Just noticeable: erasing place in municipal water treatment in the U.S. during the interwar period

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Just noticeable: Erasing place in municipal water treatment in the U.S. during the interwar period Christy Spackman Arizona State University, School for the Future of Innovation in Society, United States

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history: Received 16 July 2018 Received in revised form 24 October 2019 Accepted 25 October 2019

For centuries noses, eyes, and mouths have assessed the safety of drinking water. Yet by the end of the long nineteenth century, the nascent professional water worker corps in the United States and Europe began to distance themselves from everyday sensory approaches to judging a water’s potability. Historians and geographers have explored the rise of urban water infrastructures as well as shifting approaches to water analysis. However, the changing role of sensory analysis in erasing waters’ biogeophysical histories, as well as the political ramifications of creating authoritative modes of sensory labor that exclude aesthetic evaluations of quality, remains relatively unexamined. This paper asks how water workers’ efforts to standardize and make objective the embodied labor of managing municipal water shifted not only how sensory knowledge is made, but also who has access to sensory knowledge about place. Drawing on technical documents, scientific papers, and production manuals, I examine the emergence of a new standardized system for characterizing and mitigating off odors and flavors found in raw and treated water during the first half of the twentieth century in the United States. This analytical assemblage is built on the precepts of nineteenth-century Fechnerian psychophysics. Grounded in the idea that small increases in stimulation are proportionally accompanied by small increases in sensation, psychophysics offered a way to express and test the relationship between stimulus and experience by identifying the point at which a difference in stimuli was ‘just noticeable’. Through attending to the role of tasting, smelling bodies as sites of scientific knowledge production and as sites where scientific knowledge is called into question, I show that water workers used estimation of the ineffable to break away from or transcend locale. In the process, they made the water treatment laboratory into a space thoroughly embedded in place, even as they in turn set in motion efforts to remove place from the water sent to consumers throughout the provisioning system. © 2019 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Keywords: Sensory evaluation Municipal water Pollution Odor Taste

On December 29, 1927, the front page of the Chicago Daily Tribune reported that the previous day Chicago’s south side residents had found their water so bitter that demand for bottled water had outstripped supply. The city’s chief engineer, Hyman H. Gerstein, told the Tribune he had ordered ‘special chlorination’ for water from the south side source. As such, he noted, there was ‘no danger whatsoever in drinking it’. Inhabitants disagreed. A few days later, water workers sailed out into Lake Michigan to sample water at different locations (Fig. 1). Their goal? To determine the contamination source. The ‘obnoxious tastes and gross sewage pollution’ responsible for the complaints, the team concluded, were due to a southerly wind moving phenole contaminated waters from the Calumet river into Lake Michigan. Those same winds had

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circulated sewer waste northward from the Indiana Harbor, a dual attack on the potability and palatability of water coming into the city through south side taps.1 Chicago, and its neighboring cities along the southern shore of Lake Michigan, faced a double bind. They had access to the largest body of fresh water in the United States. That same body of water, boosters had noted for years, not only connected the city and its inhabitants to eastern sea ports, it offered a ready supply to lubricate the wheels of industry. As a result, by 1921 Lake Michigan found itself home to ‘one of the most intensive industrial developments in the world’; Samuel Greely, a consulting engineer at the Chicago firm Pearse, Greeley, and Hansen, estimated that

1 H.H. Gerstein, Chloro-phenol tastes and abnormal absorption of chlorine in the Chicago water supply, Journal American Water Works Association 21 (1929) 346e57.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2019.10.014 0305-7488/© 2019 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Please cite this article as: C. Spackman, Just noticeable: Erasing place in municipal water treatment in the U.S. during the interwar period, Journal of Historical Geography, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2019.10.014

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Fig. 1. Published map of the survey to locate the cause of chloro-phenol tasting pollution in the public water supply from Lake Michigan, December 29, 1927. Source: Gerstein. Journal American Water Works Association: 347. Used with permission of John Wiley and Sons.

industrial sewage produced in the area amounted to ‘over 500,000,000 gallons per 24 h’.2 Despite Gerstein’s hyperbolic description of the incident as the

2 S.A. Greeley, Operation of the water filtration plants at Evanston, Illinois, and Whiting, Indiana, Journal American Water Works Association n.d., 442e47.

‘worst condition Chicago has ever experienced in its water supply’, the 1927 event was not singular. Rather, it illustrated one of the central challenges facing urban water suppliers in the United States: how to deliver a product whose quality aligned with the modernist project they were embedded in even as industrial and agricultural usage of the same resources threatened those efforts?

