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achievement of modern civil engineering in using new materials in an elegant
manner to perform on a huge scale one of the basic public services—providing
a good water supply.
The systematic use of impounding reservoirs to supply water to urban
communities in modern times dates from the early nineteenth century,
when Robert Thom created in 1827 what was then the largest artificial
lake in Britain to supply Greenock on the Clyde estuary in Scotland. It
retained this distinction until the Vyrnwy and Thirlmere projects at the end
of the century (see below), but by that time extensive water supply projects
had been undertaken in many parts of Britain. The first extensive
municipal water supply project was that devised by J.F.La Trobe Bateman
for Manchester between 1851, when the first part became operational, and
1877, when the works were complete. These consisted of five major
reservoirs on the River Etherow in the Longdendale valley in the Pennines
to the east of the city, with their associated aqueducts and auxiliary
reservoirs. Bateman used earth embankment dams and had great difficulty
in making them stable.
Techniques of dam construction improved substantially in the second half of
the nineteenth century, and pioneering work in Europe on the construction of
high-wall masonry dams was adopted in Britain by the end of the century in
the Manchester Thirlmere extension in the Lake District (1874–1890), the
Liverpool Lake Vyrnwy scheme in north Wales (1881–1892) and the complex
of reservoirs to supply Birmingham built in the Elan valley in central Wales
(1890–1904). In the Manchester Haweswater project in the Lake District
(1923), concrete became an important constructional material.
In those places where surface water has not been easily available, thirsty
towns and cities have exploited the potential of underground sources.
Sometimes natural springs could be directed with little difficulty into water
supply systems, but more normally wells have been sunk to reach the water

table or to give access to artesian supplies where favourable geological
conditions have prevailed. In some dry inland regions such supplies are vital to
any permanent settlement. The construction of wells and bore-holes
encouraged the use of powerful pumping engines to maintain a continuous
flow and thus provided the primary need for the large steam engines which
have figured prominently in the history of British water supply. One of the
most extensive groups of water works deriving their supply from wells were
those built under the direction of Thomas Hawksley to extract water from the
New Red Bunter Sandstone for Nottingham, but Hawksley built similar
systems for many other British and continental towns. The fine beam pumping
engine built at Ryhope in Durham in 1868 under his direction for the
Sunderland and South Shields Water Company has been preserved in working
order, as has also the elaborately embellished engine and engine-house at
Papplewick, north of Nottingham (1884).
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Treatment
Before water can be distributed for public consumption, various processes of
treatment are required by modern legislation to ensure that it maintains
wholesome standards. The first requirement is filtration to remove the coarser
forms of pollution, but chemical treatment of dangerous organisms is also now
obligatory in most countries. Filtration was used by Thom in his Greenock
scheme in 1827, using mechanical and slow sand filtration processes. Two years
later, in 1829, James Simpson brought into use his sand-filtration process at
Chelsea waterworks in London. Together with Bateman and Hawksley, Simpson
was amongst the leading British water-works engineers of the nineteenth century.
His pioneering efforts at Chelsea were partly in response to a loud public outcry
against the foul condition of the River Thames from which water was being
drawn for public supply at that time. Simpson made a study of methods of
filtering water supplies and built an experimental arrangement in 1827 in which

