago. The
following account is abstracted from that article:

"Babylonia is perfectly level. From Bagdad to the Persian Gulf there
is not the slightest elevation save for the artificial mounds or an
occasional changing sand drift. In most places there is a crust of hard
clay upon the surface, baked by the hot sun of summer time so hard
that it resembles stone. Beneath the crust, which at Bismya is seldom
more than 4 feet in thickness and in places entirely lacking, is loose
caving sand reaching to an unknown depth.

"Drainage in such a country, without sloping hills or streams of
running water, might tax the ingenuity of the modern builder. In
constructing a house, the ancient Sumerian of more than 6,000 years
ago first dug a hole into the sand to a considerable depth. At Bismya
several instances were found where the shaft had reached the depth of
45 feet beneath the foundation of the house. From the bottom he built
up a vertical drain of large cylindrical terra cotta sections, each of
which is provided with grooved flanges to receive the one above. The
sections of one drain were about 19 inches in diameter and 23½ inches
in height; others were larger and much shorter. The thickness of the
wall was about 1.06 inches. The tiles were punctured at intervals with
small holes of about ¾ inch in diameter. The section at the top of the
drain was semi-spherical, fitting over it like a cap and provided with
an opening to receive the water from above. Sand and potsherds were
then filled in about the drain and it was ready for use. The water
pouring into it was rapidly absorbed by the sand at the bottom, and
if there it became clogged the water escaped through the holes in the
sides of the tiles.

"The temple at Bismya was provided with several such drains. One palace
was discovered with four. A large bath resembling a modern Turkish
bath and provided with bitumen floor, sloping to one corner, emptied
its waste water into one. The toilets in the private houses of 6,000
years ago were almost identical with those of the modern Arab house—a
small oblong hole in the floor, without a seat. Several found in Bismya
were provided with vertical drains beneath.

"In clearing out the drains a few of them whose openings had been
exposed were filled with the drifting sand. Others were half full of
the filth of long past ages. In one at the temple we removed dozens
of shallow terra cotta drinking cups not unlike a large saucer in
shape and size. Evidently it received the waste water of the drinking
fountain and the cups had accidentally dropped within.

"In the Bismya temple platform, constructed about 2750 B. C., we
discovered a horizontal drain of tile, each of which was about 3 feet
long and 6 inches in diameter and not unlike in shape those at present
employed. It conducted the rain water from the platform to one of the
vertical drains. One tile was so well constructed that for a long
time it served as a chimney for our house, until my Turkish overseer
suggested that its dark, smoked end project from the battlements of the
house to convince the Arabs that we were well fortified; thus it served
as a gun until the close of the excavations."

[Illustration: The Cloaca Maxima. From an old woodcut]

The first sewers of Rome were built between 800 and 735 B. C., and
therefore antedate the first aqueduct by between 440 and 487 years.
It is evident, therefore, that as originally planned the sewers of
Rome were intended to carry off the surface water and in other ways
serve to drain the site of the ancient city. Indeed, the Cloaca
Maxima, which was constructed during the period of the Kings, from
735 to 510 B. C., was intended to drain the marshy hollow between the
Capitoline, Palatine and Esquiline hills, and afterwards, by a process
of development, became part of a combined sewage system for the city.

[Illustration: The Cloaca Maxima. From a Recent Photograph]

That the engineers who designed the sewerage system of Rome had a clear
conception of the service expected of such drains, is evidenced by
the manner in which the system was proportioned. The pipes gradually
enlarged from their extremities in the buildings through all the
ramifications of the system until they finally reached the outlet at a
bulkhead or quay-wall in the Tiber. It is stated by early writers that
so complete was this system of sewers that every street in the ancient
city was drained by a branch into the Tiber.

[Illustration: Egyptian Lady Having Head Sprayed, 1700 B. C.]

The Cloaca Maxima was one of the largest and most celebrated of the
ancient sewers. The solidity of this structure can be judged by the
fact that it has been in uninterrupted service for over 2,400 years,
and at the present time is still in use, with no signs of immediate
failure. The arches were made of neatly jointed stones fitted together
without cement. It is stated by Pliny that a cart loaded with hay could
pass down the Cloaca Maxima. It should be borne in mind, however, that
a Roman cart and load of hay were of smaller dimensions than a modern
one. The actual dimensions of the mouth of the sewer are 11 feet wide
by 12 feet high. The lateral branches of the main sewer were of a size
in proportion with their requirements and in proportion to the main
or trunk sewer. The dimensions of these sewers are evidenced by the
service they performed for Nero, who threw into them the unfortunate
victims of his nightly riots.

[Illustration: Greek Women Bathing]

[Illustration: Greek Bath Tubs]

While each street in Rome was provided with an adequate sewer, it is
more than probable that only a small percentage of the population had
branches extending into their houses. In those that had, the latrines
were located adjacent to the kitchen, where through the untrapped
end of the sewer noxious gases were continually arising to vitiate
the surrounding air. The only ventilation the sewers of Rome had was
through these untrapped ends.

Many of the houses of Rome were lofty and inhabited near the top by
the poor, who—drainage systems not extending above the first floor—had
very imperfect means for carrying off rubbish and other accumulations.
A practice seems to have grown up then of throwing such liquid and
solid matter from the windows, sometimes to the discomfort or injury of
hapless pedestrians.

To provide against accidents due to this cause, the Dejecti Effusive
Act was passed, which gave damages against a person who threw or poured
out anything from a place or upper chamber upon a road frequented
by passersby, or on a place where people used to stand. The act,
however, gave damages only when the person was injured, but nothing was
recoverable if the wearing apparel was damaged. A strange provision of
this act was that it applied only in the daytime and not to the night,
which, however, was the most dangerous time for passersby.

[Illustration]

[Illustration: THE ROMAN AQVEDVCT OF SEGOVIA SPAIN

  (See page iv)]



[Illustration: CHAPTER IV.]

 SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTER. Origin of Bathing—Early Greek Baths—Roman Private
 Baths—Public Baths of Rome—Ruins of Baths of Caracalla—Description of
 the Thermæ—The Thermæ of Titus at Rome—Baths of Pompeii—Heating Water
 for Roman Baths—Thermæ of Titus Restored.


The value of bathing for pleasure, cleanliness and health was early
realized by the ancients, who in many cases made the daily bath part of
their religious ritual, with the hope of thus inducing a practice that
would, from constant observance, become a habit not easy to overcome,
and which would be a lasting benefit to the health of the individual
and a safeguard to the community.

[Illustration: Mosaic from the Floor of the Baths of Caracalla]

It perhaps was among the Greeks that bath tubs were first introduced.
The early Greek bathing vessels (see preceding woodcuts) were made of
polished marble, shaped something like a punch bowl, stood about 30
inches high, and were not occupied by the bather as in a modern bath
tub, but served only to hold the water which was applied to the bather
by an attendant, who dashed or poured, as circumstances required, a
vessel full of water on his head or body. Both woodcuts shown were
reproduced from ancient Greek vases and convey a fair idea of the way
these baths were used. One of the bathers is shown with an iron, bone,
bronze or ivory instrument called a _strigilis_, in his hand, which
was used to scrape off perspiration when the bather emerged from the
hot room, or induced a flow by exercising in the gymnasium, which was
generally connected with the baths. The inscription on the woodcut,
representing men bathing, shows that this was a public bath, and is
probably the earliest picture of a bathing establishment extant. The
women's bath bowl differed but slightly from the men's. It was a trifle
lower and considerably deeper, but the method of using was the same as
for the men.

[Illustration: Ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, Rome]

While the Greeks were prior to the Romans in the use of the bath, they
considered it effeminate to use warm water, and consequently their
bathing establishments never attained the luxury and splendor that
later marked the Roman baths. When bath tubs were first introduced
into Rome, the wealthy inhabitants fitted up their houses with a
bathroom much as do the people of our own time. As the luxury, pleasure
and benefit of the bath became better known, more elaborate bathing
facilities similar to a modern Turkish bath were installed. In some
houses several rooms were devoted to this purpose. The anointment of
the body with oils was one of the characteristics of a Roman bath.
The practice was indulged in by people of both sexes, and the time
when applied depended much on the treatment the bather was taking. For
instance, most bathers anointed the body as the finishing touch of the
bath, while some bathers applied the oil before going to the hot or
sweat room.

[Illustration: Interior of the Frigidarium or Cold Bath, Caracalla]

No luxury can be monopolized by the rich, and it was not long before
public bathing establishments, in which a small entrance fee was
charged, were built by private capital. Following quickly on the heels
of these private enterprises, came the establishment of public baths,
then, according to the authority of Pliny, for 600 years Rome needed
no medicine but the public baths.

When the public baths were first instituted they were only for the
lower classes, who alone bathed in public. The people of wealth and
those who held positions of state bathed in their own homes. But this
monopoly of the poor was not long enjoyed. In the process of time even
the emperors bathed in public among their subjects, and we read of the
abandoned Gallienus amusing himself by bathing in the midst of the
young and old of both sexes, men, women and children.

In the earlier stages of Roman history a much greater delicacy was
observed with respect to promiscuous bathing, even among men, than
obtained at a later period. Virtue passed away as wealth increased, and
the public baths became places of meeting and amusement where not only
did men bathe together in numbers, but even men and women stripped and
bathed promiscuously in the same bath.

Some idea of the magnitude of the baths at Rome can be gained from a
statement of the number of bathers they could accommodate at one time.
The baths of Diocletian, which were perhaps the most commodious of them
all, could accommodate at one time 3,200 bathers. One hall of this
famous bathing institution was at a later date converted by Michael
Angelo into the church of St. Marie de gli Angeli.

The baths of Caracalla, built A. D. 212, were perhaps the most famous
of the baths of Rome. They were not as commodious however as many other
baths, and they had accommodations at one time for only 1,600 bathers,
or just one-half that could be accommodated by the baths of Diocletian.

The following description of the Roman baths, together with the
historical sketch of the people of that period who indulged in the
luxury, is abstracted from an old dictionary of Greek and Roman
antiquities, published in London, England, almost a century ago. The
illustrations are from woodcuts appearing in the article.

[Illustration: Outer Row of Baths, Caracalla, Rome]

"In the earlier ages of Roman history a much greater delicacy was
observed with respect to promiscuous bathing, even among the men,
than was usual among the Greeks; for according to Valerius Maximus,
it was deemed indecent for a father to bathe in company with his own
son after he had attained the age of puberty, or son-in-law with his
father-in-law, the same respectful reserve being shown to blood and
affinity as was paid to the temples of the gods, toward whom it was
considered an act of irreligion even to appear naked in any of the
places consecrated to their worship. But virtue passed away as wealth
increased, and when the thermæ came into use, not only did the men
bathe together in numbers, but even men and women stripped and bathed
promiscuously in the same bath. It is true, however, that the public
establishment often contained separate baths for both sexes adjoining
each other, as will be seen to have been also the case at the baths of
Pompeii. Aulus Gellius relates a story of a consul's wife who took a
whim to bathe at Teano, a small provincial town of Campania, in the
men's baths, probably because in a small town the female department,
like that at Pompeii, was more confined and less convenient than
that assigned to the men, and an order was consequently given to the
quaestor to turn the men out. But whether the men and women were
allowed to use each other's chambers indiscriminately, or that some of
the public baths had only one common set of baths for both, the custom
prevailed under the empire of men and women bathing indiscriminately
together. This custom was forbidden by Hadrian, and Alexander Severus
prohibited any baths common to both sexes from being opened in Rome.

When the public baths were first instituted they were only for the
lower orders, who alone bathed in public, the people of wealth, as well
as those who formed the Equestrian and Senatorian orders, using private
baths in their own houses. But this monopoly was not long enjoyed, for
as early even as the time of Julius Cæsar, we find no less a personage
than the mother of Augustus making use of the public establishments,
which were probably at that time separated from the men's, and, in
process of time, even the emperors themselves bathed in public with the
meanest of the people. Thus Hadrian often bathed in public among the
herd, and even the virtuous Alexander Severus took his bath among the
populace in the thermæ he had himself erected, as well as in those of
his predecessors, and returned to the palace in his bathing dress; and
the abandoned Gallienus amused himself by bathing in the midst of the
young and old of both sexes, men, women and children.

The baths were opened at sunrise and closed at sunset, but in the time
of Alexander Severus, it would appear that they were kept open nearly
all night, for he is stated to have furnished oil for his own thermæ,
which previously were not opened before daybreak and were shut before
sunset; and Juvenal includes in his catalogue of female immoralities
that of taking the bath at night, which may, however, refer to private
baths.

The price of a bath was a quadrant, the smallest piece of coined money
from the age of Cicero downward, which was paid to the keeper of the
bath. Children below a certain age were admitted free, and strangers,
also foreigners, were admitted to some of the baths, if not to all,
without payment.

The baths were closed when any misfortune happened to the republic, and
Sentonius says that the Emperor Caligula made it a capital offence to
indulge in the luxury of bathing upon any religious holiday. The baths
were originally placed under the superintendence of the ædiles, whose
business it was also to keep them in repair, and to see that they were
kept clean and of a proper temperature.

The time usually assigned by the Romans for taking the bath was the
eighth hour or shortly afterward. Before that time none but invalids
were allowed to bathe in public. Vilruvins reckoned the best hours
adapted for bathing to be from midday until about sunset. Pliny took
his bath at the ninth hour in summer and the eighth in winter; and
Martial speaks of taking a bath when fatigued and weary at the tenth
hour and even later.

When the water was ready and the baths prepared, notice was given by
the sound of a bell. One of these bells with the inscription Firmi
Balneatoris was found in the thermæ Diocletiane, in the year 1548.

When the bath was used for health merely or cleanliness, a single one
was considered sufficient at a time, and that one only when requisite.
But the luxuries of the empire knew no such bounds, and the daily bath
was sometimes repeated as many as seven and eight times in succession.
It was the usual and constant habit of the Romans to take the bath
after exercise, and previous to the principal meal; but the debauchees
of the empire bathed also after eating, as well as before, in order to
promote digestion so as to acquire a new appetite for fresh delicacies.
Nero is said to have indulged in this practice.

