The Blue Death

by Dr. Robert D. Morris

  Altona and Hamburg were separate cities, but Hamburg had grown to the point where it subsumed its smaller neighbor. Both cities had similar populations living under similar conditions and both drew their water from the Elbe River. The two cities had grown together in such a way that Altona could be said to differ from Hamburg in only two important aspects. First, Altona filtered its drinking water. Second, very few of its residents died of cholera.

  Altona in fact had filtered its water since 1859. Officials in Hamburg had first announced plans to filter its water in 1860, but had spent the next thirty-three years wrangling over the design of the filters, the cost of the system, and above all who should pay for it. Hamburg maintained a titular government, but commerce was king and business interests seemed to have the final say in all decisions. The head of the city’s property owners association offered an assessment of the city’s water in 1885, in which he concluded that “Hamburg must be the cleanest city in the world with its water supply and sewage system.” The city had installed a system of sanitary sewers in 1850, after close consultation with London’s sanitarian Edwin Chadwick, but still had unfiltered water and still drank from the river, which was the repository for its sewage.

  Hamburg relied on its reservoirs to remove any impurities in its water. The head engineer of the waterworks observed that as river water flowed into the reservoirs, the heavier impurities would sink and the flotsam including “dead fish and other corpses” would be blown to the side by the wind. By taking water from the reservoir “at the right level in the right way,” impurities, he asserted, could be avoided. Since the floating “foam and its contents [could] be easily removed by hand,” filters were, in his mind, superfluous.

  Small animals, from snails to eels, did make it into the water supply, but a zoologist who studied the multitude of organisms that lived in the city’s water pipes concluded that most of them should “possess enough strength” to resist being pulled up into the vertical pipes that supplied the city’s buildings. In other words, despite the remarkable findings of Pasteur, Koch, and Snow, many of Europe’s scientists failed to fully grasp the deadly power of the invisible.

  Here Koch had found a natural experiment similar to the one Snow had studied forty years earlier in South London. Several key differences allowed him to erase any doubts about the validity of Snow’s findings. First, he could compare a filtered to an unfiltered water supply when both drew from the same source. Second, he had the tools to look for the causal agent. Third, and perhaps most important, the world was finally ready to listen.

  Koch showed that the river water crawled with Vibrio cholerae and that the filters removed it. The impact of the epidemic followed the water supply so closely that the homes around Hamburger Platz, a single neighborhood in Hamburg that used water from Altona, survived the epidemic largely unscathed. The findings reaffirmed the importance of the cholera bacteria and the role of water in its spread. They also gave public health officials a clear plan for driving a stake through cholera’s heart.

  The use of sand filters to purify public water supplies became routine on the heels of the disaster in Hamburg. Never had there been such a stark demonstration of the efficiency of a public water supply as a mechanism for delivering death to every door. The death of an old idea, however, is a protracted and ungainly thing.

  In 1893 Koch’s laboratory received a strange request. Professor Max von Pettenkofer, director of the Institute of Hygiene in Munich, wanted some cholera. The fact that he wanted cholera was not remarkable. Koch’s lab had maintained a culture of Vibrio cholerae since the outbreak in Hamburg and may have been the only source of the bacteria in Germany. Anyone wanting to study cholera would need a sample. The thing that made his request stand out was that Pettenkofer had no plans to study the microbe in his own laboratory. He was convinced that the bacteria growing in Koch’s culture media did not cause cholera and saw no need to study it further. He did, however, have an experiment in mind.

  Despite the fact that Pettenkofer was a leading critic of Koch, Georg Gaffky, one of Koch’s colleagues, prepared a sample to send. Pettenkofer was, after all, the elder statesman of public health in Germany. Gaffky packaged the sample with exceptional care and sent it to Munich. The sealed vial within contained enough Vibrio cholerae to kill hundreds of people.

  At seventy-four Pettenkofer was one of Germany’s most senior scientists with former students in key positions throughout the country. Among his protégés was Hamburg’s former medical officer Theodor Kraus, the man who had treated Koch so poorly. (Kraus was fired in the wake of the epidemic.) Pettenkofer was convinced that cholera in drinking water could not, by itself, cause the disease.

