A Hot Day in August



 The train was late. Waiting on the train platform in Middletown, Connecticut early in the morning in August 1910, James A. Newlands could tell it would be a hot humid day.  Mr. Newlands worked for the Connecticut State Laboratory, located on the campus of Wesleyan University in a broken down old shed.  Although they would soon move to better quarters in the physics building, Newlands wished that the lab was back at Yale University, from which they had recently moved.  His thoughts

 were interrupted  by the whistle announcing the arrival of New York - Hartford train.  Wooden boxes of crushed ice were lifted down from the baggage car, and Newlands loaded his cart and took them back to the lab.  He unpacked clear glass bottles containing water samples from the Greenwich Water Company.

The Greenwich Water Company supplied distribution water to the built-up areas of Greenwich and Port Chester, New York.  Water was distributed from reservoirs through pipes to homes and public pumps.  The water company wanted to deliver a good product, so they treated the water with alum to clarify it, forced it through beds of sand and charcoal to strain out particles and improve the taste (like a giant Britta filter) and treated it with chlorine.  This was important because it was known that impure water could cause disease.  A London doctor had traced a cholera outbreak to contaminated water from a particular pump, and about twenty years previously it was shown that typhoid fever could be caught from water contaminated with sewage.

 

The State Laboratory at Yale University
(used with permission)



This is where James A. Newlands came in.  He evaluated the water for acidity, color and turbidity.  He measured the presence of nitrogen compounds that would show whether the water would support the growth of bacteria.  He placed samples of water on plates of “gelatine” to see how much bacteria it contained.  And he incubated test tubes of sample to see if any bacteria would produce gas from sugars, indicating the presence of fecal contamination.

There was bad news the next day when he looked at the plates.  There were high levels of bacteria in general, and the tests for fecal bacteria were positive.  Newlands immediately telegraphed the Health Officer of Greenwich so he could issue an alert warning the citizens to boil the water before drinking it. 

This wasn’t unusual.  James A. Newlands contributed data for a report that the New York State Health Department produced in 1910, describing all the water distribution systems in the state, including the Greenwich Water Company (because they supplied the water to Port Chester, New York). The report stated that high turbidity levels meant that the filters were not working very well, and that the water tended to develop a bad odor and taste in July, August and September.

Within five years, Greenwich would have its own laboratory, quickly processing water samples from the distribution system and public and private wells, and it still does this today.  John A. Newlands went on to found his own private laboratory in the Hartford area.  His scenario on that hot August day has been repeated many hundreds of times in the century that has since passed.  Laboratories find out that drinking water is contaminated, and people are warned not to drink it until the problem is fixed.

Sources:

Sedgewick, 1895

NY State Board of Health, 1910

Foote, 1939

Williston, 1891

Letter from Henry Souther Laboratories, Newlands Sanitary Lab Division, June 5, 1998