water was first allowed to settle and then passed through a downward-flow filter
consisting of a four-foot bed of carefully graded sand and gravel. It was this
method which he then applied to Chelsea waterworks in 1829. Although
successful in giving a vastly improved supply of water, the method took a
surprisingly long time to be generally adopted, mainly because of scepticism
about its beneficial effects, but also because of the high cost and substantial space
required for filter beds. The impact of cholera, however, strengthened the case
for filtration, and the principle was made obligatory in Britain by the Metropolis
Water Act of 1852. This measure, confirmed by subsequent Royal Commissions
and Acts of Parliament, served to give a sound legal basis to the provision of
wholesome water in Britain, although chemical purity of water supply was not
achieved until the introduction of chlorination to kill off undesirable bacteria.
Like filtration, this was accepted with some reluctance by the water authorities,
and it only became general practice in Britain after the Second World War. The
further addition of chemicals such as fluoride to harden children’s teeth against
decay is a matter of continuing controversy about the medication of water
supply, but the principle of the responsible authorities being required to provide
pure water to every domestic and industrial consumer is no longer in doubt in
the developed countries.
Distribution
The distribution of treated water to its consumers has called on the skills of
several generations of civil engineers. In Britain, even the early impounding
reservoirs were usually in upland valleys comparatively remote from the towns
where the supply was needed, so that extensive culverts and aqueducts were
necessary to get it to its destination. The fact that the reservoirs were usually in
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high land, moreover, meant that the supply could flow largely under the effect
of gravitation. As the reservoirs were established farther afield, so the need for
siphons, tunnels, and pumping engines increased. For example, the scheme

designed by Bateman at Loch Katrine in the Trossachs to supply Glasgow is
48km (30 miles) from that town; Thirlmere is 160km (100 miles) from
Manchester; and the Elan valley is 120km (75 miles) from Birmingham. The
works by which these distances are covered are rarely obtrusive or easily
visible to the casual visitor. In most cases, the level of the reservoirs is such to
permit a siphon action to convey the water to the taps of the customers, but in
some areas it is necessary to supplement this with water towers, to which the
water is pumped in order to allow it to gravitate to its point of use. Powerful
steam engines were frequently installed by waterworks in the nineteenth
century to perform this function, and several of these have been preserved in
various parts of Britain, although the work is now done by more efficient and
convenient electrical pumps.
Water may be allowed to flow freely in open culverts, but when it is put
under pressure by pumping or by passing it through a siphon, or when it is
being conveyed underground, it has to be contained in strong piping. The
traditional form of water pipes had been those made of elm trunks bored out
through the core and fitted end-to-end, but the tremendous expansion of the
British iron industry made available new piping materials which were quickly
demonstrated to be extremely versatile when used for water pipes. First came
cast-iron pipes, flanged and bolted together, providing excellent water mains
for laying underneath busy city streets, just as they also provided ideal gas
mains. For larger pipes carrying water overground, wrought-iron pipes were
constructed by curving plates and riveting them together in a manner similar
to that used in the construction of boilers and the hulls of iron ships. Such
wrought-iron pipes were well-suited for the aqueducts carrying water across
valleys and other obstacles on the routes from reservoirs to its urban
consumers. Subsequently, wrought-iron was replaced by mild steel, which
remains in widespread use for conveying water although concrete piping is
now used for some functions. The use of iron and steel piping has enabled
water to be pumped for considerable distances in arid regions of the world

where it is not practicable to use open culverts. For instance, inland cities in the
USA like Denver, are supplied with most of their water from sources many
miles away: in this case, it is collected on the western slopes of the Rocky
Mountains and transferred through tunnels across the continental water-shed
to the city which is on the arid eastern side of the mountains.
Water supply has become increasingly a matter of water conservation as an
expanding population with rising expectations presses on the finite fresh-water
resources of the world. It has always been a scarce commodity in arid regions.
The twentieth century attempts to conserve the water of the River Nile, from the
first Aswan Dam completed under the supervision of Sir Benjamin Baker in
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1902 to the Aswan High Dam finished in 1970, have extended the work of
many generations of Egyptian engineers in this respect. In Australia, the driest of
all the land masses in the world, most of the areas of human settlement are on
the coast, but the development of gold-mining settlements at Coolgardie and
Kalgoorlie in the arid deserts of Western Australia was made possible by the
opening in 1903 of a 645km (400 mile) pipeline from the Mundaring reservoir
near Perth. An even more ambitious project in the south east of Australia, the
Snowy Mountain scheme, during the 1950s and 1960s involved converting a
large eastwards-flowing river into one flowing westwards into the dry but
potentially fertile interior, and providing a large amount of hydro-electric energy
in the process. In parts of the world with even scarcer resources of fresh water,
the desalination of sea water is the sole means of maintaining essential water
supplies. The first large plant of this type was installed in Kuwait in 1949, and
despite heavy initial expense on the equipment required to produce the
evaporation and condensation of sea water, there is likely to be more use of it in
the future as even more-favoured parts of the world begin to find that their
available water resources are inadequate to meet expanding needs.
Drainage