  Soon after receiving the sample, Pettenkofer stood before a small audience in a lecture hall at his institute. He explained to them his long-held belief that agents released from damp soils were the real cause of cholera. Koch’s comma-shaped bacteria might predispose one to the disease he told them, but in the absence of appropriate atmospheric and hygienic conditions, it was harmless. Then he held up the vial containing billions of the bacteria and told the audience that he was now prepared to offer definitive proof of his theory. He then put the flask to his lips, tilted his head back, and consumed its contents.

  What thoughts passed through Pettenkofer’s aging mind at that moment? If Koch was right, as the majority of German scientists now believed he was, he could expect to be seized by cholera in the next forty-eight hours with a case so severe that it would almost certainly kill him. Was Pettenkofer steeled by absolute confidence in his ideas? Could he have been so certain that a theory widely seen as obsolete could save him? Had he simply disregarded the evidence Koch had put forward following the outbreak in Hamburg?

  Was he confident enough to risk his life or was he taunted by uncertainty? Had Pettenkofer allowed for the possibility he was wrong and tried to hedge his bet? Perhaps he had snuck off to an empty laboratory and heated the broth to kill the bacteria in an act of private desperation. Perhaps a protégé seeking to protect his mentor had done it for him. It has even been suggested that Gaffky, learning of Pettenkofer’s intentions, attenuated the bacteria before sending it out of respect for a foolish but honorable old man.

  On the other hand, Pettenkofer’s demonstration might have been, in his mind, the most fitting way to resolve that doubt. For this tired old man who had launched his career with a string of brilliant discoveries as an organic chemist, being wrong and dead might well have been better than being wrong and alive.

  In the end it seems either that Pettenkofer, or someone seeking to protect him, had attenuated the culture, that the bacteria had not survived the trip from Berlin, or that Pettenkofer had been infected in the past and had some immunity. For whatever reason, after a mild case of diarrhea, Pettenkofer and his idea survived. His survival gave a last gasp of life to his theories, but in the years that followed, science trudged on toward the truth. The evidence that drinking water could spread cholera and other diseases grew steadily more clear. It is hard to pinpoint the precise moment the stubborn idea that microbes in water could not transmit disease finally died, but none marked the end of that centuries-old notion as starkly as the day that Max von Pettenkofer, nine years after his bizarre self-experiment, put a pistol to his head and blew the failed theory from his toothless skull.

  8

  THE SCRAMBLE FOR PURE WATER

  T he spring mud sucked at the hooves of the horses trotting along Lake Street as a shrill whistle pierced the morning air. The sound came from deep within the foundations of the buildings that lined one side of the street. Carriages slowed to watch as a man with a trim goatee and thick black hair combed straight back paced in front of the imposing stone and brick facade of Chicago’s Marine Bank, examining it with the voracious eyes of a twenty-eight-year-old entrepreneur. Eight large brick buildings, including some of the city’s finest stores, stretched off to his right. Across the street a crowd had gathered to watch. Satisfied that everything was ready, Geo
rge Pullman put his whistle to his lips and blew.

  In the damp world hidden beneath the buildings, six hundred men scurried into action. Following Pullman’s elaborate choreography, each man moved among his ten assigned jackscrews, pausing to give each one a quarter turn. Massive wooden support beams groaned and creaked as the jacks dug into their grain. Above them the ornate stone and brick buildings inched their way into the sky. When all six thousand jackscrews had been turned, each man returned to his assigned position and waited for the next pair of whistles. On the street level, bankers managed Chicago’s money and the city’s elite continued to shop unperturbed while above them printers, bookbinders, cobblers, and apothecaries went about their business knowing only that they would have a longer step to the street at the end of the day. In a masterful effort, the house mover from Albion, New York, would succeed in lifting a third of a city block five feet in the air, a tenth of an inch at a time. But Pullman had not come all the way from New York just to raise a few buildings. He had come to help raise an entire city.

