To the Tap: Public versus Private Water Provision at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
For Citation: Business History Review 83 (Winter 2009): 675–702.
In 1858, a peculiar plague descended upon London. It wasn’t an illness, really, or an attack on the city’s dwindling agricultural lands. It wasn’t a plague that its victims could see or an infestation of anything they could catch. No, the plague of 1858 was a smell, a smell so foul and potent that the city’s residents began referring to it as “the Great Stink.” It was a smell that arose from the banks of the Thames, enveloping anything with the bad fortune to be downwind of the river and forcing even such august institutions as Parliament and the Law Courts to close not only their windows but, when the stench was bad and the temperature high, their entire offices as well.[1]
For decades, Londoners had been using the Thames as a source of drinking water, a channel of navigation, and a dumping ground for all the refuse that the growing city generated. According to the Dolphin, an angry pamphlet penned in 1827, the river was “charged with the contents of more than 130 public common sewers, the drainings from dung hills and laystalls, the refuse of hospitals, slaughter-houses, color, lead, gas and soap works, drug mills and manufactories, and with all sorts of decomposed animal and vegetable substitutes.”[2] Now the Thames was fighting back, imposing its displeasures across the city.
Initially, London’s response had been measured and slow. City and national authorities convened meetings and ordered studies and learned to cover their noses when the winds blew wrong. In 1828, a Royal Commission devoted to London’s water quality solemnly noted testimony affirming that fish from the Thames had been spotted climbing out of the water and gasping for air among the weeds and driftwood.[3] What to do with these supposedly gasping fish or the waters that surrounded them, however, was unclear. The river, after all, could not itself be ruled, and London’s municipal authorities had limited power over the various firms that brought water from outlying streams and wells into the city.
By the final decades of the nineteenth century, however, as Londoners began to grasp the connection between water and illness as well as between water and filth, city officials found ways of claiming their control over water. In a pattern that would be repeated across the European continent and into North America, municipal authorities embarked upon an infrastructural spree, building or buying waterworks at an unprecedented rate. By 1915, the United Kingdom alone had nearly eight hundred public waterworks, serving an estimated two-thirds of the population.[4] The United States similarly had 9,850 public systems by the 1920s, and France supplied two-thirds of its major cities through municipal régies by the start of World War I.[5] Technologically, these systems combined the ancient goals of water provision with modern methods of treatment and distribution. Following very much in the model of Rome’s classical emperors, nineteenth-century city officials built bridges and aqueducts for transporting potable water to distant urban sites, supplemented over time with more powerful ways of moving the water and more scientific knowledge about how to clean and treat it. Along the way, these officials and the inhabitants they served also grappled with new modes of political and economic organization, struggling to determine how to pay for increasingly expensive waterworks that still delivered something people expected to be free.
As they crafted these models, the cities of the industrial world swung wildly between the edges of what might be considered the policy pendulum of water, moving back and forth between public and private modes of provision.[6] At some moments and in some places, the political demands of public health and convenience prompted municipal authorities to claim control over water supplies and then to find some means—taxes, loans, or fees—of paying for their works. In other cases, the authorities calculated that the costs of clean and accessible water—costs that by the late nineteenth century included reservoir construction, treatment plants, miles of underground piping, and sewage removal—were simply too high to bear alone and too risky to invest in. Accordingly, authorities in these cases turned portions of their public service over to private firms, leaving them to bear the costs of capital and earn whatever profits they could. Neither pole, of course, solved the underlying issues of water. Instead, approaches from the public edge typically encountered economic problems, while their counterparts on the private side encountered political ones. What complicated matters in either case were the unremittingly high costs of providing water to urban areas, combined with the unvarying belief of even urban dwellers that water should arrive without charge. Finding a way to bridge this financial and emotive gap became the central, albeit subtle, quest of municipal water planners.
To some extent, the problem of public water provision in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a classic case of industrialization combined with governmental opposition; of municipal governments with steadily expanding powers wrestling simultaneously with the science that explained societal ills and the technologies that promised to cure them. In other areas of infrastructure—electric power, railroads, telegraphy—governments also swung, at the turn of the century, between public and private provision, struggling to cover the investment costs that these technologies demanded while retaining the right to, at the very least, regulate them in accord with the public interest.
Yet water, in many ways, was different. First, unlike railroads and telegraphs, the product itself was not new. Technology revolutionized the way in which water was delivered: it made water easier to procure and vastly safer to drink. But what came out of the tap was still familiar to consumers, who balked at paying extra for it. Their reluctance put water companies under pressure (much more so than railroad or telegraph companies) to keep prices low and hold investment spending to limits that frequently tempted governments to intervene, even when they lacked the financial resources to do so. Second, because water is so vital to survival, its provision in the nineteenth century became political in a fundamentally different way than that of transportation or electric power, where ratepayers’ grievances centered only on their money, not their lives. As societies developed the means to create ever more powerful networks of communication, transportation, and sanitation, governments around the world were inclined to provide these networks to their populations. When it came to water, however, they were compelled to act, demonstrating that they placed their citizens’ well-being above all else. Finally, although many of the industrial revolution’s technologies involved massive network effects, and even as technology expanded and conferred benefits on an increasing number of people, water also contained the potential for network contagion, meaning that bad service provision anywhere in the system could create risks that extended far beyond the network itself.
In other words, if cholera were spread through a city’s water supply, the disease did not just compromise the water system; it also compromised the city. As the details of waterborne contamination became better known and understood, municipal authorities came to view modern water systems not only as technological marvels but also, and more critically, as defensive mechanisms against some of the plagues that industrialization itself was generating.
In this paper, we use the examples of three major nineteenth-century cities—London, Philadelphia, and New York—to explore how governments and their citizens viewed the provision of what remains the world’s most strategic commodity. Nearly all the research here is based on secondary sources; all the historical evidence has been discussed and debated in earlier works. We do not, therefore, provide any radical interpretations of this history or argue in favor of any particular mode of municipal water provision. Instead, what we offer is a comparison of three cities whose histories typically are treated by separate, regional literatures; and a comparison of two countries whose evolving views of the appropriate divide between public and private realms—between governments and markets—occurred along subtly different lines. This approach allows us to explore both what is permanent about the problem of water provision—that consumers want it clean, accessible, and free—and what is mediated by the shifting forces of government policy and economic constraints. The cases of London, Philadelphia, and New York by no means suggest that there is a single or ideal way for cities to provide their citizens with water. But together they allow us to consider how cities can approach this never-ending charge, and why they shift, often dramatically, from one pole of the water-provision pendulum to the other.
Pipe Dreams: Building the Modern Water Market
London’s nineteenth-century water woes were a far cry from the ancient splendors of Rome or Lyon, blessed as they had been for centuries with consistent supplies of water and relatively clean-flowing streams. Some European cities—most notably Rome itself, along with Spoleto, Segovia, and Constantinople—maintained their Roman infrastructure in the years that followed the empire’s decline, but most of the continent returned to simpler ways, using buckets and rough-hewn cisterns to store whatever water they could find from nearby wells, springs, and rivers.[7] For nearly all of Europe, therefore, the Dark Ages were also dry and dirty, as families used increasingly tainted well water to wash themselves and their possessions and relied on beer (which was fermented and therefore relatively safe to drink) as their primary beverage.