Upon quitting the bath, it was usual for the Romans, as well as the
Greeks, to be anointed with oil; indeed, after bathing, both sexes
anointed themselves, the women as well as the men, in order that the
skin might not be left harsh and rough, especially after hot water.
Oil is the only ointment mentioned by Homer as used for this purpose,
and Pliny says the Greeks had no better ointment at the time of the
Trojan war than oil perfumed with herbs. A particular habit of body
or tendency to certain complaints, sometimes required the order to be
reversed and the anointment to take place before bathing. For this
reason, Augustus, who suffered from nervous disorders, was accustomed
to anoint himself before bathing, and a similar practice was adopted
by Alexander Severus. The most usual practice, however, seems to have
been to take some gentle exercise in the first instance, and then after
bathing to be anointed either in the sun or in the tepid or thermal
chamber, and finally to take their food.

The Romans did not content themselves with a single bath of hot or
cold water, but they went through a course of baths in succession, in
which the agency of air as well as water was applied. It is difficult
to ascertain the precise order in which the course was usually taken,
if indeed there was any general practice beyond the whim of the
individual. Under medical treatment, of course, the succession would
be regulated by the nature of the disease for which a cure was sought,
and would vary also according to the different practice of different
physicians. It is certain, however, that it was a general practice to
close the pores and brace the body after the excessive perspiration
of the vapor bath, either by pouring cold water over the head, or by
plunging at once into the tank. Musa, the physician of Augustus, is
said to have introduced the practice which became quite the fashion, in
consequence of the benefit which the emperor derived from it, though
Dion accuses him of having artfully caused the death of Marcellus by
an improper application of the same treatment. In other cases it was
considered conducive to health to pour warm water over the head before
the vapor bath, and cold water immediately after it; and at other times
a succession of warm, tepid and cold water was resorted to.

The two physicians, Galen and Celsus, differ in some respects as to the
order in which the baths should be taken; the former recommending first
the hot air of laconicum, next the bath of warm water, afterward the
cold, and finally to be well rubbed; while the latter recommends his
patients first to sweat for a short time in the tepid chamber without
undressing, then to proceed into the thermal chamber, and after having
gone through a regular course of perspiration there, not to descend
into the warm bath, but to pour a quantity of warm water over the head,
then tepid, and finally cold; afterward to be scraped with the strigil
and finally rubbed dry and anointed. Such in all probability was the
usual habit of the Romans when the bath was resorted to as a daily
source of pleasure, and not for any particular medical treatment; the
more so as it resembles in many respects the system of bathing still in
practice among the Orientals who succeeded by conquest to the luxuries
of the enervated Greeks and Romans.

Having thus detailed from classical authorities the general habits of
the Romans in connection with their systems of bathing, it now remains
to examine and explain the internal arrangements of the structures
which contained their baths, which will serve as a practical commentary
upon all that has been said. Indeed, there are more ample and better
materials for acquiring a thorough insight into Roman manners in this
one particular than for any of the other usages connected with their
daily habit.

In order to make the subjoined description clear, a reproduction from
an old woodcut of a fresco painting on the walls of the thermæ of
Titus at Rome, is here reproduced, showing in broken perspective the
general arrangement of one of the baths known as the thermæ. Heat was
supplied to warm the apartments and the water used in the baths by the
furnace shown extending under the entire floor of the establishment.
This furnace was known as a Hypocustum. To the right may be seen the
vessels in which water for the baths was heated. The topmost vessel,
the Frigidarium, contained cold water from which the hot water tanks
and the various baths were supplied. Next in order is the tepidarium,
in which water of moderate temperature was stored, and in the lowest,
the caldarium, was heated the hottest water used in the baths. After
the end of the republic, large establishments used to have a separate
steam bath, the laconicum, and in this apartment, or sometimes
adjoining the tepidarium, was the Clipeus, a small circular chamber
covered by a cupola. The Clipeus received its light through an aperture
in the center of the dome, and this aperture served also as a vent from
the chamber. The Clipeus was heated by means of a separate heating
apparatus, and its temperature could be raised to an enormous degree or
could be regulated to suit the bather by raising or lowering the shield.

[Illustration: Thermæ of Titus at Rome]

[Illustration: Clipeus. From an old woodcut]

The tepidarium, as the name would imply, was a room in which a
moderately warm bath could be taken and where the process of dry
rubbing also took place. In the balneum a hot bath could be taken,
originally in a tub, but in later times in a large reservoir; and in
the frigidarium a cold plunge could be had. The elæothesium was the
anointing room where the body was rubbed with oil and massaged.

[Illustration: Floor Plan of the Baths of Pompeii From an old woodcut]

A good idea of the general layout of a Roman bath can be gained from
the accompanying woodcut, showing the ground floor plan of the baths
of Pompeii. The baths, as may be seen by the illustration, are nearly
surrounded on three sides by houses and shops. The whole building,
which comprises a double set of baths, has six different entrances
from the street, one of which, A, gives admission to the smaller set
only, which was appropriated to the women, and five others to the
male department, of which two, B and C, communicate directly with the
furnaces, and the other three, D, E, F, with the bathing apartments,
of which F, the nearest to the Forum, was the principal one; the other
two, D and E, being on opposite sides of the building served for the
convenience of those who lived on the north and east sides of the city.
To have a variety of entrances was one of the qualities considered
necessary to a well constructed set of baths.

[Illustration: Frigidarium. From an old woodcut]

Passing through the principal entrance, F, which is removed from the
street by a narrow footway, and after descending three steps, the
bather finds upon his left hand a small chamber or toilet room, 1,
which contains a latrine. From passage, F, he proceeded to covered
portico, 2, which ran around three sides of an open court, 3, and
this portico and court together formed the vestibule of the baths, in
which servants belonging to the establishment, as well as such of the
slaves and attendants of the great and wealthy, whose services were not
required in the interior, waited. Within the court the keeper of the
baths who exacted the fee paid by each visitor, was also stationed, and
accordingly in it was found the box for holding the money. The room, 4,
which runs back from the portico, might have been apportioned to him,
or if not, it might have been a waiting room for the convenience of the
better classes while waiting the return of their acquaintances from
the interior. In this court, likewise, as being the most public place,
advertisements for the theater and other announcements of general
interest were posted, one of which, announcing a gladiatorial show,
still remains. The passageway, 5, is the corridor which leads from
the entrance, E, to the vestibule; and the cell, 6, is a toilet room
similar to 1. Number 7 is a passage of communication which leads into
the chamber, 8, which served as a room for undressing. This room is
also accessible from the street by the door, D, through the corridor,
9, in which a small niche is observable, which probably served for
the station of another doorkeeper, who collected money from those
entering from the north street. Here, then, is the center in which
all the persons must have met before entering into the interior of the
baths; and its locality, as well as other characteristic features of
its fitting up, leave no room to doubt that it served as an undressing
room. It does not appear that any general rule of construction was
followed by the architects of antiquity with regard to the locality and
temperature best adapted for a dressing room. The bathers were expected
to take off their garments in the dressing room, not being permitted
to enter the interior unless naked. The clothes were then delivered to
a class of slaves whose duty it was to take charge of them. These men
were notorious for dishonesty, and leagued with all the thieves of the
city, so that they connived at the robberies they were placed there to
prevent. To so great an extent were these robberies carried, that very
severe laws were finally enacted making the crime of stealing from a
bath a capital offence.

To return to the chamber itself, it is vaulted and spacious, with
stone seats along two sides of the wall and a step for the feet below,
slightly raised from the floor. Holes can still be seen in the walls
which might have served for pegs on which the garments were hung when
taken off; for in a small provincial town like Pompeii, where a robbery
committed in the bath could scarcely escape detection, there would
be no necessity for slaves to take charge of them. The dressing room
was lighted by a window closed with glass, and the walls and ceilings
were ornamented with stucco mouldings and painted yellow. There are no
less than six doors to this chamber: one leading to the entrance, E,
another to the entrance, D, a third to the small room, 11, a fourth
to the furnaces, a fifth to the tepid apartment, and the sixth opened
upon the cold baths, 10. The bath, which is coated with white marble,
is 12 feet 10 inches in diameter, about 3 feet deep and has two marble
steps to facilitate the descent into it, and a seat surrounding it
at a depth of 10 inches from the bottom, for the purpose of enabling
the bathers to sit down and wash themselves. It is probable that many
persons contented themselves with cold baths only, instead of going
through the severe course of perspiration in the warm apartments; and
as the frigidarium could have had no effect alone in baths like these,
the natatio must be referred to when it is said that at one period cold
baths were in such request that scarcely any others were used.

There is a platform or ambulatory around the bath, also of marble, and
four inches of the same material disposed at regular intervals around
the walls, with pedestals for statues probably placed in them. The
ceiling is vaulted and the chamber lighted by a window in the center.
The annexed woodcut represents a frigidarium with its cold bath at
one extremity, supposed to have formed a part of the Formian Villa of
Cicero, to whose age the style of construction, the use of the simple
Doric order, undoubtedly belongs. The bath itself, into which water
still continues to flow from a neighboring spring, is placed under the
alcove, and the two doors on each side opened into small chambers.

In the cold bath of Pompeii the water ran into the basin through a
spout of bronze and was carried off again through a conduit on the
opposite side. It was also furnished with a waste pipe under the coping
to prevent the water from running over.

[Illustration: Atlantes. From an old woodcut]

No. 11 is a small chamber on the side opposite to the frigidarium,
which might have served for shaving or for keeping unguents or
strigils; and from the centers of the side of the frigidarium, the
bather who intended to go through the process of warm bathing and
sudation entered into 12, the tepidarium.

The tepidarium did not contain water, either at Pompeii or at the
baths of Hippias, but was merely heated with warm air of an agreeable
temperature, in order to prepare the body for the great heat of the
vapor and warm baths; and, upon returning, to obviate the danger of too
sudden transition to the open air.

In the baths of Pompeii, this chamber served likewise as a disrobing
room for those who took the warm bath, for which purpose the fittings
up are evidently adapted, the walls being divided into a number of
separate compartments or recesses for receiving the garments when taken
off. One of these compartments, known as an Atlantes, is shown in the
annexed woodcut.

In addition to this service there can be little doubt that this
apartment was used as a depository for unguents and a room for
anointing, which service was performed by slaves. For the purpose of
anointing, the common people used oil simply or sometimes scented, but
the more wealthy classes indulged in the greatest extravagances with
regard to their perfumes and unguents. These they evidently procured
from the elæothesium of the baths, or brought with them in small
glass bottles, hundreds of which have been discovered in different
excavations made in various parts of Italy.

From the tepidarium, a door which closed by its own weight, to prevent
the admission of cold air, opened into No. 13, the thermal chamber.
After having gone through the regular course of perspiration, the
Romans made use of instruments called strigils, to scrape off the
perspiration, much in the same way as we are accustomed to scrape the
sweat off a horse with a piece of iron hoop after he has run a heat or
come in from violent exercise. These instruments, many of which have
been discovered among the ruins of the various baths of antiquity, were
made of bone, bronze, iron and silver. The poorer classes were obliged
to scrape themselves, but the more wealthy took their slaves to the
baths for the purpose, a fact which is elucidated by a curious story
related by Spartianus. The Emperor while bathing one day, observing
an old soldier, whom he had formerly known among the legions, rubbing
his back as the cattle do against the marble walls of the chamber,
asked him why he converted the walls into a strigil, and learning
that he was too poor to keep a slave he gave him one, and money for
his maintenance. On the following day, upon his return to the bath,
he found a whole row of old men rubbing themselves in the same manner
against the wall, in the hope of experiencing the same good fortune
from the prince's liberality; but instead of taking the hint, he had
them all called up and told them to scrub one another.

[Illustration: Coppers for Heating Water. From an old woodcut]

The strigil was by no means a blunt instrument, consequently its edge
was softened by the application of oil which was dropped on it from a
small vessel. This vessel had a narrow neck, so as to discharge its
contents drop by drop. Augustus is related to have suffered from an
over violent use of this instrument. Invalids and persons of delicate
habit made use of sponges, which Pliny says answered for towels as well
as strigils. They were finally dried with towels and anointed.

The common people were supplied with these necessaries in the baths,
but the more wealthy carried their own with them.

After the operation of scraping and rubbing dry, they retired into or
remained in the tepidarium until they thought it prudent to encounter
the open air. But it does not appear to have been customary to bathe
in the water, when there was any, which was not the case at Pompeii
nor at the Baths of Hippias, either of the tepidarium or frigidarium;
the temperature only of the atmosphere in the two chambers being of
consequence to break the sudden change from the extreme hot to cold.
Returning now to the frigidarium, 8, which according to the directions
of Vitruvius has a passage, 14, communicating with the mouth of the
furnace, _e_, and passing down that passage we reach the chamber, 15,
into which the præfurnium projects, and which has also an entrance from
the street, B, appropriated to those who had charge of the fires. There
are two stairways in it, one leading to the roof of the baths, and the
other to the coppers which contained the water. Of these there were
three, one of which contained the hot water, caldarium; the second,
the tepid, tepidarium; and the last, the cold, frigidarium. The warm
water was introduced into the warm bath by means of a conduit pipe,
marked on the plan, and conducted through the wall. Underneath the
caldarium was placed the furnace which served to heat the water and
give out streams of warm air into the hollow cells of the hypocanstum.
These coppers were constructed in the same manner as is represented in
the engraving from the Thermæ of Titus; the one containing hot water
being placed immediately over the furnace, and as the water was drawn
out from these it was supplied from the next, the tepidarium, which
was already considerably heated, from its contiguity to the furnace
and the hypocaust below it, so that it supplied the deficiency of the
former without materially diminishing its temperature; and the space
in the last two was in turn filled up from the farthest removed, which
contained the cold water received direct from the square reservoir
behind them. Behind the coppers there is another corridor, 16, leading
into the court, 17, appropriated to the servants of the baths, and
which has also the conveniences of an immediate communication with the
street by the door, C.

