Watermen

For healthful and palatable drinking water, some 70,000,000 people in the U. S. are dependent on a scattered army of obscure technicians: the superintendents of urban waterworks. Last week 1,200 members of the American Water Works Association gathered in convention at Los Angeles, talked shop, complained about their pay, behaved themselves. A solemn and sober group, the waterworks superintendents are famed among hotelmen and convention solicitors for the fact that they almost never do any damage. In their convention lobby they gazed earnestly at water tinkling through complete model systems; at a scale model of Los Angeles' new automatic chlorinator, which has a photo-electric "eye" to maintain the proper proportion of chlorine. Highlights of the meeting:

P: Average pay of waterworks superintendents in the U. S. and Canada is $4.11 per day. Deploring this fact, retiring President Frank Barbour of Boston trumpeted: "The slightest slip on the part of any one of these superintendents might result in a typhoid epidemic that would wipe out practically an entire community!"

P: The coppery taste in many water supplies was attributed to the grounding of radio wires in water pipes.

P: The watermen agreed that, with water-borne disease under control, chief remaining problem is to eliminate taste. Success was reported by adding charcoal.

P: Charles Hardy Eastwood, Newark water equipment manufacturer, declared that he sends employes into every flood-afflicted area, foots the bill himself, considers it good advertising. During the severe floods last spring, Eastwood had men with portable chlorinators in 14 States. Where they worked there were no cases of disease attributable to polluted water.

P: Surprisingly, the watermen had little or nothing to say about the growing practice of sterilizing reservoirs and swimming pools with silver. That ions (atomic fragments) of silver, copper and some other metals in extremely minute traces have a powerful germicidal effect was discovered in 1893. Only a few millionths of a gram per litre of water will kill germs. The silver which dissolves from a plate simply immersed in the water is enough. Thus treated is the water supply of Heidelberg, and there are many other installations in Germany, England, Switzerland. Two years ago the swimming pool of the Congressional Country Club in Washington became the first silvered pool in the U. S.

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