Such was the case in medieval London, where citizens had depended for centuries on the Thames and its network of tributaries, along with shallow wells and surrounding springs. The river itself was wide and voluminous, supporting fishing and recreation, along with a steadily growing stream of transport. Singing its praises in the seventeenth century, one observer wrote that “the Thames is the privileged place for fish and ships, the glory and wealth of this city, the highway to the sea, the bringer-in of wealth and strangers.”[8] Most domestic water use, though, came from underground springs that fed wells scattered around the city’s environs. At the wellhead (some of whose sites are still discernible in London street names, such as Clerkenwell and Holywell) the water would typically flow right up to the ground, leaving residents free to cart it away in buckets or employ the services of a water carrier. By the twelfth century, the city’s wells were being celebrated for their “sweet, wholesome and clear” waters, and for their growing popularity as social destinations.[9] By contrast, Londoners generally avoided taking water from the streams that fed directly into the Thames, using them instead as rubbish conduits.
This rudimentary municipal system served London well for over a millennium. There was no need to construct additional waterworks, and no political power was exercised as a result in that direction. By the mid-thirteenth century, however, London’s population was exploding, and its water resources, for the first time, were becoming constrained. In 1237, London’s mayor obtained a concession from King Henry III to construct a conduit across the lands of a nobleman named Gilbert de Sanford, channeling waters to a proposed network of public fountains in the city and directing it toward two stated purposes: “for the poor to drink, and the rich to dress their meat.”[10] Accordingly, the city put in place what may have been the world’s first dual pricing scheme. All of London’s citizens, rich and poor, could access the conduit’s water for free, but business users were required to pay an annual fee for its upkeep. In 1327, that fee was ten shillings—roughly equivalent to the purchasing power of $400 in 2007.[11] In the deed granting perpetual access to his land, Sanford cited “the common benefit of the City of London” and waived both his rights and those of all future heirs to restrict citizens’ access to the infrastructure.[12]
Over the next three centuries, city authorities continued to build new conduits and maintain their authority over the water that flowed through them.[13] “Keepers” or “wardens of the conduit” were appointed by the city and charged, as was one William Hardy in 1310, with “faithfully caus[ing] the conduit . . . to be guarded so that brewers and fishmongers shall not use the water thereof.”[14] When brewers and fishmongers—and cooks and other businesses—used the conduit’s supply, they were compelled to pay; their rents were spent directly on the repair and maintenance of the conduit.[15]
Periodically, as the local population strained against the existing supply, the mayor and his officials would scour the surrounding countryside for new resources, which they would subsequently lease from the existing owners. In 1439, for example, the Abbot and Monastery of Westminster granted the mayor of London the right to erect a “fountain-head with fountains, vents, sesperals, cisterns and other work in the manor of Padyngtone” in exchange for the annual fee of two pounds of pepper.[16] Throughout this period, the city appears to have scrupulously maintained its dual-use policy, allowing citizens to draw freely whatever water they desired, but punishing any diversion from the conduit or unpaid use for commercial purposes. One violator of this regime, a man named William Campion, who had the audacity to tap the main conduit as it passed by his home in Fleet Street, was convicted in 1478 of having “occasion[ed] a lack of water to the inhabitants.” As punishment, he was made to drive through the streets of London with a leaking vessel of water atop his head.[17]
As London’s population began to grow at ever faster rates, however, no amount of diligence or punishment could preserve the city’s water supply at a sufficiently high level. Numerous new conduits were built—at Grass Street (1491), Bishopsgate (1513), and London Wall (1528), to name but a few—but the pace of construction proved far too slow. By the end of the sixteenth century, London was running out of water. In an effort to secure more plentiful supplies, Parliament passed the London Conduit Act in 1544, authorizing the city to take whatever land it needed to secure the necessary water and then to convey it—“free to all comers”—by pits, trenches, wellheads, and pipes to the growing population.[18] Yet even these measures were not enough. And so, in the latter decades of the sixteenth century, London’s authorities started to look for a new approach, one that would take the city’s water problems out of their hands.
The most immediate solution came from a Dutch entrepreneur named Peter Morris (variously spelled Morice and Maurice), who in 1580 proposed a double innovation: pumping water and charging money. Specifically, he presented London’s officials with a plan for using the power of the Thames to turn a waterwheel located at London Bridge. There, because of the bridge and the shape of the river at that point, the level of water was predictably high and the tides were particularly strong—high enough and strong enough, Morris demonstrated, to power a waterwheel-driven pump that could draw water from the Thames and raise it to a height of 120 feet.[19] From that height, the sheer force of the released water would enable it to flow along an extended network of pipes and directly into purchasers’ homes.
By 1581, Morris had received a five-hundred-year lease on the first arch of the London Bridge and a one-time payment of £100 (about $36,000 in current dollars).[20] By December of 1582, the system was operational, bringing water to individual households and allowing Morris to charge these newfound customers for the water that ran through his pipes.[21] His only obligation to the city was an annual lease payment of 10 shillings and a promise to maintain a traditional public fountain where citizens could draw water for free.[22]
Morris’s plan quickly inspired others to follow suit, proposing either to bring the Thames’ water to other portions of the city or to replicate the commercial elements of his London Bridge Waterworks with other, more far-flung sources. In a trend that would be repeated across the following centuries of private water provision, many of the second-wave entrepreneurs sought to differentiate themselves on taste, offering to supply London with water that was “sweeter” or “softer” than that of the nearby river. The most prominent of these new projects was initiated by a man named Edmund Colthurst, who proposed to deliver fresh water to London from springs in Hertfordshire, using a gravity-based canal to move the water to its destination. Colthurst approached the crown with his idea around 1600, but owing first to Queen Elizabeth’s due diligence and then to her death and succession by King James I, the project was delayed. Parliament eventually passed an act allowing the city to proceed with the plan in 1606, but after several years of negotiations, the city council empowered not Colthurst but Sir Hugh Myddleton, a London goldsmith, to build the canal, provided he would take upon himself the financial burdens involved.[23] Raising capital from twenty-eight shareholders or “adventurers,” Myddleton was able to begin work that year. However, disputes soon arose with landowners through whose property the so-called New River was to pass, and the venture’s funds began to dwindle. Eventually, seeing the importance of the project (and perhaps its profit-making potential), the king himself got involved. In exchange for half the venture’s profits, James I matched the contribution of the twenty-eight adventurers and helped to settle the remaining property disputes.[24] Work was completed in 1613, but the New River Company was slow in attracting consumer interest. Indeed, it was only several years after Myddleton’s death in 1636 that profits rose enough for shares in the company to pay a significant dividend.[25] Despite its slow start, however, the New River Company would go on to become the single most important player in London’s water market, supplying the vast bulk of the city’s private water supply throughout the eighteenth century.[26] By 1899, each of its shares was worth an astonishing £120,000.[27]
During this period, however, the New River was hardly alone. Instead, its success, even more so than Morris’s before it, spawned generations of competitors, each delivering privately held water to a specific geographic area.[28] The service provided by the water companies marked a significant improvement over communal fountains fed by conduits, but it was still a far cry from the kind of system we take for granted today. Water was not available at the turn of a tap, but was delivered intermittently and at low pressure. Nor was sewage part of the deal. Instead, households disposed of their own waste in cesspits, which were regularly emptied by so-called night-soil men, who collected the sewage and sold it as fertilizer.[29]
As new technologies emerged during the Industrial Revolution, the quality of service slowly improved. Companies embraced steam engines over the course of the eighteenth century and reinforced their systems of wooden pipes and mains with newly affordable iron. By 1829, as Table 1 indicates, the eight companies that would dominate the market for most of the next century were all in existence, delivering water to a reported 177,000 households in London. The market’s growth was linked directly to that of London, driven by a population swelled by migrants from Ireland and rural England, soldiers returning from the Napoleonic wars, and declining mortality rates. In 1801, the city had 959,000 inhabitants; by 1850, that number had more than doubled to 2.3 million.[30] While this growth meant new opportunities for the water companies, it also brought with it a host of new problems, including the squalor denounced by the pamphleteer who penned the Dolphin in 1827. The popularity of flush toilets, introduced in the 1770s, soon forced the city to let households connect their drains to the sewer system, effectively allowing Londoners to flush their toilets into the Thames. A growing volume of waste from the industries that attracted job-seekers to the city found its way into the river, too; the gas industry was a particularly noxious offender. Rising steamboat traffic added to the contamination and helped to churn up the increasingly murky waters.[31] The Thames, in short, was becoming a cesspool—one that served as the source for all but one of the capital’s water companies.