We now proceed to the adjoining set of baths, which were assigned to
the women. The entrance is by the door, A, which conducts into a small
vestibule, 18, thence into the apodyterium, 19, which, like the one in
the men's baths, has a seat on either side built up against the wall.
This room opens upon a cold bath, 20, answering to the natiatio of
the other set, but of much smaller dimensions. There are four steps
on the inside to descend into it. Opposite to the door of entrance
there is another doorway which leads to the tepidarium, 21, which also
communicates with the thermal chamber, 22, on one side of which is a
warm bath in a square recess. The floor of this chamber is suspended
and its walls perforated for flues, like the corresponding one in the
men's baths.

The comparative smallness and inferiority of the fittings up in this
suit of baths has induced some Italian antiquaries to throw a doubt
upon the fact of their being assigned to women, and ingeniously
suggest that they were a set of old baths, to which the larger ones
were subsequently added when they became too small for the increasing
wealth and population of the city. But the story already quoted of the
consul's wife who turned the men out of their bath at Teanum for her
convenience, seems sufficiently to negative such a supposition and to
prove that the inhabitants of ancient Italy, if not more selfish, were
certainly less gallant than their successors. In addition to this,
Vitruvius expressly enjoins that the baths of the men and women, though
separate, should be contiguous to each other, in order that they might
be supplied from the same boilers and hypocaust; directions that are
here fulfilled to the letter, as a glance at the plans will demonstrate.

Notwithstanding the ample account which has been given of the plans
and usages respecting baths in general, something yet remains to
be said about that particular class denominated _thermæ_, of which
establishment the baths, in fact, constituted the smallest part.
The thermæ, properly speaking, were a Roman adaptation of the Greek
gymnasium. The thermæ contained a system of baths in conjunction with
conveniences for athletic games and youthful sports, places in which
rhetoricians declaimed, poets recited and philosophers lectured, as
well as porticos and vestibules for the idle, and libraries for the
studious. They were decorated with the finest objects of art, both in
painting and sculpture, covered with precious marbles and adorned with
fountains and shaded walks. It may be said that they began and ended
with the Empire, for it was not until the time of Augustus that these
magnificent structures were commenced. M. Agrippa was the first who
afforded these luxuries to his countrymen by bequeathing to them the
thermæ and gardens which he had erected in the Campus Martius. The
Pantheon, now existing at Rome, served originally as a vestibule to
these baths; and, as it was considered too magnificent for the purpose,
it is supposed that Agrippa added the portico and consecrated it as a
temple, for which use it still serves.

The example set by Agrippa was followed by Nero and afterward by Titus,
the ruins of whose thermæ are still visible, covering a vast extent,
partly under ground and partly above the Esquiline Hill.

Previous to the erection of these establishments for the use of the
population, it was customary, for those who sought the favor of the
people, to give them a day's bathing free of expense.

[Illustration: Ground Plan of Thermæ of Caracalla. From an old woodcut]

Thus, according to Divi Cassius, Faustus, the son of Sulla, furnished
warm baths and oil gratis to the people for one day; and Augustus, on
one occasion, furnished warm baths and barbers to the people for the
same period free of expense, and at another time for a whole year to
the women as well as the men. From thence it is fair to infer that
the quadrant paid for admission to the balnea was not exacted at the
thermæ, which as being the works of the emperors, would naturally
be opened with imperial generosity to all, and without any charge,
otherwise the whole city would have thronged to the establishment
bequeathed to them by Agrippa; and in confirmation of this opinion it
might be remarked that the old establishments, which were probably
erected by private enterprises, were termed Meritorial.

Most, if not all, of the other regulations previously detailed as
relating to the economy of the baths, apply equally to the thermæ; but
it is in these establishments especially that the dissolute conduct of
the emperors and other luxurious indulgence of the people in general,
as detailed in the compositions of the satirists and later writers,
must be considered to refer.

Although considerable remains of the Roman thermæ are still visible,
yet, from the very ruinous state in which they are found, we are far
from being able to arrive at the same accurate knowledge of their
component parts and the usages to which they were applied, as has
been done with respect to the balnea; or, indeed, to discover a
satisfactory mode of reconciling their constructive details with the
description left us by Vitruvious and Lucian. All, indeed, is doubt
and guesswork. Each of the learned men who have pretended to give an
account of their contents differing in all the essential particulars
from one another; and yet the general similarity of the ground plan of
the three which still remain cannot fail to strike even a superficial
observer; so great indeed that it is impossible not to perceive at
once that they were all constructed upon a similar plan. Not, however,
to discuss the subject without enabling the reader to form something
like a general idea of these enormous edifices, which from their
extent and magnificence have been likened to provinces, a ground plan
of the thermæ of Caracalla is annexed, which are the best preserved
among those remaining, and which were perhaps more splendid than all
the rest. Those apartments of which the use is ascertained with the
appearances of probability, will be alone marked and explained. The
dark parts represent the remains still visible; the open lines are
restorations.

[Illustration: Hypocaust for Heating Water, Thermæ of Caracalla

From an old woodcut]

A is a portico fronting the street made by Caracalla when he
constructed his thermæ. B are separate bathing-rooms, either for
the use of the common people, or perhaps for any person who did not
wish to bathe in public. C are apodyteria attached to them. D, D and
E, E, the porticos. F, F, exedra in which there were seats for the
philosophers to hold their conversations. G, passages open to the air.
H, H, sladra. I, I, possibly schools or academies where public lectures
were delivered. J, J and K, K, rooms appropriated to the servants of
the bath. In the latter are staircases for ascending to the principal
reservoir. L, space occupied by walks and shrubberies. M, the arena
or stadium in which the youth performed their exercises, with seats
for spectators. N, N, reservoirs with upper stories; O, aqueduct which
supplied the baths. P, cistern.

This external range of buildings occupies one mile in circuit.

We now come to the arrangement of the interior, for which it is very
difficult to assign satisfactory destinations. Q represents the
principal entrances, of which there were eight. R is the natiatio or
cold water baths to which the direct entrance from the portico is by a
vestibule on either side marked S, and which is surrounded by a set of
chambers that serve most probably as rooms for undressing and anointing.

Those nearest to the peristyle were, perhaps, where the powder was kept
which the wrestlers used in order to obtain a firmer grip upon their
adversaries.

The inferior quality of the ornaments which these apartments had, and
the staircases in two of them, afford evidences that they were occupied
by menials. T is considered to be the tepidarium with four warm baths
taken out of its four angles, and two labra on its two flanks. There
are steps for descending into the baths, in one of which traces of the
conduit are still manifest. It would appear that the center part of
this apartment served as a tepidarium, having a cold water lavatory in
four of its corners. The center part, like that also of the preceding
apartment, is supported by eight immense columns.

[Illustration: Restoration of Thermæ of Titus. (Restored by Leclerc)]

[Illustration: Plan of the Thermæ of Titus, Rome. (Restored by Leclerc)]

The apartments beyond this, which are too much dilapidated to be
restored with any degree of certainty, contained, of course, the
laconium and sudatories, for which the round chamber, W, and its
appurtenances seem to be adapted, and which are also contiguous to the
reservoirs, Z, Z. The apartments e, e' are probably places where youths
were taught their exercises, with the appurtenances belonging to them.
The chambers on the other side, which are not marked, probably served
for the exercises in bad weather. These baths contained an upper story,
of which nothing remains beyond what is just sufficient to indicate
the fact. It will be observed that there is no part of the bathing
department separate from the rest which could be assigned to the use of
women exclusively. From this it must be inferred either that both sexes
always bathed together promiscuously in the thermæ, or that the women
were excluded altogether from these establishments.

[Illustration: Sectional Elevation, Thermæ of Titus, Rome. (Restored by
Leclerc.)]

It remains to explain the manner in which the immense body of water
required for the supply of a set of baths in the thermæ was heated.
This has been done very satisfactorily by Piranesi and Cameron, as may
be seen by a reference to the two sectional elevations showing the
reservoir and aqueducts belonging to the Thermæ of Caracalla. A are
arches of the aqueduct which conveyed the water into the reservoir, B,
whence it flowed into the upper range of cells through the aperture at
C, and thence again descended into the lower ones by the aperture, D,
which were placed immediately over the hypocaust, E, the furnace of
which can be seen in the transverse section at F. There were thirty-two
of these cells arranged in two rows over the hypocaust, sixteen on each
side, and all communicating with one another, and over these a similar
number similarly arranged, which communicated with those below by the
aperture at D. The parting walls between these cells were likewise
perforated with flues which served to disseminate the heat all around
the whole body of water. When the water was sufficiently warm it was
turned on to the baths through pipes conducted likewise through flues
in order to prevent the loss of temperature during passage, and the
lower reservoir was supplied as fast as water was drawn off from the
reservoir next above, which in turn was supplied with water from the
topmost tier and the aqueduct.

[Illustration: Frigidarium, Thermæ of Caracalla, Rome. (Restored by
Viollet-le-Duc)]

Perhaps a better idea of the thermæ can be had by an examination of
the plan of the Thermæ of Titus, Rome, restored by Leclerc, also the
sectional elevation and front elevation of the same bath, restored
by the same artist. The original drawings, which won the _Grand Prix
de Rome_, are preserved in the library of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts,
Paris. A restoration by Viollet-le-Duc, which appeared with the other
restorations in the June, 1906, number of the _Architectural Record_,
conveys a very good idea of the interior of a frigidarium.

[Illustration]

[Illustration: · INTERIOR · VIEW · OF · AQVEDVCT ·

· LISBON · PORTVGAL]



[Illustration: CHAPTER V]

 SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTER. Fall of the Roman Empire—Succeeding Period known
 as the Dark Ages—Sanitation during the Dark Ages—Beginning of Material
 Progress in Sanitation—Pilgrimages to Juggernaut—Water Supply to
 Paris—London Water Supply—Aqueduct of Zempoala, Mexico.


During the period following the fall of Rome, the empire was overrun
by barbarians from the north, and the magnificent baths, aqueducts and
public edifices reared by the Romans with such painstaking care were
suffered to fall into decay. So little in sympathy were the barbarians
with the people they conquered and their institutions, that in time the
inhabitants of many localities even forgot the uses to which the old
works had been put; and had it not been for the Popes the supply of
water to the city of Rome would have been cut off completely, while as
it was the service was frequently interrupted.

Following the fall of the Roman Empire there was a period of over one
thousand years of intellectual darkness, during which no material
progress was made; indeed, instead of progress a retrograde movement
set in which left a lasting impression on the times. The little spark
of knowledge that survived this period burned in the monasteries of the
monks, who treasured and kept alive the spark of civilization.

[Illustration: Destroyed Lead Font, Great Plumstead, Norfolk]

The Dark Ages, as this period is called, if lacking in progress, were
replete with adventure. During this period, which might equally well
be called the Age of Romance, there sprung up a brotherhood of men
noted for skill in combat, who were dubbed knights. There also spread
a creed about that time that uncleanliness was next to godliness,
and clergy and laymen vied with each other to see which could live
in the most filthy manner. They associated in their minds luxury
and cleanliness as inconsistent with godliness, while squalor and
bodily filth were considered as outward indications of inward piety
and sanctification. So it came to pass that bathing, instead of a
daily practice, became uncommon; homes and inhabitants became filthy
and streams polluted. Such violations of sanitary principles could
not continue indefinitely without evil results, and scourge after
scourge of filth diseases that swept over Europe and Asia, claiming
over 40,000,000 victims, were due to the unsanitary condition that
prevailed. The restless, seething, venturesome spirit of the times and
the emotional zeal displayed in religious matters contributed greatly
to the spread of pestilence. The crusades, starting out with a romantic
and religious fervor, but with no set rules of conduct for guidance,
and lacking a leader strong enough in discipline to hold in check men
whose only claim to distinction lay in their powers in a tilt and their
love of battle, soon degenerated into the most disorderly and lewd of
rabble. Women camp-followers joined their fortunes with that of the
knights, who in most cases forgot the object of the crusade, and gave
themselves up to indolence and debauchery. Sanitary precautions were
dispensed with on the march, and the result was that wherever the
crusaders went they left sickness and pestilence in their wake.

[Illustration: Leaden Cup, of the time of Vespasian, found in Rome. The
band was decorated with colored glass]

[Illustration: Lead Pipehead and Pipe]

[Illustration: Lead Cistern with the Arms of the Fishmongers' Company,
in the possession of Mr. Merthyr Guest]

Pilgrimages to the holy shrines, which drew together thousands of
human beings without adequate shelter or food, also served to spread
contagious diseases throughout the land. Perhaps the best picture of a
pilgrimage which, while of a latter date, will still serve to show the
unsanitary conditions when thousands of people are brought together
without food or shelter, can be had from a report of Dr. Simmons, of
the Yokahama Board of Health. In speaking of a latter-day pilgrimage
in India, he says: "The drinking-water supply is derived from wells,
so-called 'tanks' or artificial ponds and the water courses of the
country. The wells generally resemble those of other parts of Asia.
The tanks are excavations made for the purpose of collecting the
surface water during the rainy season and storing it up for the dry.
Necessarily they are mere stagnant pools. The water is used not only
to quench thirst, but is said to be drunk as a sacred duty. At the
same time, the reservoir serves as a large washing tub for clothes, no
matter how dirty or in what soiled condition, and for personal bathing.
Many of the watercourses are sacred; notably the Ganges, a river 1,600
miles long, in whose waters it is the religious duty of millions, not
only those living near its banks, but for pilgrims, to bathe and to
cast their dead. The Hindoo cannot be made to use a latrine. In the
cities he digs a hole in his habitation; in the country he seeks the
fields, the hillside, the banks of streams and rivers when obliged to
obey the calls of nature. Hence it is that the vicinity of towns and
the banks of the tanks and water courses are reeking with filth of the
worst description, which is of necessity washed into the public water
supply with every rainfall. Add to this the misery of pilgrims, then
poverty and disease and the terrible crowding into the numerous towns
which contain some temple or shrine, the object of their devotion, and
we can see how India has become and remains the hotbed of the cholera
epidemic." In the United States official report the horrors incident
upon the pilgrimages are detailed with appalling minuteness. W. W.
Hunter, in his "Orissa," states that twenty-four high festivals take
place annually at Juggernaut. At one of them, about Easter, 40,000
persons indulge in hemp and hasheesh to a shocking degree. For weeks
before the car festival, in June and July, pilgrims come trooping in
by thousands every day. They are fed by the temple cooks to the number
of 90,000. Over 100,000 men and women, many of them unaccustomed to
work or exposure, tug and strain at the car until they drop exhausted
and block the road with their bodies. During every month of the year a
stream of devotees flows along the great Orissa road from Calcutta, and
every village for three hundred miles has its pilgrim encampments.