Please cite this article as: C. Spackman, Just noticeable: Erasing place in municipal water treatment in the U.S. during the interwar period, Journal of Historical Geography, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2019.10.014

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Making water modern has largely been a project of abstraction and reduction. As scholars including Jamie Linton, Christopher Hamlin, and Hasok Chang demonstrate, extracting water from its historical and social contexts resulted in an understanding of water as a singular chemical substance, rather than as heterogeneous and multiple.3 Jeffrey Banister and Stacie Widdifield build on this insight, pointing out that making potable water modern required ‘both historicizing space and spatializing history’; a process facilitated by the implementation of visual rhetoric.4 In Mexico city, Banister and Widdifeld point out, new pump houses and pipes embodied this rhetoric, while tours and brochures presented potable water as always natural, existing out of space and time. Even municipalities like Chicago that relied on visible surface waters rather than hidden springs mobilized visual rhetorics in proclaiming their conquest of nature. The vaunted reversal of the Chicago river, building of supply cribs far from the lake shore and proposal of future filtration stations that would double as recreation spaces similarly worked to transform Chicago’s potable water into a modern (or as Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw argue, fetishized) product for both residents and politicians.5 Yet in late December 1927 all visual and verbal rhetoric failed. Mouths and noses reminded south side inhabitants of the intimate connection between their own bodies and the decisions taken by municipal water workers receiving water from the sixty-eighth and Dunne cribs; newspaper reports further highlighted that inhabitants’ drinking supply continued to serve as the dumping grounds for industrial waste from the Calumet district. This unanticipated moment, formed through the interactions between human bodies and material substance, built infrastructure and natural resource, called into question all claims that water had been conquered. The end of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century witnessed a dramatic shift not only in how municipalities provisioned water, but also in how they presented their water. Highly publicized disease outbreaks and acceptance of germ theory, the rapid compression of distance between far-flung metropolitan spaces by train travel, and increases in tourism promulgated the idea that a city’s safety lay not only in its crime statistics, but also in its water supply. For example, after a devastating typhoid outbreak in 1892, hosts of the Chicago World’s fair worked to convince would-be attendees and governmental representatives that the water was safe.6 Although gustatory characteristics (and I here read gustatory broadly to include the olfactory) did not play a core part in efforts to make potable water (rather numbers did), boosters recognized that clarity and flavor shaped perception of the entire region: for those preparing to host the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, clarifying St. Louis’ previously acceptable, naturally brown water became a critical action point.7 Simply supplying

3 J. Linton, What Is Water? The History of a Modern Abstraction, Vancouver, 2010; C.H., A Science of Impurity: Water Analysis in Nineteenth Century Britain, Berkeley, 1990; H. Chang, Is Water H2O?: Evidence, Realism and Pluralism, New York, 2012. 4 J.M. Banister and S.G. Widdifield, The debut of ‘modern water’ in early 20th century Mexico City: Xochimilco potable waterworks, Journal of Historical Geography 46 (2014) 51. 5 J. Ericson, The quality problem in relation to Chicago’s water supply: official report to Col. A. A. Sprague, Commissioner of Public Works, Chicago, IL, May 1925, Chicago Public Library; M. Kaika and E. Swyngedouw, Fetishizing the modern city: the phantasmagoria of urban technological networks, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24 (2000) 120e38. 6 M.P. McCarthy, Should we drink the water: typhoid fever worries at the Colombian Exposition, Illinois Historical Journal 86, n 1 (1993) 2e14; C. Smith, City Water, City Life: Water and the Infrastructure of Ideas in Urbanizing Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago, Chicago, 2013. 7 C.G. Shapiro-Shapin, Filtering the city’s image: progressivism, local control, and the St. Louis water supply, 1890e1906, Journal of the History of Medicine 54 (1999) 401e2.