It wasn’t until the start of the twentieth century, however, that concern over the river’s pollution would coincide with demands to push private companies out of the water-supply business. In the interim, concern was focused largely on science: on trying to figure out why the Thames had grown so foul and how much risk this situation posed. In the 1790s, British scientists, inspired by the newly analytical chemistry coming out of Sweden and France, began for the first time to investigate the content of drinking water throughout their country. Studying the solid matter they removed from the water with filters, they quickly came to conclude, in the words of one scientist, that the vast majority of water consumed by people without a second thought was “defiled and vitiated” with “earthy, . . . living, dead, and putrid animal and vegetable substances.”[32] The presence of these substances per se was no great revelation, but the growing sense that such contamination could be harmful to human life was. It would take time, however, for this idea to gain ground, both in the medical community and among the public at large. For even as some chemists sought to design and popularize filtration mechanisms that would remove organic solids from water systems, others continued to believe that the natural flow of a river constituted a self-cleansing mechanism.[33] One eminent expert testifying before a Royal Commission in 1869, for example, proclaimed that “some of the noxious matter is removed by fish and other animal life, and a further quantity is absorbed by the growth of aquatic vegetation.”[34] Water from the Thames, he further insisted, was actually preferable for brewing the city’s beloved tea, because “to a refined taste hard water gives much the best flavour, as it leaves the disagreeable matter undissolved.”[35]
Even slower to gain ground was the notion that water could carry pathogens invisible to the naked eye. Hence, when the first of the century’s four cholera epidemics hit London in 1831 and 1832, few attributed the spread of the disease to drinking water. Among those who did was physician John Snow, who, in his 1849 pamphlet On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, argued persuasively that the substance responsible for causing cholera entered the body through the digestive tract, and that the disease could thus be transmitted through drinking water contaminated by human waste.[36] Accordingly, Snow insisted, “The sanitary measure most required in the metropolis is a supply of water . . . from some source quite removed from the sewers.”[37] In 1854, when the next cholera epidemic hit, Snow’s hypothesis and recommendations were both all but proved by the pattern of disease. First, and most famously, he demonstrated that 83 cholera deaths in the neighborhood of Soho could be traced to a single public water pump on Broad Street. Second, and perhaps even more intriguingly, he found that two separate water companies that served adjacent areas of London had witnessed sharply different death rates among their clients. Households served by the Southwark and Vauxhall company saw 315 deaths from cholera per 10,000 houses, while households served by the Lambeth, which drew its water some fifteen miles southwest of London, experienced only 37 deaths per 10,000 households.[38]
Meanwhile, over the course of the nineteenth century, Britain was also witnessing a considerable expansion of state power, moving from a loose and relatively weak central government to one that claimed authority to administer and regulate many aspects of society.[39] This was a slow shift, and by no means the product of any single-minded campaign. Philosophically, it drew on the utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham and the evolving views of John Stuart Mill. The latter increasingly viewed municipal institutions as a means for defending liberty.[40] In practice, many of the measures that increased state power were championed by reformers who sought to remedy the host of social problems wrought by rapid population growth, the rise of industry, and urbanization. Against bitter opposition from proponents of laissez-faire government, these reformers marshaled the fruits of meticulous investigations, such as activist Edwin Chadwick’s oft-cited 1842 report on the sanitary conditions of the working poor, as well as a growing body of scientific knowledge, to win support for increased regulatory authority. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, for example, established a national authority to maintain standards in the country’s welfare system; the Public Health Act of 1848 similarly established a General Board of Health to maintain the health and safety standards of public facilities.[41] These laws laid the groundwork for initial regulation of the water market.
The first effort at such regulation was in 1852, when the Metropolis Water Supply Act mandated that drinking water be drawn from points sufficiently far upstream, that it be filtered, and that reservoirs and distribution tanks be covered to protect against contamination.[42] More critically, the law also established the government’s authority over the water companies and, by extension, over the public water supply. Such authority was further expanded in 1871, when Parliament established the posts of Metropolitan Water Examiner and Water Auditor to monitor safety standards and other ratepayer interests.[43] While the regulators’ power of enforcement remained limited, the information they amassed—on highly variable water quality across the eight companies serving the city, lack of service in poorer areas, and lack of continuous service in certain others—helped cement political will for public ownership. By 1900, a report of the Royal Commission on Water Supply claimed that “it has become an almost universally accepted principle of Parliament that the water supply of urban communities should be in the hands of bodies directly representing the people.”[44]
Accordingly, Britain’s turn-of-the century debate over water supply was not strictly partisan. Instead, both Liberals and Conservatives debated the menu of options before them, tacking back and forth between consumer groups and regulatory bodies demanding government control, local authorities interested in the precise forms and costs of that control, the powerful firms maintaining that only private industry could afford the level of investment necessary for water supply and treatment, and their shareholders, who feared the effects of municipalization on their portfolios. At various points in the final decades of the century, both Liberal and Conservative governments introduced bills that would put London’s water supply in public hands. Each time, these bills were defeated, whether because politicians had their hands full with more pressing matters—most notably, Ireland’s growing clamor for independence—or because the water companies proved capable of mounting a far more disciplined and effective lobbying campaign than London’s fragmented governing bodies were able to organize, or because politicians who may have favored public control of the waterworks could not agree on how the private companies would be compensated.[45]
Finally, in addition to these shifting political tides, the fragmentation of municipal authority also posed a major structural impediment. London had sprawled organically, from the center out, over the centuries, and was governed by a motley array of vestries and parish assemblies, each supervising one of more than ninety parishes or precincts spread out over three different counties.[46] By some counts, if one included even lower-level bodies, there were more than four hundred authorities responsible for water in the metropolis.[47] The Metropolitan Board of Works, created in 1855, was intended to bring some measure of unity to this patchwork, but the Board was generally an appointed rather than an elected body, which limited its credibility and authority.[48] This proved particularly vexing when talk turned to municipalization, as Parliament did not want to endow the Board with the power to make the vast expenditures required.[49] In short, then, even when the political will existed, there was simply no credible candidate to assume control over a citywide public water system until 1888, when the Local Government Act created the London County Council, a broad-based authority above the vestries and assemblies.[50]
With this obstacle out of the way, in the end it was a Conservative government that managed to strike the delicate political balance required, passing the Metropolis Water Act of 1902 and placing London’s water at last under public ownership.[51] Previously, that same government had spent several years frustrating other groups’ efforts to pass similar legislation, but a series of severe droughts and ensuing water shortages exposed the water companies’ lack of capacity and forced the leadership’s hand.[52] After more than three hundred years in operation, London’s private water companies were out of business. The eight companies that remained were shuttered for good, receiving a total of £30,662,323—roughly $4.7 billion today—in exchange for their shares.[53] This was paid out in “Metropolitan Water Stock,” a bond issue backed by expected revenues from water rates paid by consumers, which would bear interest at a rate of up to 3 percent.[54]
A Philadelphia Story: Waterworks in the American East
An ocean away, similar arguments were leading to similar outcomes, albeit with somewhat less political controversy. Between roughly 1880 and 1920, thousands of U.S. cities that had traditionally relied upon private water supply turned instead to municipal control, building or purchasing local water companies with newfound cash raised from bond offerings. Cities that already had municipal water infrastructures—including Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Chicago—went on high-minded building sprees, investing hundreds of millions of dollars to build dams and aqueducts, lay miles of water mains, and build increasingly sophisticated filtering and treatment plants. All were heeding a clarion call to respond to a matter of social urgency based on economic logic: cities need water, the argument ran; water must be clean and cheap; and only public authorities have the means, the motives, and the wherewithal to make this amenity happen.
