History
As an outgrowth of the Industrial Revolution, many cities in Europe and North America grew in the 19th century, frequently leading to crowding and increasing concerns about public health. As part of a trend of municipal sanitation programs in the late 19th and 20th centuries, many cities constructed extensive sewer systems to help control outbreaks of disease such as typhoid and cholera. Initially these systems discharged sewage directly to surface waters without treatment. As pollution of water bodies became a concern, cities added sewage treatment plants to their systems. Most cities in the United States underwent their sanitary revolutions between 1900 and 1935, by adding more expensive sewer systems and other technology to rid themselves of bad bacteria by chlorinating water and filtering water and sewage. In areas where there was surface pollution near the shore, such as Cleveland, extended intake systems were put out into the water to reduce contamination in drinking water. In cities during this period, there were reductions in diseases, such as typhoid fever which went from 35 per 10,000 to less than 5 per 10,000 in the population. These early sewer systems can be accredited with a rise in population in cities because life expectancy increased and disease went down.
Read more about this topic: Sanitary Sewer
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“If you look at the 150 years of modern China’s history since the Opium Wars, then you can’t avoid the conclusion that the last 15 years are the best 15 years in China’s modern history.”
—J. Stapleton Roy (b. 1935)