Edwin Chadwick and the Engineers, 1842—1854: Systems and Antisystems in the Pipe-and-Brick Sewers War CHRISTOPHER HAMLIN To the English sanitary reformer Edwin Chadwick, author of the famous Report of an Inquiry into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842), goes credit for recognizing the central importance of public works—waterworks, sewers, betterventilated streets and houses—to public health. Chadwick’s career as a public health official lasted only from 1848 to 1854, yet his influence was great. In a broad sense, the administrative structures, the sanitary sensibilities, and the technologies (e.g., indoor running water and water closets) he developed or endorsed were adopted, and on great scale: by 1905, local authority debt in England and Wales for waterworks and sewers was nearly one hundred million pounds.1 One might think engineers would have aligned themselves with Chadwick’s programs—he brought them business. In fact, however, Chadwick’s relations with engineers were wretched. For Chadwick, mid-century British civil engineers were part of the problems, not the solutions. He saw them as both loyal to a primitive laissez-faire and in cahoots with the most corrupt and irrational institutions of local government: the ancient municipal corporations, sewers commis sions, and navigation trusts. He represented their works as hyperexpensive , uninformed by science, even dangerous. Worse, they clung to obsolete doctrines and rejected truths from outsiders. Historians, even those critical of Chadwick, have shared this view. They have seen Dr. Hamlin is associate professor of history and the history and philosophy of science at the University of Notre Dame. His research was supported by National Science Foundation grant DIR-8804685. An earlier version of the article was presented at University College, London, in May 1990, and he thanks seminar participants and Gerald Berk, Thomas P. Hughes, Joel Tarr, and David E. Wright for criticisms and suggestions. 'See the “35th Annual Report of the Local Government Board,” Parliamentary Papers (hereafter PP), 1905-6, vol. 35 [cd. 3105], p. cciii.© 1992 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/92/3304-0004$01.00 680 Systems and Antisystems in the Pipe-and-Brick Sewers War 681 engineers as key actors in Chadwick’s downfall, collaborating with tightfisted politicians to block needed improvement.2 At the center of Chadwick’s troubles with engineers is an obscure technical controversy over sewer design, the “pipe-and-brick” sewers war of 1852—54. On one side were Chadwick and a handful of marginal engineers who advocated a novel system of small-bore pipe sewers; on the other, prominent members of the Institution of Civil Engineers, notably Thomas Hawksley, a leading water engineer, and Joseph Bazalgette, later builder of London’s main drainage, who opposed this novelty.3 Like many technical controversies, this one took place on many levels. Facts were in dispute: was there really mud in certain sewers? How fast did a sewer of given design discharge a given amount of water? There were also conflicts about the nature of expertise, the proper institutional and social framework for sewerage projects, and what constituted success or failure. The two sides even disagreed about what they were disagreeing about; only one side (the 2For example, M. W. Flinn writes of Chadwick as “sickened by the squandering of public money in purchasing the services of ill-qualified quacks . . . the main weight of his criticism fell upon the engineers.” Likewise, Chadwick’s pipe sewer is seen as “so sensible that its subsequent universal adoption has obscured its radical nature at the time.” See M. W. Flinn’s “Introduction” to Edwin Chadwick, Report ofan Inquiry into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, ed. M. W. Flinn (Edin burgh, 1965), pp. 60-61. See also S. E. Finer, The Life and Times ofSir Edwin Chadwick (London, 1952), pp. 439—52; R. A. Lewis, Edwin Chadwick and the Public Health Movement (London, 1952), pp. 222—23, 295—300. Anthony Brundage’s England’s “Prussian Minister": Edwin Chadwick and the Politics of Government Growth, 1832—1854 (University Park, Pa., 1988), is critical of Chadwick but does not significantly depart from earlier views of engineers (see p. 151). A...