During the colonial period, American attempts at water distribution were “isolated and spasmodic.”[55] Although simple and small-scale systems using wooden pipes may have been built as early as 1652 in Boston and 1776 in Winston Salem, North Carolina, most colonial towns remained small enough and wet enough to make reliable use of springs, private wells, cisterns, and water carriers.[56] In 1789, however, following an outbreak of yellow fever in his home city of Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin recommended that the city build a municipal infrastructure to draw water from an outside source. At this time—nearly half a century before John Snow proved the link between wells and cholera—prevailing wisdom still held that diseases like yellow fever were caused by poor sanitation rather than degraded water supplies. Yet the basic connection between healthiness and cleanliness seemed obvious, and Franklin’s proposals (along with the money that he bequeathed the city to finance a water system) were taken seriously.[57] In 1797, following another devastating fever outbreak in 1793, Philadelphia convened a special committee of the city council to consider how to bring water to all the inhabitants of what was then the largest city in the United States. “Incited,” as they wrote, “by the general prevalence of sentiment and by the petitions of very numerous and respectable citizens,” the Watering Committee weighed both financial and geographic options, touring the area’s rivers and watersheds and debating the merits of private versus public solutions.[58] For several months, they contemplated what would have been a particularly audacious scheme: licensing a private firm to build a series of locks and canals along the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers and then channeling these waters into a Venetian-style network of urban canals. In the end, however, the Committee decided that the joint undertaking would be too expensive and complicated. Instead, they adopted a scheme put forth by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, a well-respected English engineer who happened to be visiting Philadelphia at the time, and they determined to pay for it themselves.
In engineering terms, Latrobe’s plan was bold but not unique. Indeed, bearing a striking resemblance to the Southwark works in London, it used a series of steam-driven pumps to draw water from the Schuylkill River that it raised into an elevated reservoir, and then let flow by gravity through a system of wooden pipes.[59] In financial terms, however, the scheme was unprecedented. Rather than using private monies to cover the investment costs and presuming that either the state of Pennsylvania or the newly created government of the United States would step in with funds, the members of Watering Committee essentially took the financial obligation on themselves, pledging to raise the estimated construction costs of $150,000 (about $2.5 million in today’s dollars) through voluntary subscriptions to a municipal loan.[60]
The plan was not without its frustrations. Once construction was underway, the Committee found itself woefully short of funds: “monied citizens” apparently preferred to loan their money to the United States government, which was offering an attractive 8 percent rate, and supporters of an alternative scheme organized against the Committee and its subscription offer. So Committee members, “impressed with the immense benefits to arise to the city,” advanced their own funds to the project and, when those could still not fill the financing gap, reluctantly agreed to a water tax, the promise of which convinced the Bank of the United States to lend the waterworks the funds that were still needed.
In January of 1801, the Philadelphia Waterworks at Centre Square opened at last—three years behind schedule and more than $70,000 over budget. The total cost of the project had come to $220,310, making it the single largest capital expenditure to date in the United States.[61] Almost instantly, however, it proved its mettle: clear water flowed from the Schuylkill River and helped to cleanse the filth that had befallen Philadelphia.[62] Meanwhile, as Table 2 suggests, the number of paying customers was also growing as residents came to enjoy the benefits of in-house delivery, and businesses became dependent on a steady supply of water. By 1814, 2,850 customers (mostly “dwellings, schools, and private stables”) were on the grid, contributing to an annual income for the Waterworks of over $16,000. But the costs of operating the system—primarily for wood to fuel the system’s boilers—remained higher still. Between 1799 and 1815, the Waterworks accumulated a total deficit of $552,047.73, excluding interest.
By 1811, therefore, the Watering Committee had already decided on another bold move, motivated this time by a combination of civic duty and financial duress. Focusing still on the Schuylkill, the city’s most promising water source, they agreed to build and fund another major pumping station along the river’s banks, powered entirely by water channeled through a newly constructed dam. When the Fairmount Waterworks opened in 1822, it was quickly hailed as an engineering marvel. Visitors came from around the country and even from across the ocean to peer into the waterworks’ mechanical rooms and wander around the surrounding gardens.
Again, the project was massively over budget and unprecedented for its time.[63] But the new works were also highly efficient, providing the city with a supply of fresh water that far outpaced demand. Indeed, Philadelphia’s Fairmount system would prove sufficient until well into the 1870s, supplying fresh water to a growing roster of citizens, who paid the city “water rents” based on the size of their connection to the water main.[64] By 1837, nearly fifteen hundred houses in Philadelphia had running water, and the Waterworks was enjoying a comfortable financial surplus. Visiting the city at around this time, Charles Dickens was moved to note that “Philadelphia is most bountifully provided with fresh water, which is showered and jerked about, and turned on, and poured off everywhere.”[65] And the Watering Committee, after decades of struggle, seemed happy at last to report on “the cheap and abundant supply of pure and wholesome water we now enjoy.” “Blessed are we,” they wrote, “above every other city of the Union.”[66]
As word of Philadelphia’s waterworks spread, the Fairmount system quickly became a model for others to emulate. New Orleans hired Latrobe to commence work on a steam-powered system in 1811, for example, and Cincinnati launched a similar operation in 1813.
