Water pollution in the second half of the 19th century was common enough to suggest that people back then simply didn’t care about how urbanization and industrialization were harming rivers and ponds.
In fact, the problem wasn’t lack of caring but rather lack of knowledge; few people at the time knew much about the principles of contamination.
That situation began to change as scientists began looking into water. A key figure was William R. Nichols, who in 1873 investigated river pollution for the Massachusetts State Board of Health. His studies are well described in a book that I highly recommend: Nature Incorporated – Industrialization and the Waters of New England by Theodore Steinberg (1991).
This blog entry isn’t about Nichols. Instead, it’s about one of his early assistants whose accomplishments are all the more remarkable for her gender at a time when women weren’t welcomed in science.
She was Ellen Swallow Richards, a Massachusetts native who enrolled in the relatively new Vassar College in 1868 after saving up tuition money from house-cleaning and teaching. It was at Vassar where she developed an interest in chemistry. Following graduation she applied unsuccessfully for work in industrial laboratories. A chemist at one of those labs suggested that she approach the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which at the time didn’t accept women. To MIT’s credit, it enrolled her as a special student, establishing her the first woman in the nation to be accepted into a scientific school.
In due course Richards received a BS degree, and then began a career of teaching at MIT. Along the way, she helped start and fund a laboratory to facilitate women’s studies there.
In 1884, she was appointed instructor at the university’s new laboratory of sanitary science, the first such facility in the nation. Three years later, at the request of Massachusetts health authorities, she conducted a study of 40,000 samples of local sources of drinking water that led to the first state-level water quality standards in the United States. Not long afterwards the first modern sewage treatment plant in the nation was built in Lowell, Mass.
Meanwhile, Richards found time for other activities. She helped start what’s now the American Association of University Women. She helped launch the field of home economics; in that spirit, she wrote books about science for use in the home, including Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning.
Another book -- Food Materials and their Alterations -- led to the passage of the first Pure Food and Drug Act in Massachusetts.
She also maintained a private practice in sanitary chemistry that included testing water, air and food, and also the testing of wallpapers and fabrics for arsenic.
Richards continued teaching at MIT until her death in 1911. In 1973, on the centennial of her enrollment, MIT named a professorship in her honor.
Given Richards’ interest in science and water, it’s fitting that MIT would be her chosen university, for it’s a leader in water science innovation, most visibly in recent years through its Water Club.
If she were to return today, Richards would find challenges and uncertainties of a high order. The contaminants that she encountered in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (raw sewage and largely organic waste from textile mills) are now either pretty much under control or long-gone — unlike the new classes of synthetic chemical contaminants such as PFOAs that water-treatment scientists know little about.