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water was no longer enough for municipalities. Experiences of tasting and smelling have a long history of resisting scientific codification. As Melanie Kiechle’s history of olfactory investigation demonstrates, this resistance resulted in the continuation of connoisseur-like practices of smelling in efforts to track and identify odorific nuisances into the latter half of the nineteenth century, even after the ascendance of instrumental modes of knowing the chemical world had largely replaced smelling and tasting in most scientific domains.8 Identification and eventual acceptance of the germ theory of disease had, by the early twentieth century, upended the historical relationship between sensory practices of evaluating quality and detecting danger, especially with regards to the provisioning of public water. By the early twentieth century, potability d a water’s safety d came to be primarily defined in public health discourse and then in law by microbial counts and chemical measurements rather than the ‘common sense’ standards of temperature, taste, odor, and clarity.9 And yet. Despite the regulatory enshrinement of bacteria as the core threat to health and the ostensible triumph over microbial life represented by the smell of chlorine, the gustatory qualities of water obdurately continued to matter to water workers. They mattered, in large part, because ‘raw’ or otherwise, water is multiple and mutable. It not only carries traces of the biogeophysical genealogies of its paths, it also records human interventions into its surrounding environments. When perceptible, those qualities insist on a science done ‘in place’ even as water workers sought to create an increasingly place-less water through the most placed of things: the sensing human body. From a present-day vantage point, one can argue that consumers of municipal waters in the U.S. have largely forgotten that the water coming out of their taps has a history. When asked about how they prefer their water, many in the U.S. cite temperature and tastelessness as an ideal; very few ‘recognize that the H2O which gurgles through [their] plumbing is not water, but a stuff which industrial society creates’.10 This forgetfulness ends with the arrival of seasonal changes in the smell or taste of water, or with the appearance of a water crisis. These forms of bodily ‘remembering’ interrupt or throw into relief our sense of belonging. In the process, bodily remembering calls for, as Jay Emery recently argued in this journal, investigation of the historical geographies, processes and politics that go into making scientific truths.11 This paper thus joins conversations in historical geography and other fields that examine how access to municipal water is contingent upon ongoing processes of techno-scientific transformation of ‘natural’ water into ‘potable’ water.12 It asks what role everyday bodily actions of smelling and tasting d by professionals and consumers d play in shaping the relationship between urban inhabitants, scientific experts, industrial actors and physical environments? Water’s ability to dissolve and carry in it a host of materials proves fruitful for investigating the ways that individual,

8 M.A. Kiechle, Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America, Seattle, 2017. 9 This argument is fully developed in C. Spackman and G.A. Burlingame, Sensory politics: the tug-of-war between potability and palatability, Social Studies of Science 48 (2018) 350e371. 10 I. Illich, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness: Reflections on the Historicity of Stuff, Dallas, 1985, 7. 11 J. Emery, Belonging, memory and history in the north Nottinghamshire coalfield, Journal of Historical Geography 59 (2018) 77e89. 12 S.B. Pritchard, Confluence: The Nature of Technology and the Remaking of the ^ne, Cambridge, 2011; M.V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Rho Urban America From Colonial Times to the Present, Abridged Edition, Pittsburgh, 2008; E. Swyngedouw, Social Power and the Urbanization of Water: Flows of Power, Oxford, 2004; M. Gandy, The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination, Cambridge, 2014; Hamlin, A Science of Impurity.

Please cite this article as: C. Spackman, Just noticeable: Erasing place in municipal water treatment in the U.S. during the interwar period, Journal of Historical Geography, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2019.10.014

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subjective experiences intersect with the making of place, as well as for exploring how processes of estimation, specifically of sensory experience, have materialized ideas and assumptions about what tastes and odors are, as well as their workings and circulations. To do this, I draw primarily from published reports of attempts to mitigate off tastes and odors found in the American Water Works Association (AWWA) flagship journal. I additionally draw on newspaper accounts of water problems, from documents produced by the Municipal Water Department of the City of Chicago held at the Chicago Public Library, and from public health manuals and scientific papers. My analysis focuses on the development of a widely accepted sensory method for estimating the organoleptic qualities of tastes and odors found in raw and treated water during the interwar period by a network of Illinois-based researchers; their method would persist for close to fifty years before being partially displaced by a newer method drawn from the food industry.13 As such, this paper is geographically rooted in the Midwest in general, and Illinois in specific. I first situate how the relationship between bodies and environments results in placing or displacement. I next turn to examine how water workers used estimation of sensorial experience to navigate what David Livingstone refers to as the ‘imprint of location’ in their efforts to create scientific knowledge about tastes and odors in municipal water.14 Through attending to the role of tasting, smelling bodies as sites of scientific knowledge production and as sites where scientific expertise is called into question, I show that water workers turned to estimation of ineffable, sensorial experiences in an attempt to transcend challenges to their expertise brought about by episodes of off-tastes and odors. Efforts to remove perceptible markers of a waters social and biogeographical journeys sought to erase place from municipal water even as it transformed the water treatment laboratory into a space thoroughly embedded in place. Working with water in place The scale and scope of municipal water systems significantly expanded in the early twentieth century. Water workers across the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, writing in their professional association’s journal and presenting at regional and national conferences, regularly recount episodes of objectionable quality in the waters they watched over. These episodes ranged in severity and form. Some report off tastes and odors, others cloudiness or coloration. Sometimes these defects resulted in serious complaint; other times episodes simply ‘left an opening for unfavorable criticism’ of the work performed.15 Although the engineers, chemists, and plant operators managing municipal water works largely considered themselves triumphant in the fight against water-borne diseases, their approach to treating water remained in flux as plant operators developed new technologies, responded to new political exigencies, and adapted to shifting consumer usage patterns. Sharing their approaches and findings, water workers found, facilitated efforts to avoid unfavorable criticism. Founded in 1881 in St. Louis by a group of twenty-four men hailing from the midwestern states of Kansas, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri and Tennessee, the American Water Works Association (AWWA) sought to provide the new corps of water workers d which included engineers, chemists, sanitarians, as well as technicians d with a way to communicate techniques and

