History
The reservoirs were completed in 1872 to provide clean drinking water to Greenock. The construction was authorised by an Act of Parliament in 1866 following the typhus epidemic of 1864, related to a continuing problem with unsafe water, which resulted in thousands of deaths in the town.
Read more about this topic: Gryffe Reservoir
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It’s not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)