  The year was 1860. Chicago had just lost six percent of its population to typhoid, cholera, and dysentery. In response the city hired Ellis Sylvester Chesbrough, who had designed Boston’s water distribution system. His assignment was not to design a water supply but, in the spirit of Chadwick and the sanitarians, to design a sewer. After arriving in Chicago and studying the lay of the land, Chesbrough immediately realized that he had been asked to plan a sewer for a swamp. If he dug under the streets and built sewers with enough slope to reach the river, they would enter the river well below its surface and, when the river was high, sewage would fill the basements of Chicago.

  Chesbrough had a remarkable knack for bold innovation. After his father’s business failure forced him out of school at the age of nine, he took whatever work he could find, but the job that defined his career was his work for a railroad contractor. There, in a time when such a thing was possible, he became an engineer with nothing more than an elementary-school education and job experience. His real-world education had bred in him an understanding of solutions that worked. With years of experience building railroads, he had no fear of massive engineering projects. So when he was faced with the prospect of building a sewer in a city that defied its proper construction, he came up with a radical plan. He would design and build sewers that worked and then reshape the city to fit the sewers.

  In 1855 he began to lay pipes down the center of Chicago’s streets, not by burying them, but by setting them on the surface. Using mud dredged from the Chicago River, he then built the streets up until they were higher than the pipes. This gave building owners a stark choice. They could either hire Pullman or a similarly specialized contractor to raise their buildings four to ten feet in the air or carve entrances into their second floors and watch as their first floors became basements. With the city redefined to meet Chesbrough’s specifications, Chicago’s sewage began to flow into the river.

  For Pullman raising Chicago was just a prelude to a career that would earn him a vast fortune in the luxury railcar business and infamy as a ruthless manipulator of workers. Chesbrough and Chicago were also just getting started. The city’s remarkable self-levitation helped clean the city, but Chesbrough’s solution became his challenge. The intake for Chicago’s water supply was six hundred feet out in Lake Michigan at a point about one mile from the mouth of the Chicago River. So the more efficiently Chesbrough drained the streets, the more efficiently the flow from the river contaminated the city’s drinking water. A mile, it soon turned out, was not far enough. Again and again, cholera and typhoid rode out into the lake from the Chicago River, crawled back through the city’s water pipes, found new victims, and slithered back through the sewers into the river to complete their circle of death.

  Chesbrough recognized from the start that this could be a problem, but when he was hired, drinking water was not in his job description. That was the province of a separate agency. But after he had succeeded in draining the city, Chesbrough was given control of Chicago’s water supply and charged with the task of providing clean water to the city. One can wonder whether this was a promotion or punishment, but in either case he once again hatched a bold plan.

  In the winter of 1866, a team of Irish laborers huddled together as icy water splashed over the bow of their boat nearly two miles out in Lake Michigan. Below the deck a pair of mules struggled to maintain their footing in the rolling seas. Ahead, the men could see waves crashing against an immense stone pentagon, ninety feet across and topped by a forty-foot-tall lighthouse. Above the lighthouse an American flag flapped in the stiff breeze. They sailed up to one side of the man-made island, disembarked, and entered to begin their workday, completing what must stand as the most unique commute in Chicago history.

  Inside the immense structure, a winch lowered two of the men and a mule down a narrow steel shaft that passed through thirty feet of lake water and then another forty feet into the lake bed to a brick-lined tunnel. The two men crawled out of the elevator and hunched slightly as they led the mule down the tunnel. They trudged over a quarter of a mile into the darkness, the light of their lanterns swaying with each step. The tunnel ended abruptly at a wall of dense, blue clay. The two men stopped and began to dig. Working in shifts for four dollars a day, the team would fill carts of clay, haul them out of the tunnel with the mule, and send them up on the elevator. After sixteen hours a team of bricklayers would take their place and spend the next eight hours lining the freshly dug tunnel.