A corollary to a good water supply is a good system of drains. In the first
place, drains are required to remove surface water, and secondly to allow the
removal of sewage.
With the increase in urban building and the paving of streets, natural means
of allowing surface water to percolate the sub-soil or to run off in streams are
blocked, and it becomes necessary to provide artificial drains for this purpose.
As rain rarely falls consistently, the provision of drains has to allow for the
periods of maximum rainfall in order to protect settlements from the hazard of
serious flooding. In tropical areas this involves ‘monsoon ditches’ alongside
main roads to carry off the very heavy rain accompanying frequent
thunderstorms, but in more temperate latitudes the service of drains is usually
less conspicuous, although some modern cities have found it necessary to
undertake storm-water and river-control works in order to guard against
exceptional conditions of prolonged rainfall or flash floods. Towns on tidal
estuaries have comparable problems when parts of the built-up area are below
peak high-tide level. Normally, potential flood conditions can be controlled by
extensive river embankments and dykes, as demonstrated in the Netherlands
and Belgium around the mouths of the Rhine. In some places, however, the
gradual sinking of the land creates a long-term problem and makes the
coincidence of exceptional weather conditions with a particularly high tide a
dangerous hazard. Parts of the Netherlands and south east England
experienced such a combination in 1953, and the construction of the Thames
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Flood Barrier at Woolwich was undertaken as a defence against a repetition of
this event, which could put at risk large parts of London. The Barrier,
completed in 1984, consists often rising sector steel gates between hooded piers
spanning the 520m (171 0ft) of the river at Woolwich Reach. The gates are
normally submerged horizontally, allowing shipping to pass freely, but in an
emergency they can be raised in about 30 minutes to stand vertically and hold

back any potential tidal surge. The system has not yet been put to a serious
test, but it is a considerable comfort to Londoners to know that this public
service is now prepared.
Sewage disposal
Water supply has been an essential factor in the development of successful
methods of disposing of large volumes of organic waste. Modern systems of
sewage disposal began with the introduction of water-borne techniques inspired
by Edwin Chadwick’s public health reforms in Britain in the 1840s, and the
insistence of engineers such as Hawksley on providing a continuous rather than
an intermittent supply of water wherever it was required. As towns acquired
reliable sources of fresh water, so a proportion of this became available to flush
water closets and to maintain a continuous flow of sewage waste through a
network of well constructed main and tributary sewers. The design and
construction of sewers were carefully managed. In the Victorian era good quality
brick became the favoured material for the building of the larger sewers, in a
pear-shaped cross-section, the narrower end at the bottom to ensure a strong flow
of liquid even when the level was low. Such sewers thus had a self-scouring
action so long as they remained in use. Most of the early systems of sewers
aimed at discharging their effluent into a river downstream from the town being
served, but gradually it was recognized that this was not acceptable for inland
towns where other settlements depended upon the same river for their water
supplies, and even those with access to the sea and tidal estuaries were
encouraged to consider the value of recovering minerals from the waste. Thus
followed the development of ‘sewage farms’ for securing the partial purification
of water to be released back into the rivers and for exploiting those parts of the
waste which could be used for agricultural fertilizers and other purposes. The
techniques of sewage treatment involved some form of sedimentation process,
with the addition of chemicals as appropriate to speed the bacteriological
decomposition and to remove unpleasant odours.
The most serious problem confronting public health experts and the