[Illustration: Car of Juggernaut]

The people travel in small bands, which at the time of the great feasts
actually touch each other. Five-sixths of the whole are females and
ninety-five per cent. travel on foot, many of them marching hundreds
and even thousands of miles, a contingent having been drummed up from
every town or village in India by one or other of the three thousand
emissaries of the temple, who scour the country in all directions in
search of dupes. When those pilgrims who have not died on the road
arrive at their journey's end, emaciated, with feet bound up in rags
and plastered with mud and dirt, they rush into the sacred tanks or
the sea and emerge to dress in clean garments. Disease and death make
havoc with them during their stay; corpses are buried in holes scooped
in the sand, and the hillocks are covered with bones and skulls washed
from their shallow graves by the tropical rains. The temple kitchen has
the monopoly of cooking for the multitude, and provides food which if
fresh is not unwholesome. Unhappily, it is presented before Juggernaut,
so becomes too sacred for the minutest portion to be thrown away. Under
the influence of the heat it soon undergoes putrefactive fermentation,
and in forty-eight hours much of it is a loathsome mass, unfit for
human food. Yet it forms the chief sustenance of the pilgrims, and is
the sole nourishment of thousands of beggars. Some one eats it to the
very last grain. Injurious to the robust, it is deadly to the weak and
wayworn, at least half of whom reach the place suffering under some
form of bowel complaint. Badly as they are fed the poor wretches are
worse lodged. Those who have the temporary shelter of four walls are
housed in hovels built upon mud platforms about four feet high, in the
center of each of which is the hole which receives the ordure of the
household, and around which the inmates eat and sleep. The platforms
are covered with small cells without any windows or other apertures
for ventilation, and in these caves the pilgrims are packed, in a
country where, during seven months out of twelve, the thermometer marks
from 85 to 100 degrees Fahr. Hunter says that the scenes of agony and
suffocation enacted in these hideous dens baffle description. In some
of the best of them, 13 feet long by 10 feet broad and 6½, feet high,
as many as eighty persons pass the night. It is not then surprising
to learn that the stench is overpowering and the heat like that of
an oven. Of 300,000 who visit Juggernaut in one season, 90,000 are
often packed together five days a week in 5,000 of these lodgings. In
certain seasons, however, the devotees can and do sleep in the open
air, camping out in regiments and battalions, covered only with the
same meagre cotton garment that clothes them by day. The heavy dews are
unhealthy enough, but the great festival falls at the beginning of the
rains, when the water tumbles in solid sheets. Then lanes and alleys
are converted into torrents or stinking canals, and the pilgrims are
driven into vile tenements. Cholera invariably breaks out. Living and
dead are huddled together.

[Illustration: Distant View of Zempoala Aqueduct, Queretaro, Mexico]

In the numerous so-called corpse fields around the town as many as
forty or fifty corpses are seen at a time, and vultures sit and dogs
lounge lazily about gorged with human flesh. In fact, there is no end
to the recurrence of incidents of misery and humiliation, the horrors
of which, says the Bishop of Calcutta, are unutterable, but which
are eclipsed by those of the return journey. Plundered and fleeced
by landlords, the surviving victims reel homeward staggering under
their burden of putrid food wrapped up in dirty clothes, or packed
in heavy baskets or earthenware jars. Every stream is flooded, and
the travelers have often to sit for days in the rain on the banks of
a river before a boat will venture to cross. At all these points the
corpses lie thickly strewn around (an English traveler counted forty
close to one ferry), which accounts for the prevalence of cholera on
the banks of brooks, streams and rivers. Some poor creatures drop and
die by the way; others crowd into the villages and halting places on
the way, where those who gain admittance cram the lodging-places to
overflowing, and thousands pass the night in the streets, and find no
cover from the drenching storms. Groups are huddled under the trees;
long lines are stretched among the carts and bullocks on the roadside,
then half saturated with the mud on which they lie, hundreds sit on the
wet grass, not daring to lie down, and rock themselves to a monotonous
chant through the long hours of the dreary night. It is impossible to
compute the slaughter of this one pilgrimage. Bishop Wilson estimates
it at not less than 50,000, and this description might be used for
all the great India pilgrimages, of which there are probably a dozen
annually, to say nothing of the hundreds of smaller shrines scattered
through the peninsula, each of which attracts its minor horde of
credulous votaries.

[Illustration: Near View of Zempoala Aqueduct, Mexico]

Such then may be accepted as a picture of one of the numerous
pilgrimages made during the Dark Ages and which helped to spread
infectious diseases broadcast throughout the land, polluting water
supplies to such an extent that in many localities filth diseases
became epidemic. It was not until about the end of the sixteenth
century that general improvement began to be made in sanitary matters,
although some notable exceptions may be mentioned in the construction
of a few important works in Spain by the Moors, such for instance
as those at Cordova in the ninth century and the repair of the Roman
aqueduct at Sevilla in 1172. Until as late a date as 1183 Paris
depended entirely on the River Seine for its water supply. During
that year an aqueduct was constructed to conduct water to Paris from
a distant source, but as late as the year 1550 the supply of water to
Paris amounted to only one quart per capita per day.

[Illustration: Zempoala Aqueduct. From an old print in the _Engineering
News_]

London, England, was more backward than Paris in supplying the
inhabitants with water, and it was not until the year 1235 that small
quantities of spring water were brought to the city through lead pipes
and masonry conduits.

Little is known about the strange race of people that inhabited the
North American continent prior to the Indians, and it is only by the
ruins of works which they constructed in the shape of mounds that
their existence is known of. Nevertheless, had historians of that
time written of the engineering projects successfully carried out by
the engineers of the mound builders no doubt some surprising facts
would be revealed to contemporary man; for wherever men have existed,
whether in China, Japan, Egypt, Europe, England or, as we are informed
by astronomers, on Mars, gigantic works of irrigation have been
successfully undertaken, and in most of the places mentioned conduits
or aqueducts to supply water to inhabitants of communities were
constructed. Reasoning then by analogy it would be safe to infer that
before the race of mound builders became extinct they built works of
equal importance if not of equal endurance. This belief is borne out
by the fact that long before Columbus discovered America, the Aztecs
of Mexico built an aqueduct to supply the ancient city, built on the
site of the present City of Mexico. How long the aqueduct supplied the
city before Cortez, in his expedition to conquer Mexico, destroyed
the works, in 1521, nobody knows and the truth will probably never be
told. The fact of the existence of such a structure is interesting
chiefly as showing that in the matter of supplying communities with
water the ancient tribes of Mexico and America had made considerable
progress long before Europeans set foot on shore. It was in Mexico,
too, that the next aqueduct in point of time was constructed. This work
was built during the period between the years 1553 and 1570, under the
supervision of Friar Francisco Tembleque, a Franciscan monk, and served
for about two centuries to carry water from the mountain Lacayete to
the city of Otumba, state of Hidalgo, district of Apan, a distance of
27.8 miles.

The aqueduct, which is known as the Zempoala, included three arched
bridges of a maximum height of 124 feet. This aqueduct is further
interesting from the fact that the original agreement, under which
the work was performed, is still in existence, a copy of which was
published in the _Engineering News_, 1888, from which the following
copy is taken.

The first bridge contains forty-six arches, the second thirteen arches
and the third sixty-eight arches. The length of the longest bridge
is 3,000 feet and the span of the arches at the springing line is
fifty-six feet. About five years were required to build the principal
part of the aqueduct which is carried on arches.


CONTRACT UNDER WHICH AQUEDUCT WAS BUILT

 I, Friar Cristobal y Chanriguis, preacher and secretary of this holy
 province of the holy evangel, certify that Father Luis Gerro, preacher
 and guardian of the Convent of All Saints, Zempoala, has presented to
 me a patent in favor of natives of said town, whose legal tenor is as
 follows:

 We, Friar Juan De Bustamanti, Commissioner General of the Indes of
 the Ocean Seas, and Friar Juan De San Francisco, Provincial Master
 of the province of said holy evangel, and Friar Deigo Nolivarte, and
 Friar Juan De Gavna, and Friar Antonio Centad Rodriquez, and Friar
 Bernardino De Sahagun, subordinate of priests of said province of the
 holy evangel, declare:

 That inasmuch as you, the Governor Alcaldes and principal officers of
 the town of Zacoala, have agreed, for the love of God and because of
 our intercession, with the same officers of the town of Otumba to give
 to them half the water which you have in your town of Zacoala for the
 use and benefit of the inhabitants of Otumba and for the use of the
 monastery of our order founded in that town, in which you do great
 good to them and to our said monastery, because of our intercession as
 stated; and, inasmuch, moreover, as you, the said people of Zacoala,
 with much labor and for the good of your souls, agree to join with
 the people of the Flaquilpan and Zempoala in the place where you are
 erecting an All Saints Monastery, at which point you agree to remain
 and work and not to depart for the reason that you are removed from
 your own houses; on order to labor for the good of our souls and in
 return for the labor which the priests have in visiting you. And
 whereas now you will soon have together a monastery for the friars of
 our order, in which must be administered for all the holy sacraments;
 therefore, in return for this benefit and work we promise you that
 in all our time we will not cease to give friars for said monastery,
 and for the whole length of our lives we will aid you in your prayers
 in all the agreed respects; and for the time to come after our
 lives, in consideration of said benefit, we will petition the said
 Commissioners General and Provisional Masters that they will severally
 and collectively adhere to the agreement, and always have the charity
 to furnish friars in the Monastery of All Saints, as now in view of
 the great and good work which you have done through our intercession,
 both in giving the said water and in aiding the said work to supply
 it. And if by chance there should happen to be so few priests that it
 is impossible to spare them from the house of Otumba that they shall
 place friars in said Monastery of All Saints first and let the loss
 fall upon other places than Zacoala and the Monastery of All Saints,
 in all of which places you are entitled to be taught by our priests.

 We will beg of our successors in charity to favor us in these said
 respects, in return for your faithful labor and agreement in our
 behalf, and so we sign this agreement, made this seventh day of
 February, 1553.

Then followed signatures.

[Illustration]

 [Illustration: ·THE·OLDEST·BATH·ROOM·IN·THE·WORLD·
 ·IN·VSE·2500·YEARS·AGO·
   ·AT·TIRYNS,·GREECE·

From Stereograph, copyright 1908 by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.

  (See page iv)]



[Illustration: CHAPTER VI]

 SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTER. Introduction of Pumping Machinery into Waterworks
 Practice—The Archimedes Screw—Use of Pumps in Hanover, Germany—First
 London Pump on London Bridge—Savery and Newcomen's Pumping Engine—The
 Hydraulic Ram—Pumping Engines Erected for the Philadelphia
 Waterworks—Pipes for Distributing Water—Hydrants and Valves for Wooden
 Pipes—Data regarding the Use of Wooden Pipes—Modern Pumping Engines.


Water wheels for raising water were in use at such an early period that
the exact date of their invention will never be known. The earliest
known or approximate date for the invention of a water-raising machine
extends back to about 215 years before the birth of Christ, when
Archimedes, the Greek mathematician, who was killed at the taking of
Syracuse by the Romans, invented the Archimedes screw. This apparatus,
unlike pumps of later date, was operated independently of the
atmospheric pressure, and by using a number of the screws in series,
water could be raised to any desired height.

[Illustration: Savery's Engine]

The Archimedes screw was not adapted for raising large quantities of
water, however, so that Greek and Roman cities never were supplied
with water by means of engines. It remained for Hanover, Germany, to
install the first pump of which we have knowledge, for supplying a town
or city with water. In Germany, waterworks were constructed as early as
1412, and pumps were introduced in Hanover in the year 1527.

In London, England, the first pump was erected on the old London Bridge
in 1582, for the purpose of supplying the city with water from the
Thames and distributing it through lead pipes. There are only meagre
accounts of the Hanover and London Bridge pumps to be had, however, and
no illustrations showing their construction.

[Illustration: Newcomen's Engine]

The oldest known print of a steam engine is in the Birmingham public
library,[2] and shows a machine built in 1712 by Savery and Newcomen.
A search made by _The Engineer_ of London, has brought to light an old
engraving dated 1725, and entitled "The Engine for Raising Water by
Fire." It is unique in containing the first illustrated description of
a steam engine. This machine is somewhat different from that portrayed
in earlier engravings, for the boiler is fed with a portion of the
hot water coming from the bottom of the cylinder or hot well. This
fixes the date of the improvement described by Desagaliers in his
_Experimental Philosophy_ as follows: "It had been found of benefit to
feed the boiler warm water coming from the top of the piston, rather
than cold water, which would too much check the boiling and cause more
force to be needful. But after the engine had been placed some years,
some persons concerned about an engine, observing that the injected
water as it came out of the induction pipe was scalding hot, when the
water coming from the top of the piston was but just lukewarm, thought
it would be of great advantage to feed from the induction or injected
water, and accordingly did it, which gave a stroke or two of advantage
to the engine."

