Pure French Water

The American Club at Paris last week entertained a twitterer--Lieut-Col. Philippe-Jean Bunau-Varilla. Many present had known him in the U. S. He had been a co-worker with the late Ferdinand de Lesseps on the first attempt to dig a Panama canal. That project (by the French Campagnie Universelle du Canal de Panama) failed and Capt. Bunau-Varilla tried to persuade the U. S. to build a sea-level canal along the surveyed route. That was 27 years ago. Four years ago he was again in the U. S. This time he wore a wooden stump for his right leg shot off during the War. And again he urged a sea-level canal--alongside the present-Canal, one to cost a billion dollars (TIME, Jan. 28, 1924). The U. S. War Department has his recommendations on file. U. S. businessmen occasionally wondered if the old engineer was alive. He was, and at 69 still shrewd and witty.

At Paris last week he twitted the U. S. clubmen on their distaste for water. Water, he assured them, could now be safely drunk almost anywhere in France.

To American Club members he retold how he had helped make eau potable a wide reality in France. It began at Verdun, during the War. Water was polluted; typhoid threatened the troops. He invented an automatic device to pump hypochlorite of soda into the drinking water. Two and a half to five pounds of hypochlorite liberated enough chlorine to kill the germs in one million gallons of water.

After the War first Rheims, then Carcassonne, then 200 more French cities adopted his chlorination methods. Lately Spanish, Portuguese and Venezuelan communities have done likewise.