engineers who served them in the middle of the nineteenth century was that of
providing a system of drains and sewers for the metropolis of London. This
was achieved between 1855 and 1875 by the Metropolitan Board of Works
and its engineer Joseph Bazalgette. The principal feature of Bazalgette’s system
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was a main drain along the north bank of the Thames, partly to accommodate
which the Victoria Embankment was constructed. This cut across older drains
and received the discharge from many tributary sewers before finally
discharging itself into the tidal waters of the Thames below Blackwall. A
similar network provided for the removal of sewage south of the Thames, to
discharge at Crossness. On both sides of the river the gradient was such that it
was necessary to assist the flow of sewage by the installation of several
powerful pumping engines, several of which survive as industrial monuments
although no longer active. Bazalgette received a well-deserved knighthood for
his work, which did much to remove the curse of cholera and other fever
diseases from London. Similar systems were installed in other large cities in
Europe and elsewhere. Indeed, from an engineering point of view it is difficult
to improve on the system so long as the principle of water-borne sewage
disposal is adopted, so that new work has tended to concentrate on improving
the quality of sewage treatment; the replacement of old sewers, which have
frequently now given over a hundred years of excellent service in many of our
big cities, with the minimum of maintenance; and the adoption of concrete and
plastics instead of the traditional constructional materials of brick and iron.
POWER SUPPLY
Gas
Coal-gas had been recognized as a by-product of coal before the eighteenth
century, but it was William Murdock who, at the end of that century, first
discovered how to apply it as a public service (see also p. 208ff.). Murdock was
the agent responsible to Boulton and Watt, the Birmingham manufacturers of

steam engines, for the erection of their machines in Cornwall. Murdock’s daily
work, however, did not prevent him from exercising his inventive and active
mind in other directions, and in 1792, while pursuing methods of preparing
wood preservatives from materials produced by the distillation of coal, he
collected coal gas from his primitive retort and used it to light his house in
Redruth. On returning to Birmingham in 1798 he continued his systematic
investigation of coal distillation and his coal-gas plant was used to illuminate
the Soho Foundry during the celebrations accompanying the Peace of Amiens
in 1802. Simultaneously, Phillipe Lebon in France produced elaborate plans for
manufacturing coal-gas, incorporating a process to wash it in order to extract
useful by-products, and applying it to equipment for lighting and heating, and
also for inflating balloons. Lebon was killed in Paris in 1804, and little was
done to take advantage of his research, but in the same year Boulton & Watt
started seeking orders for Murdock’s gas-making equipment and installed it in
several large mills beginning with Phillips and Lee of Salford in 1806. The
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958
equipment employed was crude, burning gas in small jets known as cockspurs,
generating offensive smoke and smells.
Boulton and Watt abandoned the manufacture of gas apparatus in 1814, by
which time the quality of their equipment had been overtaken by rivals and
particularly by that of Frederic Albert Winsor, an eccentric anglicized German
professor who launched the Gas Light and Coke Company in London in 1812,
and by Samuel Clegg, who had trained under the chemist Dalton in Manchester
and worked with Boulton and Watt before being recruited by the new London
company in 1812, just as the demand for gas lighting was increasing rapidly. By
the end of 1815, some 26 miles of gas mains had already been laid. Clegg used
cast-iron retorts and provided for cooling and washing the gas, and for purifying
it in lime. His system was extensively adopted by the gas companies which
sprang up in most British towns, often in close competition by the middle of the

