Abel Wolman (1892-1989): Sanitary Engineer of the World

Abstract

Abel Wolman was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1892, the fourth of six children of Polish-Jewish immigrant parents.1 He graduated from a local public high school and then attended the Johns Hopkins University. When the university opened an engineering school in 1913, Wolman joined the first civil engineering class and graduated in 1915. He spent a year in the US Public Health Service studying the water quality of the Potomac River and then joined the Maryland State Department of Health as a sanitary engineer. His job required the inspection of all water and wastewater treatment plants, but Wolman was also actively involved in research and publication. In 1919, together with a chemist, Linn Enslow, he published an article describing a test for chlorine absorption, which established a controlled method of chlorination of municipal water supplies.2 This process transformed water treatment and would later bring safe water supplies to much of the world. In Baltimore, Wolman was the architect of the city's expanded water supply and sewage treatment plants built in the 1930s. He projected the city's future water needs and arranged for dams and reservoirs. Later, as an international consultant, he brought his extensive and impressive knowledge of sanitary engineering to many countries: first to Israel, then to over 50 countries across Asia, Latin America, and Africa. As a member of the first United States delegation to the World Assembly of the World Health Organization, he cajoled and bullied the other members into making water and sanitation a top priority. Subsequently, he made frequent trips to Geneva, Switzerland, as a consultant to the World Health Organization. In 1921, Wolman began lecturing on sanitary engineering at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. His energy, wit, and lively intellect delighted the students and immensely increased the popularity of the courses in sanitary engineering.3 Wolman saw himself primarily as a practicing engineer, however, and resisted the idea of full-time teaching. When he was repeatedly urged to become professor of civil and sanitary engineering, he submitted what he thought would be an unreasonable list of requirements before he would accept the position.4 To his dismay, the university immediately accepted his conditions, and he became professor and chairman of departments in both the School of Arts and Sciences and of the School of Hygiene and Public Health. With an amazing capacity for hard work, Wolman also became associate editor of the American Journal of Public Health, editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Water Works Association, editor of the Manual of Water Works Practice, and editor-in-chief of Municipal Sanitation. He published hundreds of articles throughout his long career, including the one excerpted here. Some of these were gathered into a book, Water, Health and Society.5 In his later years, Wolman became involved in the public health issues surrounding the development of atomic energy resources and insisted on extensive research into the geologic, hydrologic, and demographic conditions for any proposed location of a nuclear power plant.1 Spritely and professionally active until the very end, Abel Wolman died at home in 1989 at the age of 96 years. n