[Illustration: Section Through the Engine House of the Centre Square
Water Works, Philadelphia]

At about this time or late in 1700, a Frenchman, Montgolfer, invented
the hydraulic ram. This machine, while simple in construction, is one
of the most efficient water-raising devices made, and in the later
improved designs amount actually to hydraulic engines. That pumping
engines of this period and steam boilers to operate them were of crude
design there can be no doubt, indeed, many years later, in 1800, when
waterworks and a pumping station were introduced in Philadelphia, the
pumps and boilers were of the crudest design. A sectional illustration
of the pumping house, taken from Volume 17 of _Engineering News_,
conveys a fair idea of the design of the pumps. The engine was built
mostly of wood and had cylinders 6 feet long by 38¼ inches inside
diameter. A double acting pump had a cylinder of 18½ inches diameter
and 6-foot stroke. In these engines the lever arms, flywheel shaft and
arms, flywheel bearings, the hot well, hot and cold water pumps, cold
water cistern, and even the external shell of the boilers were made
of wood. The boilers were rectangular chests, made of 5-inch white
pine planks of the general dimensions shown in the illustration. They
were braced on the sides, top and bottom with white oak scantling, 10
inches square, all bolted together with 1¼-inch iron rods passing
through the planks. Inside the chest was an iron fire-box, 12 feet 6
inches long by 6 feet wide and 1 foot 10 inches deep, and 8 vertical
flues, 6 of 15 inches and 2 of 12 inches diameter, through which the
water circulated, the fire acting around them and passing up an oval
flue situated just above the fire box and carried from the back of the
boiler to near the front and then returned to the chimney at the back.

[Illustration: Wooden Boilers used in the Philadelphia Water Supply]

These wooden boilers were used at the Centre Street waterworks from
1801 to 1815, but did not give general satisfaction on account of the
numerous leaks. They were operated at very low pressure, averaging not
over 2½ pounds per square inch, but even at this extremely low pressure
were found unsatisfactory.

During the early days of water supply, following the period of
aqueducts, lead was the material commonly used for water supply mains.
Later, however, pipes made of bored-out logs were used and continued in
service up to the year 1819. The water mains used in Philadelphia were
made of spruce logs, reinforced at the ends with wrought-iron bands. A
section of one of these old Philadelphia water mains, which is still
in a good state of preservation, is on exhibition in the Builders'
Exchange of that city.

So far as is known, Philadelphia was the first city in the world to
adopt cast iron pipe for water mains. Cast iron water pipes were laid
in Philadelphia in the year 1804, antedating their use in London,
England, by a few years.

[Illustration: Section of Bored-out Log Laid in Victoria, B. C., in
1862 and taken out 1900]

The durability of wood pipe is rather astonishing when the short life
of logs exposed on the surface of the earth is considered. After lying
buried in the earth for fifty or sixty years the wood pipe used in
the Philadelphia waterworks was sold to Burlington, N. J., in 1804,
and remained in constant use there until 1887, when larger mains were
required.

[Illustration: Valve for Wooden Pipes Used in the Philadelphia Water
Supply]

[Illustration: Hydrant for Wooden Pipes Used in the Philadelphia Water
Supply]

Portsmouth, N. H., used bored pine logs for mains from 1798 to 1896,
when they were replaced with larger pipes. When dug up, the logs were
entirely sound and good for many years' service.

A few data regarding the use of wooden pipes might not be without
interest, while at the same time pointing out the approximate dates
when waterworks were constructed in several cities. Log pipes laid in
Victoria, B. C., in 1862 and taken out in 1900 were quite free from
decay but badly checked.

Constantinople still receives part of its supply through wood pipe.

London had 400 miles of wood pipe in use for 218 years, from 1589 to
1807. When taken up it was found to be quite sound.

Boston used one system of wood pipes from 1652 to 1796, then replaced
it with another one which lasted until 1848.

Denver, Colorado, has nearly 100 miles of stave pipe conduit and mains
in use. All the water brought to Denver for domestic use passes through
wooden pipe 37 inches in diameter, which conducts it from Cherry Creek,
which is about 8 miles from center of city.

The hydrants and valves used in connection with wood pipes in
Philadelphia were made of metal, and it is presumed that the valves and
hydrants used in other cities were likewise made of metal.

[Illustration: Modern Vertical Triple-Expansion Pumping Engine]

Only one brief century has passed since waterworks pumping stations
were introduced in the United States, but what wonderful improvements
have been made in pumping machinery design within that short space of
time! Steel and iron have taken the place of wood in the manufacture of
boilers and pumps, and instead of the leaky, unsatisfactory apparatus
of other days, even when working under low pressures, we now have
pumping engines which will work continuously month after month under
several hundred pounds pressure, and deliver the daily volumes of from
a few hundred to many million gallons of water.

[Illustration: ·AQVEDVCT·CROSSING·THE·ALCANTARA·VALLEY·

·SPANISH-PORTVGESE-BORDER·]



[Illustration: CHAPTER VII]

 SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTER. Early British Sewers—Sewer in the Great Hall of
 Westminster—Shape of Early English Sewers—Adoption or Recommendation
 of Pipe Sewers—Early Paris Sewers—Paris Sewers of To-day—Lack of
 Sewage Data in America—Effect of Memphis Epidemics on Sanitary
 Progress.


The earliest mention we have of English sewers is contained in an old
record of the fourteenth century, which informs us "The refuse from
the king's kitchen had long run through the Great Hall in an open
channel, to the serious injury to health and danger to life of those
congregated at court. It was therefore ordered that a subterraneous
conduit should be made to carry away the filth into the Thames." This
description of the sewer from the Great Hall presents a vivid picture
of the sewers of that day. At first the main sewers were natural water
courses which, having become offensive, were arched over to shut out
the sight and odor. Street gutters leading to those arched-over water
courses became foul in turn, and were replaced by underground channels
of the roughest brickwork or masonry. These drains which were square
in cross section received and carried off slop water and rain water
from the streets; the drains were constructed according to no regular
design nor fixed principles, although usually they were 12 inches
square and made by laying flat stones to form the bottom of the drain,
then building walls of brick and topping off with flat stones, spanning
from wall to wall. Excreta were collected in cesspools often built
beneath the floor of the house. The introduction of the water closet
about the commencement of the century, though it abated the nuisance
of the latrine, aggravated the evils of the cesspool by introducing
a large volume of water far exceeding in weight the actual excreta,
waterlogging the subsoil. The difficulty and expense of emptying the
cesspools were increased. Cesspools were therefore connected to sewers
by house drains. The channels intended to carry off rain water became
sewers. "Sewers and house drains were constructed on no scientific
principle.[3] The walls were rough, irregular and porous. Naturally
deposits took place in them; hand cleaning was considered a normal
incident to the history of the sewer, and irrespective of the volume
of sewage to be conveyed, sewers were made large enough to admit the
passage of a man to facilitate cleaning."

In 1852, the General Board of Health under the Public Health Act,
made their first report to the British Parliament, and advocated very
strongly the introduction of smaller pipes in lieu of the large brick
and stone drains then in use for house drainage. Prior to this date,
the first report of the Metropolitan Sanitary Commission, London,
appeared, which, while not to be taken as advocating exclusively
the use of small pipes, yet pointed out the necessity of reducing
the dimensions and altering the shapes of the old stone and brick
structures. From this period, then, can be assumed the adoption and
first use of earthenware pipes for house drains and public sewers.

The construction of sewers in Paris dates from 1663, but the earliest
of those still in use are not earlier than the beginning of this
century. Before the great epidemic of cholera in 1832, the total length
of sewers was not more than 21 miles. The sewers of Paris to-day
aggregate over 750 miles in length, and constitute one of the sights of
the city. According to Mason,[4] "They may be inspected without charge
on the first and third Wednesdays of each month in summer, by writing
for a permit to the Prefect de la Seine. Descent is commonly made
near the Madeleine by a substantial stairway of stone, and the boats
awaiting the party at the foot of the steps are fully as large and
quite as comfortable as Venetian gondolas.

The great sewer, which is tunnel-like in dimensions, being 16 feet high
and 18 feet broad, is, on occasions of a visit, lighted with lamps
alternately red and blue, and as these stretch away into the distance
the effect is decidedly striking.

Under ordinary circumstances, the sewage confines itself to the center
channel, but upon occasions rises above the sidewalk on either hand.
The central channel is about 10 feet wide and 4 feet deep with a curved
bottom, and a walk on either side. The boats with their loads of
visitors are pulled by ropes in the hands of attendants who walk along
the sidewalks. On either side of the sewer may be seen the large mains,
carrying the city water supply, also the telegraph cables."

Reliable data concerning the construction of sewers were not obtainable
in the United States until long after the close of the Civil War.
In 1857, when Julius W. Adams was commissioned to prepare plans for
sewering the city of Brooklyn, N. Y., which at that time covered an
area of 20 square miles, a great proportion of which was suburban
territory, the engineering profession was wholly without data of any
kind to guide in proportioning sewers for the drainage of cities and
towns. The half century intervening since that time, however, has seen
the development of sanitary engineering and witnessed the installation
of sewer system, rightly proportioned and properly designed, in
almost every city, town and village in the United States, while text
books on engineering contain all necessary data for their design and
construction. It must not be inferred from the foregoing statement that
sewers were unknown in the United States prior to the construction of
the Brooklyn sewer system. There was one in Boston, for example, which
dated from the seventeenth century, while the first comprehensive
sewerage project was designed by E. S. Chesbrough, for the city of
Chicago in 1855.

There was no great activity in sewer building in this country thirty
years ago. Up to that time most of the cities were comparatively small,
and no thought was given by the various municipalities to treating the
combined sewage as a whole. The conditions were ripe, however, for some
unusual event to crystallize public opinion and focus attention on the
subject, and the event was furnished by the city of Memphis, Tennessee.
Ever since 1740, Memphis had been known as a particularly unhealthful
city, where the death rate was abnormally high, and epidemic after
epidemic of cholera, yellow fever and other contagious diseases had
scourged the inhabitants. So common had those events become, that they
were accepted as incident to living in the locality, and were looked
upon as special visitations which could not be avoided. Such was the
state of affairs when an epidemic of yellow fever broke out in 1879,
which caused a death list of 5,150, and was followed the succeeding
year by a further death roll of 485, due to the scourge. Had the
disease been confined within the boundaries of the city, it is possible
that little would have been thought of the matter outside of the state
of Tennessee. However, refugees, fleeing in all directions, carried
the dread disease with them, until a strict quarantine—a shotgun
quarantine—confined the infection to a certain circumscribed area. In
the meantime, interference with railroad traffic, armed forces guarding
the borders of neighboring states, together with the fear of the dread
disease spreading all over the country, brought Congress and the public
to a realization of the necessity for doing something to stamp out the
disease. The most practical good accomplished by the agitation was the
organization of a National Board of Health, a committee from which made
a thorough examination of the sanitary conditions of Memphis. What the
committee found in the way of filth was almost beyond belief. The city,
they found, was honeycombed with cesspools and privy-vaults. Many of
the cesspools and privy-vaults were under or in the cellars of houses,
where they had been filled with accumulations and abandoned to fester
and rot. Filth was everywhere—above ground and beneath the surface,
in the house and out of doors. There was only one thing to do—give the
city a good cleaning; and that was the only time in history, perhaps,
when pressure from the outside forced an almost bankrupt city to
observe the laws of decency and sanitation.

The various works which had been built up to this time to supply
communities with water, had for their sole object the providing of
an adequate supply so far as quantity is concerned, but gave little
thought to the quality of the water, so long as it was clear and
cold. The sewers or drains on the other hand were constructed solely
to prevent a nuisance and with no definite knowledge that an unclean
environment and polluted water were conducive to ill-health, while pure
water and clean surroundings were conducive to the public health.

Some events were about to happen, however, which would awaken the
public mind to the dangers of dirt, and that would usher in the present
epoch of sanitation.

[Illustration]

[Illustration: ·BATHING·AND·BVRNING·

·HINDV·DEAD·AT·BENARES·

"Who dies in the waters of the Ganges obtains Heaven"

From Stereograph, copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.

  (See page iv)]



[Illustration: CHAPTER VIII]

 Synopsis of Chapter. Sanitary Awakening—Realization of the Danger of
 Unwholesome Water—Cholera in London Traced to the Broad Street Pump—An
 Historical Stink.


Truth is mighty and will prevail, but sometimes it is centuries before
its voice can be heard and additional centuries before its language is
understood. As early as 350 B. C., Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine,
pointed out the danger of unsterilized water and advised boiling
or filtering a polluted water supply before drinking. He further
believed that the consumption of swamp water in the raw state produced
enlargement of the spleen. Had his warning been heeded the lives of
millions of people who were carried to untimely graves by the scourges
of pestilence which swept over Europe, Asia and Great Britain, might
have been saved. Some idea of the ravage caused by filth diseases can
be gained by reviewing the mortality due to cholera in London during
the epidemics of 1832, 1848, 1849, 1853 and 1854.

On account of its size and lack of sanitary provisions, the London of
that period was the kind of place in which, with our present knowledge
of disease, we would expect a plague to reach its height. Prior to
1700, the city of London had no sewers and was without water supply,
except such as was obtained from wells and springs in the neighborhood.
The subsoil of London we can readily believe was foul from cesspool
leachings and from slops and household refuse deposited on the surface
of the ground, so that water from the wells within the city limits,
while cool perhaps and palatable, could not have been wholesome.
Many public wells with pumps had been installed at certain intervals
on the public highways, and an epidemic of cholera traced to one
of these wells, was the means of pointing out the danger to public
health, caused by an infected water supply, and of showing the channel
by which the infectious matter from people suffering from intestinal
diseases was transmitted to healthy individuals. The story is well
told by Sedgwick:[5] "One of the earliest, one of the most famous,
and one of the most instructive cases of the conveyance of disease
by polluted water, is that commonly known as the epidemic of Asiatic
cholera connected with the Broad Street, London, well, which occurred
in 1854. For its conspicuously circumscribed character, its violence
and fatality, and especially for the remarkable skill, thoroughness
and success with which it was investigated, it will long remain one of
the classical instances of the terrible efficiency of polluted water as
a vehicle of disease.

[Illustration:

  _ASIATIC CHOLERA_
  - AND -
  _THE BROAD STREET PUMP_.
  _LONDON 1854._]


As a monument of sanitary research, of medical and engineering interest
and of penetrating inductive reasoning, it deserves the most careful
study. No apology therefore need be made for giving of it here a
somewhat extended account.[6]

The parish of St. James, London, occupied 164 acres in 1854, and
contained 36,406 inhabitants in 1851. It was subdivided into three
subdistricts, viz., those of St. James Square, Golden Square and
Berwick Street. As will be seen by the map, it was situated near a part
of London now well known to travellers, not far from the junction of
Regent and Oxford Streets. It was bounded by Mayfair and Hanover Square
on the west, by All Souls and Marylbone on the north, St. Anne's and
Soho on the east, and Charing Cross and St. Martin's-in-the-Fields on
the east and south.