nineteenth century. Some companies introduced oil-gas to replace coal-gas in the
1820s, using a process based on the distillation of whale oil, but it proved to be
an expensive alternative and by the middle of the century most installations had
been converted to coal-gas and merged with rival undertakings. Gas was now
being very widely used, although suspicion of it had not entirely disappeared
and it was excluded from the Great Exhibition in 1851. Gas had been used
mainly to illuminate streets and public places, its fumes making the application of
gas-lighting in domestic rooms unbearable. But the introduction around 1840 of
the atmospheric burner, mixing air with the gas just before combustion, greatly
enhanced its utility, and the subsequent applications in the Bunsen burner (1855)
and the gas-ring (1867) increased its performance as a heater in boilers and
ovens. Gas cooking, however, did not become common until the 1870s and the
gas-fire with radiants was introduced in 1880. Dry gas meters also became
widespread in this period as a means of registering the amount of fuel supplied
to the domestic consumer.
A vigorous international market developed for gas equipment, and British
engineers were responsible for many installations in Europe, America, and
Australasia. As a measure of rationalization was achieved between competing
suppliers, coal-gas came to exercise a virtual monopoly in urban illumination
(the paraffin lamp developed for use elsewhere), and the industry became
complacent about its prospects until the advent of the electric incandescent
filament lamp presented a serious challenge from a totally different
technology. Thanks to the incandescent gas-mantle patented by the Austrian
Carl von Welsbach in 1885, the gas industry continued to provide an
efficient system of illumination into the twentieth century, while it transferred
its main emphasis to heating functions, both for industrial processes and for
domestic heating and cooking. The distillation of coal in retorts underwent
little change until the 1960s, although the traditional horizontal retorts
operating a batch-production process were gradually replaced, first by
inclined and then by vertical retorts which could maintain continuous

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production. In some smaller gas works however horizontal retorts remained
in operation until the end of coal-gas manufacture. The re-introduction of oil-
based processes and then natural gas, obtained as a by-product from North
Sea oil fields, brought about a spectacular change in the gas industry in
Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. Coal-gas retorts disappeared, and even the
large bell-tank gas-holders which had long featured on every urban skyline
were reduced in number as the gas was processed at a few new units and
conveyed around the country in a network of high-pressure mains. Gas has
thus managed to remain an efficient and convenient source of heat energy in
all developed nations, even though its long-term viability has come to depend
on the availability of oil and natural gas and the economics of recovering
them from places which tend to become steadily more inaccessible.
Electricity
The generation of electricity is treated in Chapter 6, but it is appropriate to
mention it here as the source of many of the most valuable utilities and services
in modern societies. While scientific knowledge of electric power increased
rapidly in the nineteenth century, with the discovery of both chemical and
mechanical means of producing a continuous current, the electricity supply
industry was remarkably slow to take advantage of this accumulating expertise.
Not only did the coal-gas industry appear to have established a comfortable
monopoly of urban lighting by the second half of the nineteenth century, but the
risk capital was not readily available for a source of energy which required heavy
installation costs and was then likely to have only spasmodic use. The solution
to these problems came in the form of the electric incandescent filament lamp
which provided a means of adapting the brilliant light available from arc lamps
to a domestic scale; and the development of electric traction in the form of the
tramcar and underground train.
The filament lamp was developed by Thomas A.Edison in the USA,

leading him to the production of a commercially viable electric light bulb in
1881, and by Joseph Swan in Britain. They joined forces to market their
invention in Europe.
Electric traction began with the adaptation of horse-drawn tramways, which
had been established in most major cities of the Western world by the 1880s,
for electrically-propelled vehicles. Werner von Siemens opened the first public
electric tramcar service in Berlin in 1881, but this was essentially an
experimental line and many problems regarding the engines, the power
transmission system, and the design of the cars had to be overcome before the
electric tramcar could offer a really efficient system of transport. This came in
1888, with the opening of the network in Richmond, Virginia, and in 1891,
when the first British system began operations in Leeds. Thereafter electric
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tramcars became vehicles of mass transport—‘the gondolas of the people’, in
the vivid phrase of Richard Hoggart—and were responsible for a rapid
suburban expansion of town life.
To meet this expanding need for electricity, it became feasible at last to
establish power stations generating sufficient electricity to supply a
substantial district. Edison pioneered such electricity supply systems as
early as 1879, when he demonstrated a complete system of generating
plant, distribution network, and lighting apparatus, at his Menlo Park
laboratories, and he quickly received contracts from municipal authorities
to install such systems in the United States. The first complete
installation in Britain was that constructed by Sebastian de Ferranti at
Deptford for the London Electric Supply Corporation in 1889 (there had
been earlier partial schemes at Brighton in 1881, and in London).
Whereas Edison supplied direct current from his power stations, Ferranti
and most subsequent electrical engineers adopted alternating current at
high voltage, which has substantial advantages over direct current for

