William Dibdin and the Idea of Biological Sewage Treatment

Abstract

William Dibdin and the Idea of Biological Sewage Treatment CHRISTOPHER HAMLIN During the second half of the 19th century cities and towns in industrialized nations began to accept responsibility for the technical problems of urban life, and especially the sanitary problems of sup­ plying the public with good water and removing refuse and sewage. The English lawyer Edwin Chadwick is commonly credited with launching a “sanitary movement” in the 1840s that brought cities to accept these responsibilities. So familiar are Chadwick’s solutions—an ample and constant supply of pure water, water closets to flush away wastes for innocuous disposal, and public administration of utilities— that it is hard not to see them as the progressive, the rational, and even the obvious, solutions to these problems. Yet, as cities acknowledged sanitary responsibilities they found that Chadwick’s neat package of integrated administrative and technical solutions was bound with little more than wishful thinking. Questions of what the responsibilities were, and whose they were, remained unsettled. For many sanitary problems, there were no obvious or unproblematic solutions, no consensus as to the rules ofadministrative and engineering practice. Even when a problem had been accepted as a public concern, it was not always clear on what criteria rival technical solutions were to be compared. J. L. Burn has written of this period that “there had to be trial and error in the technological as well as the administrative field, and, embarrassingly, these two pro­ cesses had to go on at the same time.”1 Burn might have added that Dr. Hamlin is assistant professor in the Department of History and the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Notre Dame. He thanks Fern Hamlin,Joel Tarr, and several referees for their suggestions, and also the archivists and librarians at the Greater London Council Record Office, the Guildhall Record Office, the Institution of Civil Engineers, and Trinity College, Dublin, for their gracious assistance. Versions of this paper were presented at the University of Wisconsin— Madison in 1981 and at Amherst College in 1983. !W. L. Burn, The Age of Equipoise: A Study of the Mid-Victorian Generation (New York, 1965), p. 137.©1988 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/88/2902-0002$01.00 189 190 Christopher Hamlin technical and administrative solutions coevolved: water and sewage schemes were introduced to solve problems defined by politicians and administrators, while sanitary administration and politics were always constrained by technical capabilities.2 The contact filter, developed in the early 1890s, was one of the first of the modern “biological” processes of sewage disposal. It was part of a conceptual revolution of the principles of sewage treatment that occurred in the 1890s, the replacement of a philosophy that saw sew­ age purification as the prevention of decomposition with one that tried to facilitate the biological processes that destroy sewage naturally. Yet, the filter itself was developed in a political context to meet ends that were primarily political. Its developer, William Joseph Dibdin (1850—1925), was chief chemist for the governing bodies of greater London, the Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW), and its successor, the London County Council (LCC), from 1882 to 1897. As such, he was the official responsible for the condition of the Thames estuary into which greater London’s sewage flowed. During Dibdin’s tenure, there was great public pressure on the MBW and the LCC to act boldly, responsibly, and progressively to end pollution of the estuary, and yet to do so cheaply. There were no objective criteria of success in such an endeavor; the relevance of dissolved oxygen (D.O.) and biological oxygen demand (B.O.D.) was beginning to be recognized, and Dibdin had an important part in developing and extending these measures, but they had not yet achieved the status of indicators defining the condition of the river. Instead, what mattered was the public’s perception of the ef­ fectiveness of sewage treatment. Hence, in Dibdin’s position, technical means—sewage treatment processes—were being used to meet publicrelations ends, convincing the public that the responsible authorities were taking responsible action. It was in such a context that Dibdin...