In the cholera epidemics of 1832, 1848, 1849 and 1853, St. James'
Parish suffered somewhat, but on the average decidedly less than
London as a whole. In 1854, however, the reverse was the case. The
inquiry committee estimated that in this year the fatal attacks in St.
James' Parish were probably not less than 700, and from this estimate
compiled a cholera death rate, during 17 weeks under consideration, of
220 per 10,000 living in the parish, which was far above the highest
in any other district. In the adjoining sub-district of Hanover
Square the ratio was 9; and in the Charing Cross district of St.
Martin's-in-the-Fields (including a hospital) it was 33. In 1848-1849
the cholera mortality in St. James' Parish had been only 15 per 10,000
inhabitants.

Within the parish itself, the disease in 1854 was very unequally
distributed. In the St. James Square district, the cholera mortality
was only 16 per 10,000, while in the Golden Square district it was 217
and in the Berwick Street district 212. It was plain that there had
been a special cholera area, a localized circumscribed district. This
was eventually minutely studied in the most painstaking fashion as
to population, industries, previous sanitary history, meteorological
conditions and other general phenomena common to London as a whole,
with the result that it was found to have shared with the rest of
London a previous long continued absence of rain, a high state of
temperature both of the air and of the Thames, an unusual stagnation of
the lower strata of the atmosphere, highly favorable to its acquisition
of impurity, and although it was impossible to fix the precise share
which each of the conditions enumerated might separately have had in
favoring the spread of cholera, the whole history of that malady,
as well as of the epidemic of 1854 and indeed of the plague of past
epochs, justifies the supposition that their combined operation,
either by favoring a general impurity in the air or in some other
way, concurred in a decided manner, last summer and autumn (1854) to
give temporary activity to the special causes of that disease. The
inquiry committee did not, however, rest satisfied with these vague
speculations and conclusions, but as previously shown in the history of
this local outbreak, the resulting mortality was so disproportioned to
that in the rest of the metropolis and more particularly to that in the
immediately surrounding districts, that we must seek more narrowly and
locally for some peculiar conditions, which may help to explain this
serious visitation.

Accordingly special inquiries were made within the district involved
in regard to its elevation of site, soil and subsoil, including an
extended inquiry into the history of a pest field said to have been
located within this area in 1665, 1666, to which some had attributed
the cholera of 1854; surface and ground plan; streets and courts;
density of population; character of the population; dwelling houses;
internal economy as to space, light, ventilation and general
cleanliness; dust bins and accumulations in yards, cellars and areas;
cesspools, closets and house drains; sewers, their water flow and
atmospheric connection; public water supply and well water supply.
No peculiar condition or adequate explanation of the origin of the
epidemic was discovered in any of these, even after the most searching
inquiry, except in the well water supply. Abundant general defects
were found in the other sanitary factors, but nothing peculiar to the
cholera area, or if peculiar, common to those attacked by the disease,
could be found excepting the water supply.

At the very beginning of the outbreak, Dr. John Snow, with commendable
energy, had taken the trouble to get the number and location of the
fatal cases, as is stated in his own report:

"I requested permission, on the 5th of September, to take a list, at
the general register office, of the deaths from cholera registered
during the week ending the 2nd of September, in the subdistricts of
Golden Square and Berwick Street, St. James' and St. Anne's, Soho,
which was kindly granted. Eighty-nine (89) deaths from cholera were
registered during the week in the three subdistricts, of these only
six (6) occurred on the first four days of the week, four occurred on
Thursday, August 31, and the remaining 79 on Friday and Saturday. I
considered therefore that the outbreak commenced on the Thursday, and
I made inquiry in detail respecting the 83 deaths registered as having
taken place during the last three days of the week.

On proceeding to the spot I found that nearly all the deaths had taken
place within a short distance of the pump in Broad Street. There were
only ten deaths in houses situated decidedly nearer to another street
pump. In five of these cases the families of the deceased persons told
me that they always sent to the pump in Broad Street, as they preferred
the water to that of the pump which was nearer. In three other cases
the deceased were children who went to school near the pump in Broad
Street. Two of them were known to have drunk the water and the parents
of the third think it probable that it did so. The other two deaths
beyond the district which the pump supplies, represent only the amount
of mortality from cholera that was occurring before the eruption took
place.

With regard to the 73 deaths occurring in the locality belonging, as
it were, to the pump, there were 61 instances in which I was informed
that the deceased persons used to drink the water from the pump in
Broad Street, either constantly or occasionally. In six (6) instances
I could get no information, owing to the death or departure of every
one connected with the deceased individuals; and in six (6) cases I was
informed that the deceased persons did not drink the pump water before
their illness.

The result of the inquiry consequently was that there had been no
particular outbreak or increase of cholera in this part of London,
except among the persons who were in the habit of drinking the water of
the above mentioned pump well.

I had an interview with the Board of Guardians of St. James' Parish on
the evening of Thursday, 7th of September, and represented the above
circumstances to them. In consequence of which the handle of the pump
was removed on the following day.

The additional facts that I have been able to ascertain are in
accordance with those related above, and as regards the small number
of those attacked, who were believed not to have drunk the water from
the Broad Street pump, it must be obvious that there are various ways
in which the deceased persons may have taken it without the knowledge
of their friends. The water was used for mixing with spirits in some
of the public houses around. It was used likewise at dining rooms
and coffee shops. The keeper of a coffee shop which was frequented
by mechanics and where the pump water was supplied at dinner time,
informed us on the 6th of September that she was already aware of nine
of her customers who were dead."

On the other hand, Dr. Swan discovered that while a workhouse
(almshouse) in Poland Street was three-fourths surrounded by houses in
which cholera deaths occurred, out of 525 inmates of the workhouse,
only five cholera deaths occurred. The workhouse, however, had a well
of its own in addition to the city supply, and never sent for water
to the Broad Street pump. If the cholera mortality in the workhouse
had been equal to that in its immediate vicinity, it would have had 50
deaths.

A brewery in Broad Street employing seventy workmen was entirely
exempt, but having a well of its own, and allowances of malt liquor
having been customarily made to the employees, it appears likely that
the proprietor was right in his belief that resort was never had to the
Broad Street well.

It was quite otherwise in a cartridge factory at No. 38 Broad Street,
where about two hundred work people were employed, two tubs of drinking
water having been kept on the premises and always filled from the Broad
Street pump. Among these employees eighteen died of cholera. Similar
facts were elicited for other factories on the same street, all tending
to show that in general those who drank the water from the Broad Street
pump well suffered either from cholera or diarrhœa, while those who
did not drink that water escaped. The whole chain of evidence was made
absolutely conclusive by several remarkable and striking cases, like
the following:

"A gentleman in delicate health was sent for from Brighton to see his
brother at No. 6 Poland Street, who was attacked by cholera and died
in twelve hours, on the 1st of September. The gentleman arrived after
his brother's death, and did not see the body. He only stayed about
twenty minutes in the house, where he took a hasty and scanty luncheon
of rump steak, taking with it a small tumbler of cold brandy and water,
the water being from Broad Street pump. He went to Pentonville, was
attacked with cholera on the evening of the following day, September
2d, and died the next evening.

The death of Mrs. E. and her niece, who drank the water from Broad
Street at the West End, Hampstead, deserves especially to be noticed.
I was informed by Mrs. E.'s son that his mother had not been in the
neighborhood of Broad Street for many months. A cart went from Broad
Street to West End every day, and it was the custom to take out a large
bottle of the water from the pump in Broad Street, as she preferred it.
The water was taken out on Thursday, the 31st of August, and she drank
of it in the evening and also on Friday. She was seized with cholera
on the evening of the latter day, and died on Saturday. A niece who
was on a visit to this lady also drank of the water. She returned to
her residence, a high and healthy part of Islington, was attacked with
cholera, and died also. There was no cholera at this time either at
West End or in the neighborhood where the niece died. Besides these two
persons only one servant partook of the water at West End, Hampstead,
and she did not suffer, at least not severely. She had diarrhœa."

Dr. Snow's inquiry into the cases of cholera which were nearer other
pumps showed that in most the victims had preferred, or had access to,
the water of the Broad Street well, and in only a few cases was it
impossible to trace any connection with the pump. Finally, Dr. Snow
made a statistical statement of great value which is here given in its
original form:


THE BROAD STREET, LONDON, WELL AND DEATHS FROM ASIATIC CHOLERA NEAR IT
IN 1854

  +------------+-------------+--------+
  |Date        |  Number of  | Deaths |
  |            |Fatal Attacks|        |
  +------------+-------------+--------+
  |August    19|       1     |     1  |
  |August    20|       1     |     0  |
  |August    21|       1     |     2  |
  |August    22|       0     |     0  |
  |August    23|       1     |     0  |
  |August    24|       1     |     2  |
  |August    25|       0     |     0  |
  |August    26|       1     |     0  |
  |August    27|       1     |     1  |
  |August    28|       1     |     0  |
  |August    29|       1     |     1  |
  |August    30|       8     |     2  |
  |August    31|      56     |     4  |
  |September  1|     143     |    70  |
  |September  2|     116     |   127  |
  |September  3|      54     |    76  |
  |September  4|      46     |    71  |
  |September  5|      36     |    45  |
  |September  6|      20     |    37  |
  |September  7|      28     |    32  |
  |September  8|      12     |    30  |
  |September  9|      11     |    24  |
  |September 10|       5     |    18  |
  |September 11|       5     |    15  |
  |September 12|       1     |     6  |
  |September 13|       3     |    13  |
  |September 14|       0     |     6  |
  |September 15|       1     |     8  |
  |September 16|       4     |     6  |
  |September 17|       2     |     5  |
  |September 18|       3     |     2  |
  |September 19|       0     |     3  |
  |September 20|       0     |     0  |
  |September 21|       2     |     0  |
  |September 22|       1     |     2  |
  |September 23|       1     |     3  |
  |September 24|       1     |     0  |
  |September 25|       1     |     0  |
  |September 26|       1     |     2  |
  |September 27|       1     |     0  |
  |September 28|       0     |     2  |
  |September 29|       0     |     0  |
  |September 30|       0     |     0  |
  |Date unknown|      45     |     0  |
  +------------+-------------+--------+
  |            |     616     |   616  |
  +------------+----------------------+

In addition to the original and general inquiry conducted from the
time of the outbreak by Dr. Snow, the Rev. H. Whitehead, M. A.,
curate of St. Luke's in Berwick Street, and like Dr. Snow, a member
of the Cholera Inquiry Committee, whose knowledge of the district
both before and during the epidemic, owing to his official position,
gave him unusual advantages, made a most elaborate and painstaking
house-to-house investigation of one of the principal streets affected,
viz., Broad Street itself.

The Rev. H. Whitehead's report, like that of Dr. Snow, is a model of
careful and extended observation and study, cautious generalizing and
rigid verification. It is an excellent instance of inductive scientific
inquiry by a layman in sanitation. Mr. Whitehead found the number of
houses on Broad Street 49; the resident householders 35; the total
number of resident inhabitants 896; the total number of deaths among
these 90. Deaths among non-residents (workmen, etc.) belonging to the
street, 28. Total deaths chargeable to this street alone, 118. Only 10
houses out of 49 were free from cholera.

The dates of attack of the fatal cases resident in this single street
were as follows:

  +------------+----------------+
  |Date of     | Number of      |
  |    Attack  |   Fatal Attacks|
  +------------+----------------+
  |August   12 |         1      |
  |August   28 |         1      |
  |August   30 |         1      |
  |August   31 |         6      |
  |September 1 |        26      |
  |September 2 |        24      |
  |September 3 |         9      |
  |September 4 |         8      |
  |September 5 |         6      |
  |September 6 |         5      |
  |September 7 |         0      |
  |September 8 |         2      |
  |September 9 |         1      |
  +------------+----------------+
  |            |        90      |
  +------------+----------------+

Mr. Whitehead's detailed investigation was not made until the spring
of 1855, but in spite of this fact it supplied most interesting and
important confirmatory evidence of Dr. Snow's theory that the Broad
Street well was the source of the epidemic. Mr. Whitehead, moreover,
went further than Dr. Snow, and endeavored to find out how the well
came to be infected, why its infectious condition was so limited, as
it appeared to have been, and to answer various other questions which
occurred in the course of his inquiry. As a result, he concluded
that the well must have been most infected on August 31st, that for
some reason unknown a partial purification began on September 2d,
and thereafter proceeded rapidly. There was some evidence that on
August 30th the water was much less infected than on the 31st, so that
its dangerous condition was apparently temporary only. He further
discovered that in the house No. 40 Broad Street, which was the nearest
house to the well, there had been not only four fatal cases of cholera
contemporaneous with the epidemic, but certain earlier cases of an
obscure nature, which might have been cholera, and that dejecta from
these had been thrown without disinfection into a cesspool very near
the well. On his reporting these facts in April, 1855, to the main
committee, Mr. J. York, secretary and surveyor to the committee, was
instructed to survey the locality and examine the well, cesspool and
drains at No. 40 Broad Street. Mr. York's report revealed a startling
condition of affairs. The well was circular in section, 28 feet 10
inches deep, 6 feet in diameter, lined with brick, and when examined
contained 7 feet 6 inches of water. It was arched in at the top, dome
fashion, and tightly closed at a level 3 feet 6 inches below the street
by a cover occupying the crest of the dome. The bottom of the main
drain of the house No. 40 Broad Street, lay 9 feet 2 inches above the
water level, and one of its sides was distant from the brick lining of
the well only 2 feet 8 inches. It was constructed on the old fashioned
plan of a flat bottom, 12 inches wide, with brick sides rising about
12 inches high, and covered with old stones. As this drain had but a
small fall or inclination outward to the main sewer, the bottom was
covered with an accumulation of soil deposit about 2 inches thick, and
upon clearing this soil away the mortar joints of the old stone bottom
were found to be perished, as was also all the jointing of the brick
sides, which had brought the brickwork into the condition of a sieve,
and through which the house drainage water must have percolated for a
considerable period.