long-distance transmission. The Deptford plant consisted of six steam
engines driving 10,000 and 5,000 volt alternators, and amongst other
innovations it employed new types of cable and an electricity meter to
measure consumption by the customer. In America, George Westinghouse
installed hydro-electric generators at the Niagara Falls in 1893, and like
Ferranti’s system these operated on alternating current.
As with gas works at the beginning of the nineteenth century, by the end of
the century every town in Britain was promoting or seeking to promote its
own electric power station, and again like the earlier experience of gas works,
many towns found themselves with competing power stations. Enterprises
tended to merge, however, as they became larger, and the advent of the steam
turbine as a more efficient alternative to the reciprocating steam engine
promoted this process by encouraging the construction of increasingly larger
installations. By the 1920s these were being combined into national grids, and
the process of rationalization continued with fewer but larger power stations
producing more and more electricity. Oil-burning furnaces replaced coal-
burners to produce steam for the turbines in many power stations, and since
the 1950s a significant number of nuclear-fuelled power stations have also
come on line. However, a combination of economic and political factors has
ensured the retention of coal as an important fuel.
The power produced by these large stations is distributed at high voltage
over a wide area by overhead wires carried on pylons or by underground
cables. It is reduced to lower voltages by local transformers for use by the
customers, and the instant availability of electric power has become an
assumption on which modern industry and domestic life rely as a matter of
course. This universality of electric power has been a powerful factor in
increasing the mobility of industry and population.
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But perhaps the most conspicuous public service of electricity has been in

the provision of street lighting. Gas had done much to make urban streets safer
and more wholesome at night by reasonably efficient forms of lighting, which
eventually came to include automatic control through a clock and a pilot-light,
and gas mantles protected from the elements by a glass hood. But for sheer
simplicity and ease of maintenance, gas street lighting could not compete with
electricity and it was gradually displaced, while electric lighting also became
readily available in areas beyond the reach of town gas mains and in new
towns which never had cause to use gas lighting. With the introduction of the
gas-discharge lamp, moreover, filament bulbs were replaced by neon lights and
by mercury and sodium-vapour discharge lamps, which have become generally
used in the streets of human settlements all over the world. The sodium lamp,
in particular, has become very popular because of its remarkable cheapness
and its efficiency in giving a diffused light—despite its unfortunate yellow
colour. Electric power, in short, has become the largest single public service in
modern societies.
Hydraulics and pneumatics
Just as the existence of a dependable supply of water made the provision of
water-borne systems of sewage-disposal practicable, it served also to promote
the use of hydraulic power systems. The possibility of using the pressure in a
fluid both to multiply a force in its application and to transmit the force from
one part of a machine to another or to another quite different machine had
been fulfilled first by the Yorkshire cabinet-maker turned engineer, Joseph
Bramah, who took out his patent for an hydraulic press in 1795 (see Chapter
7). Progress was slow for several decades, despite the versatility of Bramah’s
machines, and the credit for developing hydraulic power into a popular means
of power transmission belongs to William Armstrong, a lawyer in Newcastle-
upon-Tyne who became one of the most innovative engineers of his generation.
He patented his idea for an hydraulic crane in 1846 and established a large
enterprise in Newcastle to manufacture it. Hydraulic power was found to be an
ideal medium for operating lock gates in harbours, for raising and swinging

movable bridges, and for working elevators in warehouses and public
buildings. By the end of the nineteenth century, hydraulic power systems
complete with pumping engines and miles of cast-iron mains had been
established for public use in several of the largest British cities, and in places
further afield including Antwerp, Melbourne, Sydney and Buenos Aires. These
remained operational until well into the twentieth century, but they could not
compete with electricity for efficiency and convenience, once this alternative
was available. Although it has declined as a public service, hydraulic power has
undergone important development in the twentieth century, being now used in