  At the same time, another elevator on the north side of Chicago carried a team of men to a similar tunnel seventy feet below the shoreline of Lake Michigan where they began to dig in the opposite direction. According to Chesbrough’s plan, both teams would dig until they met in the middle. When the last brick was in place, valves would open within the stone pentagon filling the tunnel with the cold, fresh, and, hopefully, clean water. Steam-powered pumps would pull the water to shore. But first they had to make sure the two blind tunnels would meet.

  Chesbrough’s experience in the railroad tunnels of the East proved critical. With no way to tell direction underground, the laborers dug like moles. Engineers and surveyors made constant measurement, nudging the workers left, right, up, and down toward a spot on blueprint. An error of less than a tenth of a degree would send the two teams burrowing past each other. After almost two years of digging, they broke through the clay and the tunnels met. The planners missed by less than half a foot. The trivial error brought great relief to Chesbrough and his staff who had worried that the two tunnels might not meet at all.

  Two weeks later a mule left the shore of Lake Michigan pulling a train of six cars laden not with clay, but with dignitaries (three men to a car) as two men pushed from behind. In eerie silence they creaked through the tunnel, staring at the parade of passing bricks in the dim flicker of their kerosene lanterns for almost half an hour. They stopped at a six-inch jog in the tunnel, which marked the spot where workers had met a few weeks earlier. In short order a similar train arrived after traveling east from the crib. There, in the surreal hollow of the tunnel, the men bent down to watch the mayor of Chicago lay the final brick in the tunnel and to listen as the echoes of his mercifully brief commemorative speech scurried off into the endless darkness.

  A grander celebration of Chesbrough’s success and a fuller measure of the public thirst for better water would come several months later as cheering crowds gathered to watch finely dressed regiments from the Chicago police, the Ellsworth Zoaves, the Masons, the Knights Templar, and the Dearborn Artillery (complete with horse-drawn brass cannons) march up Clark Street. With the memories of the Chicago Fire still fresh, the link between fire and water was powerful. In the heart of the parade, sixteen teams of powerful horses pulled fire trucks with names like “Liberty,” “Economy,” and “A. D. Titsworth,” all belching steam into an icy March wind.

  Halfway to its destination, chaos threatened to consume the parade. At the very spot where Pullman had
raised the Marine Bank seven years earlier, a gridlock of wagons, carriages, snorting horses, and angry drivers blocked the parade. High spirits spiraled into nineteenth-century road rage, but a path was cleared and the marchers continued on to the newly constructed water tower.

  Water had just begun to flow into the city and every petty bureaucrat who had ever signed a purchase order for a trowel was on hand to receive his due. As cannons fired, city officials droned on through a program that seemed to give every one of those officials, in order of ascending importance, his moment on the podium. Following the mayor’s requisite speech, the crowd demanded to hear from Chesbrough. He rose only to acknowledge the graciousness of the mayor and the providence of the deity. The modest Mr. Chesbrough who had just engineered the longest underwater tunnel ever built had no speech prepared.

  Chesbrough may have understood better than his audience that safe water is not an end, but a process, an ongoing struggle in which improvement is always possible and usually necessary. Purity, as it turns out, is fleeting.

  At the same time that the unfortunate immigrant laborers were mining mud beneath Lake Michigan to build Chesbrough’s tunnel, America’s railroad barons were spinning a web of tracks across the newly settled west. The port of Chicago, at the center of the web, boomed. It would soon be the busiest port in the United States, serving more ships than New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia combined. Manufacturing burgeoned. The population exploded. With each new production line and each immigrant to the city, demand for water grew and production of sewage grew in lockstep. To complicate matters further, a new sort of immigrant had begun arriving in Chicago in numbers never before imagined.

  On December 26, 1865, a Burlington train pulled up to unload the first occupants for a vast new complex of buildings that sprawled across the prairie five miles south of Chicago. They clattered out across a wooden road, one of the finest in the city, exhaling clouds into the Midwestern winter. Another train followed, then another, then another. Before the next Christmas, a million and a half cattle, pigs, and sheep had arrived on similar trains to meet their fate in Chicago. By 1870 the annual influx had risen to 3 million and by 1900, 82 percent of the meat in America came from the jungle of meatpackers that grew up around the yards.