[Illustration: ASIATIC CHOLERA AND THE BROAD STREET WELL. LONDON 1854.]

After opening back the main drain, a cesspool, intended for a trap but
misconstructed, was found in the area, 3 feet 8 inches long by 2 feet 6
inches wide and 3 feet deep, and upon or over a part of this cesspool
a common open privy, without water supply, for the use of the house,
was erected, the cesspool being fully charged with soil. This privy was
formed across the east end of the area, and upon removing the soil the
brickwork of the cesspool was found to be in the same decayed condition
as the drain, and which may be better comprehended by stating that the
bricks were easily lifted from their beds without the least force, so
that any fluid could readily pass through the work, or as was the case
when first opened, over the top course of bricks of the trap into the
earth or made ground, immediately under and adjoining the end wall
eastward, this surface drainage being caused by the accumulation of
soil in, and the misconstruction of, the cesspool.

Thus, therefore, from the charged condition of the cesspool, the
defective state of its brickwork and also that of the drain, no doubt
remains in my mind that constant percolation for a considerable period
had been conveying fluid matter from the drains into the well; but lest
any doubt should arise on this subject hereafter, I had two spaces of
the brick stemming, 2 feet square each, taken out of the inside of
the well, the first 13 feet deep from the level of the street paving,
the second 18 feet deep, and a third was afterward opened still lower,
when the washed appearance of the ground and gravel fully corroborated
the assumption. In addition thereto, the ground was dug out between the
cesspool and the well to 3 feet below the bottom of the former, and
its black, saturated, swampy condition clearly demonstrated the fact,
as did also the small furrowed appearance of the underlying gravel
observed from the inside of the well, from which the fine sand had been
washed away during the process of filtration. It was thus established
as clearly as can be done by circumstantial evidence, that the great
epidemic in St. James' Parish, Westminster, London, in 1854, was caused
by the polluted water of the Broad Street well, which for a very few
days was probably infected with cholera germs. It is much less clear
how the well became infected, but it seems probable that the dejecta of
a cholera patient found tolerably direct access to the well from the
cesspool or drain of a house nearby. There is no evidence whatever that
the germs multiplied in the well, but rather much evidence that they
rapidly died out. It is repeatedly stated in the report that the water
was preferred for drinking because it was cold, _i. e._, colder than
the cistern water derived from public water supply and this condition
would probably favor such dying out.

That the water had long been polluted there can be no doubt. There was
evidence of this, and also some evidence that it was worse than usual
at the time when it was probably infected. One consumer spoke of it as
having been at the time offensive in taste and odor. It is instructive
to note that mere pollution seems to have done no obvious harm.
Specific infection, however, produced Asiatic cholera.

Mr. Whitehead in his singularly fair and candid report raises an
interesting question, viz: Why, if an early and unrecognized case in
the house in question brought about infection of the well, should
not the four severer cases of undoubted cholera subsequently in the
same house, with no known change in the drainage, have produced even
greater disaster? This question remains unanswered, except that after
the removal of the pump handle on the 8th of September access to the
well was shut off, and during the intermediate week the well may have
been avoided by the frightened people; or owing to illness less water
may have been used in No. 40 Broad Street, so that the cesspool did not
overflow, or some other condition unknown may have been changed."

Following closely on the heels of the report of the Cholera Inquiry
Commission came an event, which, though fraught with no danger,
nevertheless did more to call attention of people in general and
lawmakers in particular to the necessity for sanitary surroundings and
the danger of polluted water supply, than had all the epidemics of
cholera and typhoid fever which had preceded. This event was one of the
most famous stinks recorded, if not the most famous, and arose from
the Thames in London in 1858 and 1859. The following account of this
historic stink is by Dr. Budd.[7]

"The need of some radical modification in the view commonly taken of
the relation which subsists between typhoid fever and sewage was placed
in a very striking light by the state of the public health in London
during the hot months of 1858 and 1859, when the Thames stank so badly.
The late Dr. McWilliam pointed out at the time, in fitting and emphatic
terms, the utter inconsistency of the facts with the received notion
of the subject. Never before had nature laid down the data for the
solution of a problem of this kind in terms so large, or wrought them
out to so decisive an issue. As the lesson then taught us seems to be
already well nigh forgotten, I may perhaps be allowed to recall some of
its most salient points.

The occasion, indeed, as has already been hinted, was no common one. An
extreme case, a gigantic scale in the phenomena, and perfect accuracy
in the registration of the results—three of the best of all the
guarantees against fallacy—were combined to make the inductions sure.
For the first time in the history of man, the sewage of nearly three
millions of people had been brought to seethe and ferment under a
burning sun, in one vast open cloaca lying in their midst. The result
we all know. Stench so foul we may well believe had never before
ascended to pollute this lower air. Never before at least had a stink
risen to the height of an historic event. Even ancient fable failed to
furnish figures adequate to convey a conception of its thrice-Augean
foulness. For many weeks the atmosphere of Parliamentary committee
rooms was only rendered barely tolerable by the suspension before every
window of blinds saturated with chloride of lime, and by the lavish use
of this and other disinfectants. More than once, in spite of similar
precautions, the law courts were suddenly broken up by an insupportable
invasion of the noxious vapor. The river steamers lost their accustomed
traffic, and travelers pressed for time often made circuit of many
miles rather than cross one of the city bridges.

For months together the topic almost monopolized the public prints. Day
after day, week after week, the _Times_ teemed with letters filled with
complaint, prophetic of calamity or suggesting remedies. Here and there
a more than commonly passionate appeal showed how intensely the evil
was felt by those who were condemned to dwell on the Stygian banks. At
home and abroad the state of the chief river was felt to be a national
reproach. "India is in Revolt, and the Thames Stinks," were the two
great facts coupled together by a distinguished foreign writer to mark
the climax of a national humiliation. But more significant still of
the magnitude of the nuisance was the fact that five million pounds in
money were cheerfully voted by a heavily-taxed community to provide the
means for its abatement. With the popular views as to the connection
between epidemic disease and putrescent gases, this state of things
naturally gave rise to the worst forebodings.

Members of Parliament and noble lords, dabblers in sanitary science,
vied with professional sanitarians in predicting pestilence. If London
should happily be spared the cholera, decimation by fever was at
least a certainty. The occurrence of a case of malignant cholera in
the person of a Thames waterman, early in the summer, was more than
once cited to give point to these warnings, and as foreshadowing what
was to come. Meanwhile the hot weather passed away; the returns of
sickness and mortality were made up, and, strange to relate, the result
showed not only a death rate below the average, _but as the leading
peculiarity of the season_, a remarkable diminution in the prevalence
of fever, diarrhœa and the other forms of disease commonly ascribed to
putrid emanations."

While the historical stink of the Thames was without apparent effect
on the public health, the nuisance caused was so great and the fear
engendered was so real, that much good was the immediate result. One
of the most lasting and far reaching benefits was the appointment by
Parliament of a Rivers Pollution Commission, to study into and devise
ways for the prevention of pollution of streams, lakes and water-sheds,
from which public water supplies are obtained. In addition to this,
the stink stimulated inquiry into the sources of infection in cases of
epidemic diseases, and means for preventing the spread of disease, with
such success, that as early as 1866 it was decided that cholera was a
water-borne disease and that the cause of infection, whatever it was,
could be destroyed by heat. This is evidenced by the signs the local
sanitary authorities caused to be issued during the epidemic of Asiatic
cholera in 1866:

 CHOLERA NOTICE!

 "The inhabitants of the district within which cholera is prevailing
 are earnestly advised _not to drink any water which has not been
 boiled_."

Following this, the Rivers Pollution Commission[8] of 1868 went
on record as authority for the statement that "the existence of
specific poison capable of producing cholera and typhoid fever is
attested by evidence so abundant and strong as to be practically
irresistible. These poisons are contained in the discharges from the
bowels of persons suffering from these diseases." So it was that close
observation and rigid inquiry discovered the truths that discharges
from bowels of persons suffering from intestinal diseases contain the
specific poison of the disease; that these discharges, mixed with
the sewage of cities, often found their way into water supplies, and
thus caused an epidemic of the same disease, and that boiling of
water before drinking would destroy the infection, thus rendering it
harmless. These truths stand to-day and the same means of prevention
are resorted to in time of danger that were recommended during the
epidemic of cholera in London in 1866. We know now, however, thanks to
the investigations of Louis M. Pasteur, that all that class of disease
which he designated as zymotic, are caused by little microscopic
vegetation which gain lodgment in the body where they grow, multiply
and thrive at the expense of the host; and knowing the specific cause
of a disease makes it more easy to fight to prevent and to cure.

[Illustration]

[Illustration:

THE·FOVNTAIN·OF·ELISHA· ·NEAR·JERICHO,·PALESTINE·

From Stereograph, copyright 1899 by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.

  (See page iv)]



[Illustration: CHAPTER IX]

 SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTER. Introduction of Water Filters—Striking Example of
 their Efficiency and Value—Cholera at Altona and Hamburg—Purification
 of Sewage—The Automatic Scavenger of Mouras—Investigations of the
 Massachusetts State Board of Health—Garbage Destruction.


As the suburban population around London, England, grew and occupied
the drainage area from which the London water supply was obtained, just
in such proportion was the water supply polluted, and London was early
forced to devise measures for purifying an already polluted water; so
it is that as early as 1839 London was filtering part of the water
derived from surface sources, and so successful were the early attempts
that at the present time although London is supplied with water by
eight separate water companies, all of the water used within its
confines which is derived from rivers, lakes or streams, is filtered
before delivery into the distributing mains. Europe was not slow to
grasp the value of filtration, and at the present time most cities of
importance in Continental Europe have slow sand filters, while America,
or at least the United States, which is reputed to adopt almost
immediately anything which possesses merit, had constructed no filters
as late as 1880, and to-day can number but few. A striking illustration
of the value of filtration for sterilizing an infected water supply can
be instanced in the cholera epidemic of Hamburg, Germany.

[Illustration: _MAP showing the Locations of the Cases of Cholera
adjacent to the Boundary between HAMBURG and ALTONA in the Epidemic of
1892_

Boundary line indicated by line of dashes.

Cases of cholera by solid circles.

Cases of cholera imported from Hamburg by circles.

Water mains in Hamburg streets by black lines.]


On the river Elbe, some miles from the sea, there are three cities
adjoining and forming in appearance one large city of 800,000
inhabitants, the combined sewage of which is discharged into the river
Elbe. The water supply to the city of Hamburg, a free German city,
with a population of 640,400, is derived from the Elbe above where
the sewage is discharged into the river but not sufficiently far away
to escape contamination from a recision of polluted water at flood
tide. This water after some imperfect sedimentation passes direct to
the consumer without filtration. The supply of water to Wandsbeck, a
city of 20,000 population, is obtained from a lake which is unexposed
to contamination and is filtered before being delivered to the mains.
The supply to Altona, on the other hand, a Prussian city of 143,000
inhabitants, is obtained from the river Elbe at a point about 8 miles
below where it receives the combined sewage of the three cities, with
their population of over 800,000. It will thus be seen that the source
of supply to Altona is the worst of the three. This most grossly
polluted supply, however, is filtered with exceeding care before
delivery to the consumers, and to this fact is attributed the freedom
from cholera that visited Hamburg in 1892. The story is well told by
Dr. Thorne, medical officer of the London Local Government Board.[9]

"The different behavior of Hamburg and Altona as regards cholera is
extremely interesting. The two towns adjoin; they are practically one
city. The division between the two is no more obvious than that between
two densely peopled London parishes, and yet a spot map indicating
the houses which were attacked with cholera, which was shown to me by
Professor Koch, points out clearly that whereas the disease prevailed
in epidemic form on the Hamburg side of the boundary line, that line
running in and out among the streets and houses and at times passing
diagonally through the houses themselves, formed the limit beyond
which the epidemic, as such, did not extend. The dots on one side of
the dividing line were proof of the epidemicity of cholera in Hamburg,
their comparative absence on the Altona side of it was proof of the
absence of the epidemic in Altona. To use Professor Koch's own words:
'Cholera in Hamburg went right up to the boundary of Altona and then
stopped. In one street, which for a long way forms the boundary, there
was cholera on the Hamburg side, whereas on the Altona side was free
from it, and yet there was one detectable difference, and one only,
between the two adjacent areas—they had different water services.'
Professor Koch has collected certain proofs which he regards as crucial
on this point, and Dr. Reincke has supplied me with a small plan in
support of the contention. At one point close to and on the Hamburg
side of the boundary line between Hamburg and Altona, is a large
yard, known as the Hamburger-Platz. It contains two rows of large
and lofty dwellings, containing 72 separate tenements and some 400
people, belonging almost wholly to those classes who suffered most from
cholera elsewhere in Hamburg. But while cholera is shown by the spot
map to have prevailed all around, not a single case occurred among
the many residents of this court during the whole epidemic. And why?
Professor Koch explains that owing to local difficulties, water from
the Hamburg mains could not easily be obtained for the dwellings in
question, and hence a supply had been laid in from one of the Altona
mains in an adjacent street. This was the only part of Hamburg which
received Altona water, and I am informed that it was the only spot in
Hamburg in which was aggregated a population of the class in question,
which escaped the cholera. At the date of my visit to Hamburg, a
notice board was affixed at the entrance to this court. It stated that
certain tenements were to let; but, above all, in large type, and as an
inducement to intending tenants, was the announcement that the court
was not only within the jurisdiction of Hamburg, with the privileges
still attaching to the old Hanseatic cities, but that it had a supply
of Altona water.