To one city, however, Philadelphia’s early triumph also became a nagging source of embarrassment. When Philadelphia’s system first came on line in 1801, New Yorkers, too, were anticipating a new source of clean, fresh water to be provided by the recently founded Manhattan Company, which was laying the groundwork for the city’s first water system. Many years earlier, in 1774, the city government had attempted to build a water-supply system by contracting with an Irish-born engineer named Christopher Colles. Before work was completed, however, the Revolutionary War broke out, causing the remaining work to be put on hold and quickly claiming what had been built of the infrastructure as a casualty. As the newly independent city emerged from the war, it was therefore forced to rely on increasingly polluted public wells, supplemented only by the purer offerings of the Tea Water Pump, an underground spring whose owners carted their “tea water” around town and sold it, in the 1790s, for ninety-six cents a bucket.[67]
But as the city and its population entered a new phase of growth, the wells and tea water could not sustain New Yorkers for long. In the early 1790s, yellow fever struck the city, killing scores during the summer months. As politicians turned their attention to solving the mounting crisis, state assemblyman, Revolutionary War hero, and future vice president Aaron Burr lobbied the city’s Common Council, as well as his own colleagues in Albany, to authorize a private company to bring water to a parched Manhattan. Though both state and city government initially leaned toward a municipally owned system, Burr’s able maneuvering soon swayed the balance in favor of his plan. On April 2, 1799, the state legislature passed “an act for supplying the city of New-York with pure and wholesome water,” which granted a charter for the task to Burr’s own Manhattan Company. The charter gave the company the right of eminent domain over land and waters necessary to its goal, allowed it to set water rates as it saw fit, and freed it from having to repair streets damaged during the course of pipe laying. All these provisions were perpetual, provided the company could begin to offer its services within ten years.[68]
Quickly, though, it became clear that Burr was interested in water only as a means to another, less charitable, end. Relying on painstakingly cultivated alliances and deft procedural maneuvering, he had presented his bill in the final days of a busy legislative session, slipping into the charter an unprecedented clause that allowed the company to use surplus capital in any way it saw fit. Whether desperate to solve the city’s water shortage, unaware of the implications that the added clause held, or simply eager to go home, the legislators raised no objections. In effect, therefore, Burr had used the legislators’ support for a water company to create a bank, which had been his original intention. Specifically, Burr—a longtime opponent of Federalists like Alexander Hamilton, whom he would eventually engage in a fateful and fatal duel—wanted to break the monopoly of the Federalists on the city’s two financial institutions, the federally chartered Bank of the United States and the state-chartered Bank of New York.[69]
As a banking and political ploy, it was brilliant. Burr’s Manhattan Company would go on to achieve great profits and national prominence, eventually becoming Chase Manhattan in 1955. But as a water strategy, it was disastrous. Because Burr was not particularly interested in Manhattan’s water problem, his Manhattan Company consistently displayed a lackluster performance in the water sector, doing the very least it could do while still abiding by the terms of its charter. From its inauguration in 1801, the company’s water service was highly irregular and reached, at most, a third of the city’s residents. When the water did flow, it was far from “pure and wholesome,” flowing as it did from the Collect, a pond located in lower Manhattan and long since ruined by runoff from tanneries, human waste, and seepage from graveyards. By 1806, a British traveler to Manhattan noted that the city’s drainage pools “accumulate such a collection of latent filth, that the steams of it are sometimes perceptible at two miles’ distance.”[70] Residents and legislators clamored for greater investment, or for competition to Burr’s firm, but the Manhattan Company clung tenaciously to both its monopoly and its banking arm, throwing whatever resources it could muster into its financial operations, even as complaints about its service mounted and New Yorkers grew increasingly thirsty.[71]
Exasperated, city leaders began exploring alternatives to the Manhattan Company as early as 1804, but disagreement over the potential sources of water, combined with predictable opposition from the Company itself, imposed a legislative paralysis until 1833, when the city finally passed a resolution calling for legislators in Albany to nominate five commissioners to oversee the city’s water supply. Nine years later, after extensive studies, surveys, and construction works, the Croton Aqueduct was opened, a massive combination of tunnels, bridges, and embankments that brought crystal-clear water from a dammed reservoir on the Croton River forty miles south to Manhattan. Because the Manhattan Company’s monopoly only covered water drawn from sources on the island of Manhattan, the Croton Aqueduct both legally and physically circumvented the earlier charter. Unlike that charter, too, the new waterworks were controlled by the Croton Aqueduct Department, now part of New York City’s executive bureaucracy. Originally budgeted at $5 million, the project ultimately cost over $13 million and was financed through the issuance of “water stock”—effectively a series of municipal bonds issued in tranches throughout the project’s construction. Initially, the new service was slow to catch on: in 1844, the number of subscribers was around six thousand, and water from the aqueduct served mostly to feed fire hydrants and public fountains. But as cholera struck the city in the final years of the decade, tens of thousands of new subscribers flocked to connect. Thereafter, the number of subscribers continued to grow at a steady clip, as did the city’s population. By the 1880s, New Yorkers were using one hundred gallons of water a day per capita—more than any other city in the world.
Just as Croton was beginning to supply New Yorkers with steady supplies of fresh water, other cities were following similarly in its wake. Boston, which since 1795 had had a small, privately run system, opened a far larger, municipally owned system in 1848, following years of debate over the merits of public ownership. Like other Americans (then and now), Bostonians had expressed intense concern about the debt that would encumber a public system large enough to provide water to all the city’s inhabitants. In the end, however, Boston’s citizens argued that water was too important to be left in private hands. Or, as Walter Channing, dean of the Harvard Medical School and a vocal proponent of municipal waterworks, argued:
[The city] does not entrust the public education to private corporations, that men may speculate in individual culture, or popular ignorance. It does not entrust the care of the public health to private companies, which may grow rich upon disease. . . . [N]either should it for a moment admit the thought that the water men may, yes, must drink, should be doled out to them as it may suit individual caprice, or corporate enterprise.[72]
Accordingly, the city decided to trade debt for access, agreeing to finance a more expensive public system that would better meet rising demands for running water—even if, as both detractors and supporters suspected, the unwillingness of most citizens to pay the actual cost of their water meant that the city would be assuming a considerable and long-term expense.[73] In 1849, just nine months after the city’s publicly funded Cochituate Aqueduct opened for business, 10,851 private subscribers had already signed up for service; by 1852, that number had increased to 16,862.[74] The total cost to the city, not including interest and discount on loans, was $4,411,407.46.[75] Baltimore made a similar decision in 1854, acquiring a formerly private firm that, like the Manhattan Company, was facing mounting criticism over its inability to meet the city’s water needs. In Chicago, city officials likewise decided to purchase the formerly private Chicago City Hydraulic Company in 1852, citing the need to diversity the city’s water sources in the wake of a cholera epidemic.[76]
Once the major cities of the United States had built large-scale water systems and found a means to pay for them, similar arrangements were adopted across the rest of the country, gaining ground first in smaller regional centers, and then in more remote towns and villages. Between 1870 and 1897, as Table 3 shows, the number of water utilities in the United States increased from 243 to 3,196—a factor of more than thirteen. During that same period, the average population of cities and towns embracing modern water technologies fell by roughly a factor of four. What drove this expansion, and compelled even tiny towns to consider creating water utilities, was the increasingly powerful evidence emanating from the major metropolises that water-supply systems could reliably reduce mortality from disease outbreaks and contain the damage customarily wreaked by fires. During the century’s four major cholera epidemics, for example, cities with municipal water utilities consistently displayed lower death rates than those without them. They also had substantially greater success in minimizing fire damage, a record that many municipal lawmakers attributed to the pressure at which public utilities supplied their water.[77] As such trends became more widely known, ordinary citizens joined municipal authorities, insurers, and public-health reformers in demanding modern water systems, arguing, as did the Indianapolis Water Board in 1874, that given the contamination of the town’s wells with “the filth and excremental matter of seventy thousand people . . . the bare thought of using such stuff for domestic purposes is most disgusting, and if continued much longer will result in frightful epidemics.”[78]
Not all towns, however, chose to finance their water operations in the same way. Indeed, while many followed the lead of Philadelphia and Boston in constructing fully public water utilities, others moved more warily toward private systems, chartering companies that received the exclusive right to supply water to a given municipality in exchange (at least in theory) for constructing and maintaining its water infrastructure. In such arrangements, private water companies were typically granted the right to lay pipe beneath streets and to use eminent domain to acquire any property that their systems demanded. Because towns and cities could see no reason to build more than one network of pipes and sewers for a given area, they generally granted private water companies what was essentially a regulated monopoly right: the exclusive right to sell a basic service in exchange for the responsibility of providing it. When utilities were public, by contrast, the city or town absorbed both the financial responsibility and whatever profits might eventually accrue to its investment.
Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, U.S. cities moved increasingly toward a model of municipal control, following along much the same path that New York had trod in the early nineteenth century and London in its latter decades. In 1880, for example, 293 of the country’s 598 waterworks—or about 49 percent—were municipally owned. By 1920, that proportion had reached 68 percent. By contrast, though they did gradually come under greater regulation, other major utility services, including electricity, telephone service, and natural gas, all remained considerably more private. Fully 95 percent of U.S. gas utility companies in 1920 were privately owned. Likewise, privately owned utilities produced 94 percent of the country’s electricity in 1932.[79]
So what made water different? Why did it move more definitively to the public sector and stay there for considerably longer? Why did water, which, unlike electricity or telephone or gas heat, had been used and demanded by urban residents for centuries, suddenly become such a paramount concern of the state?[80]
Part of the explanation is clearly linked to public health. Once luminaries like Franklin and Snow had made the connection between water supplies and urban plagues, politicians and reformers became increasingly wary about leaving its control to private, explicitly profit-minded entities, arguing that only city authorities would be willing to make the substantial investments that were required to ensure a plentiful supply of pure and safe drinking water. Interestingly, some historians have suggested that the reformers’ concerns may have been misplaced. According to one 1999 study of typhoid rates in the United States, for example, the shift to public ownership at the turn of the twentieth century had little effect on the frequency of typhoid outbreaks caused by contaminated water.[81] Similarly, between 1880 and 1920, private water companies were actually more likely than their public counterparts to invest in the expensive filtration systems that removed human waste from water.[82] Yet the reformers who were pleading during the Progressive Era for municipal control clearly had no access to these data and no systematic way of exploring the links between private ownership and public health. Instead, they had seen the fiasco wrought by the Manhattan Company; they knew that cities like Philadelphia had become distinctly healthier following the creation of public waterworks; and they were inspired by an activist ideology of harnessing the growing power of government to the common weal. Thus, they fervently believed that municipal water meant cleaner cities and healthier, happier citizens.[83]
Meanwhile, by the end of the nineteenth century, the economic model of private water provision was also beginning to fray, partly as a result of the political logic that had put it under attack. As more and more U.S. cities either moved or threatened to acquire the private firms that provided them with water, the remaining firms began to fear, quite reasonably, for their own assets and longevity. So they engaged in what rapidly became a self-fulfilling prophecy: cutting investment out of fear of expropriation, and then being expropriated on grounds of underinvestment.[84] What made this cycle even more invidious was the problem of pricing, the same problem that beleaguers many water-privatization schemes today. If private firms were truly to run efficient water-supply systems, they needed some means of matching supply with price, charging individual consumers for the water they actually used. In practice, this meant some kind of system of metering, or at least of differentiating very large users of water from very small ones. Yet because these meters, by definition, would need to be installed in each and every household or business that drew upon the waterworks, they involved prohibitively expensive investments—investments that companies were particularly loath to make if they feared eventual expropriation. And so the companies neither conserved nor expanded, which made the cities’ arguments against them even more persuasive.[85]
Finally, some analysts of the American water market have pointed to another factor that led cities and towns to embrace municipal solutions at the turn of the twentieth century, a factor that had little to do with either public interests or private costs. Until the early decades of the nineteenth century, municipal bonds were exceedingly rare, meaning that cities had no way to raise the capital that major infrastructural investments demanded. As a result, if and when they decided to invest in infrastructure, they were forced by necessity to turn to private providers, much as the city of London had turned to Hugh Myddleton and Peter Morris in earlier centuries. After the depression that swept the United States in 1837, a small municipal-bond market emerged as cash-starved cities turned to debt as a way of covering their obligations. Much of this debt, however, was issued and held by the country’s largest cities: New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Boston.[86] New York, for instance, financed its Croton Aqueduct at this time almost entirely through municipal debt. But this nascent market came crashing to a halt after the panic of 1873, leaving would-be water authorities with no choice but to look for private solutions. As a result, as Table 3 indicates, the percentage of publicly owned water systems actually fell during the 1880s, for the first and only time. By the turn of the century, however, changes in municipal finance had allowed a robust and more stable municipal-bond market to emerge, just as such markets had appeared similarly, and somewhat earlier, in the United Kingdom.[87] Able now to draw upon a more willing pool of investors, cities—and especially small cities—rushed to borrow the funds that would enable them to build municipal waterworks. Between 1890 and 1924, the total number of waterworks in the United States rose from 1,879 to 9,850, 70 percent of which were public.[88]
Hypotheses and Implications
In retrospect, the decades at the turn of the twentieth century represented a watershed (no pun intended) in the creation of municipal water systems across the industrialized world.[89] Subsequent decades have seen these systems multiply around the world, expanding dramatically in terms of the populations reached and the technologies deployed to bring clean water to them. But the basic mechanisms of the market remain largely unchanged, as has the political pendulum that continues to drive them.
Most basically, it appears that water bears the curse of its own necessity. Because it is so vital, consumers seem patently unwilling to treat this particular commodity as a commodity. Instead, people see water as something that fluctuates between a human right and a community need, something that is provided (by gods or nature or governments), but that does not have to be paid for. This perception, as evident in contemporary India, Bolivia, and Argentina as it was in nineteenth-century London, helps to explain why economically and ideologically diverse populations share a common response to the water market.[90] Put simply, people want access to water without having to pay for it. Before the modern era, this equation played itself out at the local or individual level as households or villages secured their own water supplies. As people began to cluster in urban locations, however, and technology created the prospect of large-scale water projects, the ever-present demand for water collided with a vastly improved and far more expensive supply. The result was, and remains, a market in which price is largely dictated by political demand. At a deep and almost primal level, people believe they shouldn’t have to pay for something as natural and as ubiquitous as water. And so, even when that water comes to them through decidedly unnatural channels—when it is piped and dammed and transported over hundreds of miles—people assume that it should be free and expect their governments to comply with that expectation. The price of water, as a consequence, bears little relation to either the available supply of water or the cost of bringing it to a customer’s tap. Instead, it is generally set by what the government, rather than the market, will bear.
This relationship is then heightened by the network-contagion effect—by the biological fact that water and sanitation systems carry germs, bacteria, and effluent that spread easily among individual consumers. Because no single consumer will ever have either the interest or the financing to protect the entire system, some greater entity needs to assume authority. And because, as just noted, private firms will tend to find it difficult to raise prices sufficiently to cover the costs of protection, governments will be pulled back into the breach. In this respect, municipal water systems function essentially as public goods, and the cost of public health (here, via the prevention of waterborne illness) is assumed, or at least subsidized, by the state. What sets water apart, though, and makes it so intriguing, is that water service, unlike good air or light, can be turned off or monitored. Customers can pay for their individual water use, and often do—just as the brewers and fishmongers did in fourteenth-century London. In the aggregate, though, the fear of contagion combines with necessity to thrust water systems into the public sphere and to compel governments to treat them as if they were public goods—even if their construction or maintenance could quite reasonably be ceded to private firms.
As a substance, water’s demand is eternal, both predating civilization and enabling it. Its entry into the modern marketplace, however, has been fraught with tensions, much of which seem also to spring eternally from water’s underlying nature. Science, technology, and finance have enabled cities to control water and bring it to their citizens. But that control has been tempered, and perhaps always will be, by the depth of individuals’ demand for water and their simultaneous desire to channel, clean, soil, and drink it as if it simply fell from the sky.
[1] Stephen Halliday, The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Capital (Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire, 1999).
[2] Quoted in Norman Smith, Man and Water: A History of Hydro-Technology (New York, 1975), 113.
[3] Royal Commission on the Water Supply of the Metropolis, British Parliamentary Papers 1828 IX, 69–70. Cited in Anne Hardy, “Water and the Search for Public Health in London in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Medical History 28 (1984): 262.
[4] William A. Robson, “The Public Utility Services,” in A Century of Municipal Progress: The Last Hundred Years, ed. Harold J. Laski, W. Ivor Jennings, and William A. Robson (London, 1935), 318–19.
