William Dibdin and the Idea of Biological Sewage Treatment

Abstract

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 problems of supplying 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 utilitiesthat it is hard not to see them as the progressive, the rational, and even the obvious, solutions to these problems. Yet, as cities acknowledged 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 problems, were no obvious or unproblematic solutions, no consensus as to the rules of administrative 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 processes had to go on at the same time.' Burn might have added that