During the epidemic the deaths in the several cities were:

  +-----------+----------+-------+-----------+
  |           |          |       |Deaths per |
  |           |Population|Deaths |    10,000 |
  |           |          |       |Inhabitants|
  +-----------+----------+-------+-----------+
  | Hamburg   |  640,000 | 8,605 |   134.4   |
  | Altona    |  143,000 |   328 |    23.0   |
  | Wandsbeck |   20,000 |    43 |    22.0   |
  +-----------+----------+-------+-----------+

That infectious matter was communicated to the Elbe water from Hamburg
is not in any way a hypothesis. Cholera germs had been as a fact found
in the Elbe water. They were found a little below the place where the
Hamburg main sewer flows into the Elbe. They were also found in one of
the two Altona basins into which the water flowed before filtration."

No more striking example could be found, demonstrating on a large scale
the efficiency of filtration as a preventive of water-borne diseases
than that of the cholera epidemic of Hamburg in 1892, yet, at the
present writing, there are people holding public offices throughout
the United States who do not believe in the value of filtration as a
public prophylactic, or who are so indifferent as not to advocate its
adoption. Nor is this disbelief confined to public officials; many
there are outside of public office who have made no study of sanitation
and cannot believe that merely passing water downward through sand will
purify it, and for the benefit of those who wish to be better informed,
the story of the Hamburg epidemic of cholera, together with the part
played by filters in saving Altona from a worse visitation, cannot be
too often told.

It is but natural that, suspicion having once fallen on water as a
source or vehicle of disease, means would be adopted not only to
properly sterilize water before delivering it to the public, but,
furthermore, to select the source of supply where there was least
danger of contamination from filth. By this time public water supplies
had progressed to such a stage that but few towns, cities or villages
of any importance were without a municipal plant. Further, most cities
of any importance had a more or less complete system of sewers, and
the filth from these sewers was discharging freely, and in the crude
state, into the streams and rivers of the realm. Such a condition of
affairs could not last long without causing a nuisance, as well as
becoming a menace to the health of the commonwealth, and it was not
long before the problem was discussed of purifying the sewage before
discharging it into streams and rivers. In Great Britain, the pollution
of streams was felt more keenly than in America. The population along
the rivers in Great Britain is quite dense, and the rivers, which are
comparatively small, are used as sources of supply for the different
municipalities along the banks, so that some means had to be devised
to prevent the people up stream from polluting and perhaps infecting
it for those lower down. So early as 1840, this matter forced itself
on the attention of Parliament, and in 1843, a royal commission, the
Health of Towns Commission, was appointed to inquire into the present
state of large towns and populous districts. This was followed in 1857
by the Sewage of Towns Commission, a royal commission appointed to
inquire into the best means of distributing the sewage of towns, and in
1865 by the Rivers Pollution Commission, a royal commission appointed
to inquire into the best means of preventing the pollution of rivers.

Progress was not at a standstill during this time, however, but, on
the contrary, chemical precipitation of sewage and purification by the
application to land were striving with each other for supremacy. Up
to that time, the important part that bacteria play in the reduction
of organic matter was not understood, and instead of affording every
advantage for the decomposition and fermentation of organic matter
under the least objectionable conditions, the principal efforts of
those interested in the problem were to prevent or put off as long
as possible the septic action of sewage. It was not until so late as
the year 1880 that attention was turned toward the possibility of the
micro-organisms in sewage. In that year Dr. Mueller took out a patent
endeavoring to utilize the micro-organism in sewage for the purpose
of purification. According to Dr. Mueller's views, "The contents of
sewage are chiefly of organic origin, and in consequence of this an
active process of decomposition takes place in sewage through which the
organic matters are dissolved into mineral matters, or, in short, are
mineralized, and thus become fit to serve as food for plants. To the
superficial observer, however, it is chiefly a process of digestion, in
which the various, mostly microscopically small, animal and vegetable
organisms utilize the organically fixed power for their life purpose.

"The decomposition of sewage in its various stages is characterized
by the appearance of enormous numbers of spirilla, then of vibrios
(swarming spores) and, finally, of moulds. At this stage commences
the reformation of organic substance with the appearance of
chlorophyl-holding protococcus."

About the same time, December, 1881, the account of Mouras's automatic
scavenger was published in France. Mouras had been working and
experimenting along the same lines as Dr. Mueller, and the result was
an apparatus consisting of a closed vessel or vault, with a water seal
which rapidly changed excrementatious matter into a homogeneous fluid,
only slightly turbid, and holding the solid matters in suspension in
the form of scarcely visible filaments. The principle claimed for his
automatic scavenger by Mouras was that animal dejecta within themselves
contained all the principles of fermentation necessary to liquefy them.

The teachings of Dr. Mueller and Mouras went unheeded for a long time,
on account of the chemical processes then in vogue. It was maintained
by those who were supposed to know, that lime and other antiseptic
substances were particularly valuable in sewage purification, because
they destroyed living organisms, such as bacteria, which give rise to
putrefaction and fermentation. They contended that if all the organisms
could be destroyed, that sewage would be rendered unobjectionable.
So conditions stood when in January, 1887, Mr. Dibden read a paper
before the Institute of Civil Engineers, in which he pointed out
that the very essence of sewage purification was not the destruction
of bacterial life, but the resolution of organic matter into other
combinations by the agency of the micro-organisms. He pointed out,
further, that a septic and not an antiseptic action was what was
wanted, consequently any process which arrested the activity of the
bacteria was the reverse of what was desired. Dibden's paper had the
effect of turning investigation in the right direction, but a world
of experimenting on a practical scale would be necessary before the
practice of sewage purification could be established on a safe, sound
and scientific footing. It remained for the Massachusetts State Board
of Health to conduct those investigations, and so thoroughly was it
accomplished that the records of their experiments furnish the basis
for sewage purification practice in the United States. The experiments
have been carried on since 1887, and the thoroughness and value of
these investigations can be judged by the fact that during one period
of twenty-two months four thousand chemical examinations were made in
addition to the microscopic examinations.

Following the historic investigations of the Massachusetts State Board
of Health, numerous engineers and investigators commenced applying to
practice the principles there laid down, and with such good results
that there are upwards of 200 purification plants in the United States
to-day, and in Pennsylvania alone plans are under way at the present
time for over one hundred sewage disposal works. Such a showing is
encouraging, and leads to the hope that within a decade no city of any
importance within the States will be pouring impurified sewage into
public streams or lakes.

Up to within the last quarter century no thought was given in the
United States to the disposal or destruction of the grosser particles
which make up the waste of a large city, nor was provision made at
sanatoria, hospitals and like institutions for the destruction of
materials which might prove infectious; yet, no less important than
the removal of sewage by water carriage is the systematic collection
and subsequent destruction of all matter of no value which might
prove a vehicle of disease, if a clean, sanitary environment is to be
maintained. The necessity for such removal and destruction was first
felt in hospitals, sanatoria, barracks and camps, where many people
are brought together under unusual circumstances, and infective matter
is liable to accumulate, thereby proving a menace to the community.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the desirability of destroying
such accumulated wastes was first brought home to the medical staff
connected with military service, and that the medical authorities
should be connected with the British army.

The first garbage destructor, or garbage furnace, of which there is any
record, was constructed about 1860, at Gibraltar, for the exclusive
destruction by fire of all waste matter from the British garrison.
In the United States, likewise, it was at the army posts where the
need for waste destructors was first felt, and in 1885 Lieutenant
H. I. Reilly, U. S. A., built the first American garbage furnace at
Governor's Island, New York Harbor. From that time on, the value
of garbage destructors became more widely known, and within recent
years the need for a sanitary and convenient method for disposing of
waste matters has been occupying the attention of those in charge of
institutions devoted to the care of the sick, infirm, feeble, and to
the control of the criminal. In addition to the superintendents of
hospitals, prisons, sanatoria and asylums, those in charge of medical
schools and laboratories, hotels, business houses and municipalities
have given the matter much consideration, and at the present time most
of the large cities of the United States have constructed garbage
destructors, or are seriously considering the step, while the principal
hospitals, hotels, department stores, medical colleges and public
institutions throughout the country have already installed destructors.
Likewise, garbage destructors have been constructed at all of the
United States Government army posts.

[Illustration]

[Illustration: · NEW·YORK·PVBLIC·BATHS·

·23d·STREET·

The Twenty-third Street Public Bath is considered one of the finest and
most modern in New York City]



[Illustration: MODERN & RECENT PLVMBING FIXTVRES]

 =Passing of the Marble Lavatory—Public Bath Houses—Public Wash
 Houses—Public Comfort Stations—Conclusion=


No history of sanitation would be complete without touching upon
the plumbing fixtures in buildings, and showing the marked progress
along these lines within the last quarter of a century. It is only a
little over a century and a quarter since the first English patent was
granted for a water closet. That was in the year 1775, and was issued
to Alexander Cummings, who, strange to say, was a watchmaker. This
closet was the first one patented which had what is known as a trap to
contain water for a seal. Three years later a patent was issued to
Joseph Bramah, inventor of the hydraulic press, for a water closet with
a valve at the bottom. Little progress was made in the improvement of
water closets during the next half century, and when in the year 1833
the first American patent was taken out the art had not advanced very
far. Indeed, it might be said that until the time of the filing of the
application for the Fraim and Neff patent, for a siphon closet, that a
real cleanly and sanitary type of closet was not on the market.

[Illustration: A Bath Room of the Early 70's]

[Illustration: One Stage in the Evolution of the Porcelain Enamel Bath]

[Illustration: A Slop Sink of Long Ago]

Bath tubs and lavatories have improved as much in appearance in the
time that has elapsed as have water closets. The earliest bath tubs
of which we have any knowledge were hewn out of marble. Later, when
bath tubs came into rather extensive use in the United States, they
were made of wood, lined with either sheet zinc or sheet copper,
tinned on one side, and it is only within comparatively recent years
that porcelain enameled tubs came into use, and that solid porcelain
tubs were manufactured in this country. Open plumbing was unheard
of twenty-five years ago and in its stead plumbing fixtures were
concealed as much as possible by encasing them in woodwork of more
or less ornate designs; at that time the lavatories were all made of
marble, and of this material fully 90 per cent. of the lavatories were
made up to about the year 1902. About that time, porcelain enameled
and solid porcelain lavatories commenced taking the lead and worked
a complete revolution in the design of these fixtures. Indeed, so
sudden and complete was the change that inside of a year the marble-top
lavatories were driven as completely from the market as though they
never existed, and, outside of old work, they are as much a curiosity
to-day as an old pan closet.

[Illustration: Bath Tub Encased in Woodwork]

[Illustration: An Old Marble-Top Lavatory]

With the perfecting and cheapening of plumbing fixtures came an
increased demand for their use, and the attention of public-minded
citizens turned to means for providing the people less favored with
worldly riches with means for cleansing the person and apparel.
Liverpool, England, was the first of modern cities to establish public
bath houses. The first bath in that city was established in 1828, and
is known as the Pierhead. It contains eleven private baths, two vapor
baths, one douche, one plunge 46 x 27 feet, one plunge 40 x 27 feet,
and two small private plunges. In all, Liverpool has at the present
time nine public baths.

Birmingham, England, was next in point of time. It now has five bath
houses, the first of which was built on Kent Street, and opened May 12,
1851. In this establishment a Turkish bath can be had for a shilling.

London, England, follows on the heels of Birmingham, with eleven bath
houses, the first of which was erected in 1854. At present municipal
London has invested over $2,500,000 in public baths and laundry
establishments, which cost $550,000 annually to maintain.

[Illustration: A Modern Porcelain Enameled Lavatory]

Provisions for free public baths were made in New York in 1870 by the
erection of two floating baths. These bath houses, however, could only
be used during warm weather, so could not be considered, in the full
sense of the word, bathing establishments. The New York Association for
Improving the Condition of the Poor, realizing this and the lack of
public bathing facilities, undertook to supply the deficiency as far
as possible, and in 1891 opened the first real public bath house in
the United States, at 9 Centre Market Place. Yonkers, N. Y., however,
claims the credit of being the first city in the United States to
establish a municipal bath house, supplied with hot and cold water,
open all the year round, and maintained at the public expense.

The example set by a few cities has not been without effect, and other
cities in the United States have followed the lead. It is noticeable,
however, that it is only in the Eastern cities that public bath
houses are built and maintained at the city's expense. According to
the "Report on Public Baths and Comfort Stations," Buffalo, Boston,
Philadelphia, Newark and Trenton each have one public bath house and
Chicago has three. Since the publication of that report, however,
many cities both in the East and in the West have built public bath
houses and many have built, are building, or have planned to build,
public comfort stations. Indeed, the standard by which the advancement
of cities will be judged in the near future is, "What have they done
for the comfort and welfare of the citizens?" And among the visible
evidences of what they have done, standing foremost will be the public
bath houses, public comfort stations, and last, but not least, public
wash houses.

[Illustration: Present Stage in the Evolution of Porcelain Enameled
Baths]

Events of to-day become history of to-morrow, and no history would
be complete without recounting contemporaneous facts and events. So
it is with sanitation; no history of that subject would be complete
without illustrating a few of the plumbing fixtures in use at the time
the record was written. We of the present age believe, as did those
of a generation ago, that we have almost attained perfection in the
manufacture of plumbing fixtures; but have we, or will succeeding
generations look back upon what we consider good as we do upon the
fixtures in vogue in the early 70's? This we do not know nor can we
foresee. Time alone will tell.

[Illustration: A Twentieth Century Bathroom]

[Illustration]



FOOTNOTES:


[1] _Ewbank's Hydraulics._

[2] _Engineering Record_, Oct. 21, 1905

[3] Wanklyn and Cooper.

[4] Water Supply.

[5] Principles of Sanitary Science and the Public Health.

[6] The complete original report is entitled "Report on the Cholera
Outbreak in the Parish of St. James, Westminster, during the Autumn of
1854. Presented to the Vestry by the Cholera Inquiry Committee, July,
1855. London, J. Churchill, 1855."

[7] _Typhoid Fever, its Nature, Mode of Spreading and Prevention._

[8] _Sixth Report_, London, 1874.

[9] _Cholera Prospects and Prevention._


       *       *       *       *       *



TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

Minor punctuation and printer errors repaired.

Italic text is denoted by _underscores_, bold text by =equal signs= and
font changes by ~tildes~.





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