[5] Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore, 2000), 120; Christelle Pezon, “The Role of ‘Users’: Cases in Drinking Water Services Development and Regulation in France: An Historical Perspective,” Utilities Policy 15 (June 2007): 113; and Christelle Pezon, “La deregulation discrete de la distribution d’eau potable en France et l’emergence d’un nouvel acteur collectif, les abonnés,” Flux, no. 48–49 (2002): 63.
[6] Similar debates over public versus private provision were occurring in other industries as well during this period. See, for instance, Robert Millward, “Emergence of Gas and Water Monopolies in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Contested Markets and Public Control,” in New Perspectives on the Late Victorian Economy: Essays in Quantitative Economic History, ed. James Foreman-Peck (Cambridge, U.K., 1991); and Robert Millward, Private and Public Enterprise in Europe: Energy, Telecommunications, and Transport, 1830–1990 (Cambridge, U.K., 2005).
[7] C. E. N. Bromehead, “The Early History of Water Supply (Continued),” Geographical Journal 99, no. 4 (1942): 188; Norman Smith, Man and Water, 95.
[8] Cited in Hardy, “Water and the Search for Public Health in London,” 251.
[9] William Fitzstephen, “Descriptio Londoniae,” quoted in H. W. Dickinson, Water Supply of Greater London (London, 1954), 7.
[10] H. W. Dickinson, Water Supply of Greater London (London, 1954), 1–9; and John Stow, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster (London, 1754), vol. 1, p. 26, quoted in London Water Supply: Report by the Clerk of the Council on the Action of the Council with Regard to the Water Supply of London, June 1905, London Metropolitan Archives LCC/CL/WAT/01/45.
[11] Dickinson, Water Supply of Greater London, 10. Current value of fee estimated using Lawrence H. Officer and Samuel H. Williamson’s purchasing-power calculator at http://www.measuringworth.com, accessed 20 Sept. 2007.
[12] Quoted in Dickinson, Water Supply of Greater London, 9.
[13] According to Dickinson, the authorities toyed briefly with what we would now call privatization in 1368, when they granted a ten-year lease to a private operator. But the mayor and the commonalty quickly “repented of their ill-doing” and issued no further such leases.
[14] Quoted in Dickinson, Water Supply of Greater London, 9.
[15] See London Water Supply: Report by the Clerk of the Council, on the Action of the Council with Regard to the Water Supply of London, June 1905, 5. For more on the water bearers, see “Rules, Ordinaunces, and Statutes made by the Rulers, Wardens, and Fellowship of the Brotherhood of Saint Cristofer of the Water Bearers of London,” Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, vol. 4 (1875), 55.
[16] Dickinson, Water Supply of Greater London, 11.
[17] Ibid.
[18] London Water Supply: Report by the Clerk of the Council on the Action of the Council with Regard to the Water Supply of London, June 1905.
[19] For more on developments in pumping technology during this period, see Dickinson, Water Supply of Greater London, 15–21.
[20] G. C. Berry, “Sir Hugh Myddelton and the New River,” in Water-Supply and Public Health Engineering, ed. Denis Smith (Aldershot, 1999), 47.
[21] Joseph Fletcher, “Historical and Statistical Account of the Present System of Supplying the Metropolis with Water,” Journal of the Statistical Society of London 8 (June 1845): 150.
[22] Dickinson, Water Supply of Greater London, 20–22.
[23] Berry, “Sir Hugh Myddelton and the New River,” 46–52.
[24] Dickinson, Water Supply of Greater London, 34–35.
[25] William Matthews, Hydraulia: An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Water Works of London, and The Contrivances for Supplying Other Great Cities, in Different Ages and Countries (London, 1835), 49–55. See also Berry, “Sir Hugh Myddelton and the New River,” 48–78.
[26] Anne Hardy, “Water and the Search for Public Health in London in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Medical History 28 (1984): 252.
[27] Dickinson, Water Supply of Greater London, 35.
[28] Similar, albeit not identical, developments were also underway elsewhere in the United Kingdom. See J. A. Hassan, “The Growth and Impact of the British Water Industry in the Nineteenth Century,” Economic History Review 38, no. 4 (Nov. 1985), pp. 531–47.
[29] Nicola Tynan, “Private Water Supply in Nineteenth Century London: Re-assessing the Externalities,” paper given at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Summer Institute Workshop on the Development of the American Economy, Cambridge, Mass., July 17–20, 2000, 22.
[30] Tynan, “Private Water Supply in Nineteenth Century London,” 11.
[31] Hardy, “Water and the Search for Public Health in London,” 262–63.
[32] Quoted in Hardy, “Water and the Search for Public Health in London,” 258–59.
[33] Hardy, “Water and the Search for Public Health in London,” 265–66.
[34] Mr. Way, testifying before the Royal Commission on Water Supply. See Royal Commission on Water Supply: Report of the Commissioners, 1869, London Metropolitan Archives, ACC/2558/CH/1/305–7, lxxiv.
[35] Ibid., lxviii.
[36] Smith, Man and Water, 115–16; John Snow, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera (London, 1849).
[37] Snow, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, 30.
[38] John Snow, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, Second Edition, Much Enlarged (London, 1855).
[39] For a discussion of how this development played out in the British water industry outside of London, see Hassan, “The Growth and Impact of the British Water Industry in the Nineteenth Century,” 531–47. For a more general description, see Malcolm Falkus, “The Development of Municipal Trading in the Nineteenth Century,” Business History (1977): 134–61; and Robert Millward, “The Political Economy of Urban Utilities,” in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. 3, ed. Martin Daunton (Cambridge, U.K., 2000), 315–49.
[40] For Mill’s specific thoughts on municipal water, and his influence on the reformer Edwin Chadwick, see Pedro Schwartz, “John Stuart Mill and Laissez Faire: London Water,” Economica 33, no. 129 (1966): 71–83.
[41] For a detailed study of the politics leading up to passage of these and other such laws, see Oliver MacDonagh, Early Victorian Government, 1830–1870 (London, 1977), 1–21, 133–48; and David Roberts, Victorian Origins of the British Welfare State (New Haven, 1960), 36–45 and 70–85.
[42] Smith, Man and Water, 116; London Water Supply, Report by the Clerk of the Council on the Action of the Council with Regard to the Water Supply of London, June 1905.
[43] Asok Kumar Mukhopadhyay, “The Politics of London Water,” London Journal, 2, no. 2 (1975): 207–24.
[44] Report of the Royal Commission on Water Supply, 23 February 1900, London Metropolitan Archives LCC/CL/01/45.
[45] Asok Kumar Mukhopadhyay, Politics of Water Supply: The Case of Victorian London (Calcutta, 1981), 30–56.
[46] David Owen, The Government of Victorian London, 1855–1889: The Metropolitan Board of Works, the Vestries, and the City Corporation (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 23–24.
[47] John Davis, Reforming London: The London Government Problem, 1855–1900 (Oxford, 1988), 49.
[48] Ibid., 12–13.
[49] Ibid., 47–50.
[50] Ibid.; Falkus, “The Development of Municipal Trading,” 138.
[51] Mukhopadhyay, “The Politics of London Water,” 207–24.
[52] Mukhopadhyay, Politics of Water Supply, 137–60.
[53] Dickinson, Water Supply of Greater London, 126.
[54] The Metropolis Water Act, 1902.
[55] George W. Fuller, “Water-Works,” Proceedings of the ASCE 53 (Sept. 1927), 1587.
[56] Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore, 2000), 17–42.
[57] Henry Ralph Ringe, “Philadelphia,” in “Notes on Municipal Government: The Relation of the Municipality to the Water Supply: A Symposium,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 30 (Nov. 1907): 134–39; Melosi, The Sanitary City, 30–34.
