2006 Issue

www.utahengineerscouncil.org 15 UECJOURNAL February 2006 SOCIETY FORUM AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERS As public water systems became more common, concerns about the quality of the water used for public water supplies arose. The Massachusetts State Board of Health asked Professor of Chemistry William Ripley Nichols at the - Massachusetts Insti- tute of Technology (M.I.T.) to set up the first Sanitary Chemistry Laboratory in 1874 to perform water analyses. Ellen Swallow, the first coed at M.I.T. who graduated with a BS degree in Chemistry, did most of the analyses at the new Sani- tary Chemistry Laboratory. She went on to become one of the foremost sanitary chemists in the United States. The Massa- chusetts State Board of Health also estab- lished the Lawrence Experiment Station in 1887 to research the treatment of wastewater. Allen Hazen, George Fuller, and others demonstrated that wastewater treatment was a biochemical process in addition to a physical process at the Lawrence Experiment Station. Their find- ings were made possible by the newly-dis- covered discipline of bacteriology that added water microbiology to environ- mental engineering. While the pioneering work that underpinned the emerging profession was being performed in Massachusetts, ad- vances were also being made in other ar- eas of the country by other famous pio- neers such as George E.Waring, a leading proponent of separate sewers, James P. Kirkwood who constructed one of the first slow sand filters for Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1871, and Rudolph Hering, the “Dean of Sanitary Engineering” so recog- nized for preparing water supply and treat- ment studies for 150 cities. A discipline is born when the develop- ment of knowledge and its application evolves from individual experimentation into a formal course of study. In 1889, M.I.T. established the first program in Sani- tary Engineering by incorporating courses in sanitary chemistry and sanitary biology into civil engineering and forming a new department named Civil and Sanitary En- gineering to offer undergraduate degrees in Civil Engineering and Sanitary Engi- neering. Ten years later, only one other school, the University of Illinois, offered a degree program in Sanitary Engineering. A survey of the profession in 1899 found that there were 89 engineering schools with 9,679 students, of which only 19 were en- rolled in Sanitary Engineering. That year 1,413 engineering degrees awarded, only one was in Sanitary Engineering. These two programs were joined by one at Harvard University in 1911 under the leadership of George C. Whipple. He had been a biologist at the BostonWaterWorks for eight years after graduating fromM.I.T. and a member of Hazen, Whipple and Fuller, water and wastewater consultants in New York City since 1903. Whipple joined forces with his professor Sedgwick at M.I.T. and in 1913 the M.I.T.-Harvard working at the Lawrence Experiment Station, Allen Hazen had also examined chemical precipitation and sedimentation processes and his 1904 paper, “On Sedi- mentation,” became one of the classic pa- pers on sedimentation theory and design. In 1907, he summarized water treatment plant design in his book, Clean Water and How to Get It. Leonard Metcalf and Harrison P. Eddy, consulting engineers in Boston, brought the best of American wastewater technology together for all en- gineers in 1915 with the publication of American Sewerage Practice. Design engineering was advanced fur- ther through the efforts of GordonMaskew Fair, an immigrant from South Africa via Germany and a graduate of the Harvard Sanitary Engineering program. After join- ing the Harvard faculty in 1918 he set about to prove his belief that a set of theo- retical principles governed a wide range of artificial and natural purification pro- cesses — and that these could be specified continued on following page ▲ The development of the environmental engineering profession over its first hundred years created a culture apart from the other engineering disciplines due its inclusion of chemists, industrial hygienists, and biologists. Although most environmental engineers were trained as civil engineers, they were generally ignored within ASCE which was dominated by transportation and structural engineers. School of Public Health was established. This association enabled the Harvard Sani- tary Engineering program to maintain a focus on public health engineering in ad- dition to customary civil engineering. Design engineering evolved from ex- perience rather than from theory. Empiri- cism dominated process design and prac- tices for environmental control. While inmathematical language so that engineers could use an orderly process of calcula- tion in designing treatment works for wa- ter and air, a precursor of today’s empha- sis of mathematical modeling and the key to computerization. His success in developing the theory of purification