[58] Report to the Select and Common Councils on the Progress and State of the Water Works, Watering Committee, 24 Nov. 1799, p. 4, Philadelphia Water Department Archives.
[59] The resemblance of the Philadelphia scheme to the Southwark system was suggested by Jane Mork Gibson, a long-serving historian at the Philadelphia Water Department. For the plan itself, see “View of the Practicability and Means of Supplying the City of Philadelphia with Wholesome Water,” letter from B. Henry Latrobe to John Miller, 29 Dec. 1798 (Philadelphia, 1799), Philadelphia Water Department Archives.
[60] Report to the Select and Common Councils on the Progress and State of the Water Works, Watering Committee, 24 Nov. 1799, Philadelphia Water Department Archives.
[61] See Report of the Committee for the Introduction of Wholesome Water into the City of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1801), 13, Philadelphia Water Department Archives.
[62] Yellow fever still periodically visited Philadelphia, but never again with the vengeance that had characterized its plagues in the last years of the eighteenth century. See J. H. Powell, Bring Out Your Dead: The Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793 (Philadelphia, 1949), 282.
[63] The final price tag was $432,512. See Nelson Blake, Water for the Cities: A History of the Urban Water Supply Problem in the United States (Syracuse, 1956), 87–88.
[64] Ringe, “Philadelphia,” 134–39; Melosi, The Sanitary City, 30–34.
[65] Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (London, 1842); quoted in Jane Mork Gibson, “The Fairmount Waterworks,” Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin 84, nos. 360, 361 (1988): 28.
[66] Annual Report of the Watering Committee, 1836; quoted in Alice Outwater, Water: A Natural History (New York, 1996), 138.
[67] Gerard T. Koeppel, Water for Gotham: A History (Princeton, 2000), 28–69; David Cutler and Grant Miller, “Water, Water Everywhere: Municipal Finance and Water Supply in American Cities,” paper given at the NBER Corruption and Reform Conference, Salem, Mass., July 30–31, 2004, 14–17.
[68] Ibid.
[69] Beatrice G. Reubens, “Burr, Hamilton and the Manhattan Company: Part I: Gaining the Charter,” Political Science Quarterly, 72, no. 4 (1957): 578–607.
[70] John Melish, quoted in Outwater, Water: A Natural History, 139.
[71] Melosi, The Sanitary City, 36–37; Koeppel, Water for Gotham, 70–101.
[72] Walter Channing, Parliamentary Sketches, and Water Statistics (Boston, 1845), quoted in John B. Blake, “Lemuel Shattuck and the Boston Water Supply,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 29 (1955): 557.
[73] For more on this debate, see Blake, “Lemuel Shattuck and the Boston Water Supply,” 554–62; and Lemuel Shattuck, Letter from Lemuel Shattuck, in Answer to Interrogatories of J. Preston, in Relation to the Introduction of Water into the City of Boston (Boston, 1845), 19–27.
[74] Outwater, Water: A Natural History, 138; and Nathaniel J. Bradlee, History of the Introduction of Pure Water into the City of Boston, With a Description of Its Cochituate Water Works (Boston, 1868), 296; Report of the Cochituate Water Board, to the City Council of Boston, for the Year 1852 (Boston City document, no. 7, 1853), 9–10. Cited in Blake, “Lemuel Shattuck and the Boston Water Supply,” 561.
[75] Boston, Auditor of Accounts, Thirty-Ninth Annual Report of the Receipts and Expenditures of the City of Boston, and the County of Suffolk, for the Financial Year 1850-51 (Boston City document, no. 49, 1851), pp. 126-135. Cited in Blake, “Lemuel Shattuck and the Boston Water Supply,” 561.
[76] Melosi, The Sanitary City, 79. For a more complete history of Chicago’s waterworks, see Louis P. Cain, Sanitation Strategy for a Lakefront Metropolis: The Case of Chicago (DeKalb, Ill., 1978).
[77] Scott E. Masten, “Public Utility Ownership in Nineteenth-Century America: The ‘Aberrant’ Case of Water,” American Law and Economics Association working paper no. 1, 2007, 11–12.
[78] Quoted in Indianapolis Sentinel, 28 Mar. 1874, 4.
[79] Werner Troesken, “The Sources of Public Ownership: Historical Evidence from the Gas Industry,” Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization 13, no. 1 (1997): 13; and Edison Electric Institute, Historical Statistics of the Electric Utility Industry through 1992 (Washington, D.C., 1995), table 14, p. 86.
[80] This question has long aroused interest among economists, political scientists, and historians. Key works include Delos F. Wilcox, Municipal Franchises: A Description of the Terms and Conditions upon which Private Corporations Enjoy Special Privileges in the Streets of American Cities, vol. 1 (Rochester, N.Y., 1910); and George L. Priest, “The Origins of Utility Regulation and the ‘Theories of Regulation’ Debate,” Journal of Law and Economics 36 (Apr. 1993): 289–323.
[81] Werner Troesken, “Typhoid Rates and the Public Acquisition of Private Waterworks, 1880–1920,” Journal of Economic History 59, no. 4 (1999): 927–48. For a similar argument in the British context, see R. Wood, “Mortality and Sanitary Conditions in the ‘Best Governed City in the World’—Birmingham, 1870–1910,” Journal of Historical Geography 4 (1978): 53–56.
[82] Troesken, “Typhoid Rates,” 927–48.
[83] Melosi, The Sanitary City, 117–23.
[84] Werner Troesken and Rick Geddes, “Municipalizing American Waterworks, 1897–1915,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 19 (Oct. 2003): 373–400.
[85] Keith J. Crocker and Scott E. Masten, “Prospects for Private Water Provision in Developing Countries: Lessons from Nineteenth Century America,” in Thirsting for Efficiency: The Economics and Politics of Urban Water System Reform, ed. M. Shirley (Washington, D.C., 2002); and Masten, “Public Utility Ownership in Nineteenth-Century America.” For a similar dynamic regarding London water firms, see Millward, “The Political Economy of Urban Utilities,” 331–32.
[86] In 1843, for instance, nearly half the total debt of U.S. cities was held by New York City alone. See A. M. Millhouse, Municipal Bonds: A Century of Experience (New York, 1936), esp. table 12, p. 33.
[87] For a discussion of the evolution of municipal bonds, see Millhouse, Municipal Bonds; and Ernest S. Griffith, History of American City Government: The Progressive Years and Their Aftermath, 1900–1920 (New York, 1974). For an analysis of earlier problems with state-raised debt, see Arthur Grinath III, John Joseph Wallis, and Richard E. Sylla, “Debt, Default and Revenue Structure: The American State Debt Crisis in the Early 1840s,” NBER Working Paper Series on Historical Factors in Long Run Growth, Mar. 1997. For developments in the United Kingdom, see Falkus, “The Development of Municipal Trading in the Nineteenth Century,” 134–61.
[88] David Cutler and Grant Miller, “Water, Water, Everywhere: Municipal Finance and Water Supply in American Cities,” NBER, Mar. 2005, table 1.
[89] One could argue that the turning point actually began in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, especially if one focuses on urban areas of Britain outside of London. For representative data, see Hassan, “The Growth and Impact of the British Water Industry in the Nineteenth Century,” 531–47; and Falkus, “The Development of Municipal Trading in the Nineteenth Century,” 134–61.
[90] Indeed, Trentmann and Taylor argue that tap water was essentially the first consumer good. See Frank Trentmann and Vanessa Taylor, “From Users to Consumers: Water Politics in Nineteenth-Century London,” in The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World, ed. Frank Trentmann (Oxford, 2006), 53–79.