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For a history of that process, see Spackman and Burlingame, Sensory politics. D.N. Livingstone, Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge Chicago, 2013, 13. 15 C.H. Spaulding, Preammoniation at Springfield, Illinois, Journal American Water Works Association 21 (1929) 1085. 14

approaches to water treatment. The association grew slowly at first, with only 350 members reported in 1900. By 1910 membership had grown to 1000 people. Incorporated in Illinois in 1912, the association would by 1914 (the same year that interstate regulations governing bacteriological standards of water supplies for trains went into effect) set up regional sections, establish a journal with first quarterly, then bi-monthly, and by 1925 monthly publication of articles, conference papers and responses, as well as technical and section news. Formation of committees to investigate pressing problems and push for standardization closely followed the implementation of regional sections.16 In short, the association’s moves sought to mitigate the problem, voiced in the association’s 1915 presidential address, that ‘when we examine in detail the annual reports of water works plants, all over the country, we find ourselves absolutely unable by comparative study of accounts to formulate any satisfactory comparison in almost any matter pertaining to them’.17 Facing qualitatively and quantitatively different natural and fiscal resources, by 1924 approximately 2000 water workers across the U.S. had joined the AWWA to, as a colleague would put it twenty-two years later, ‘share experiences and work out common problems for the benefit of all’.18 Communication was key to working out common problems for AWWA members spread across a continent. By 1920 water workers agreed that they needed to produce standardized scientific information about their waters and treatment methods, a move that reflected the increasing professionalization of the field.19 Standardization, they understood, would facilitate communication done via the medium of regional meetings, conference presentations, and journal articles. Problems of off tastes and odors, however, presented an ongoing challenge: How could one take information produced in singular bodies located in specific places about an ephemeral experience and allow it to circulate across distance, especially when the tastes in question ‘were not distinct’ or often ‘[insufficient] to produce agreement by any two observers as to their qualities’?20 How could one transform water from a variable product into one so anodyne that its everyday quality escaped notice; a product whose gustatory rhetoric aligned, rather than conflicted with, the visual and political rhetorics already shaping modern potable water? Displacing water Despite the rich corpus of research examining the development and management of municipal water, as well as exploration by scholars such as Swyngedouw and Matthew Gandy of the complex ways that the search for modernity co-transforms nature and society, attention to the work of managing how water tastes, and the effects of such management, has primarily remained in the realm of engineering.21 There are notable exceptions: Joy Parr’s investigation of the role the odor of chlorine played in the water contamination crisis in Walkerton, Ontario in 2000, as well as Matthew Evenden’s tracing of the avoidance of chlorination in Vancouver

16 F.C. Amsbary Jr., The American Water Works Association 1881e1956, Journal American Water Works Association 48 (1956) 1e4. 17 G.G. Earl, Minutes of proceedings; Thirty-Fifth Annual Convention American Water Works Association [with Discussion] 2 (1915) 251. 18 Amsbary Jr., The American Water Works Association. 19 Amsbary Jr., 3; J.J. Hinman, Jr., Standards of water quality, Journal American Water Works Association. 7 (1920) 821e40. 20 Spaulding, Preammoniation, 1090. 21 Swyngedouw, Social Power and the Urbanization of Water; Gandy, The Fabric of Space.

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BC.22 However, as scholarship exploring the management of the taste of foodstuffs demonstrates, sensorial information produced through tasting and smelling is deeply embroiled in political economies of knowledge. Sensory information d what more contemporary water regulations categorize as aesthetics d not only produces place, it is co-produced by the landscape, science and society. For example, Kolleen Guy shows how champagne producers from the Marne (France) drew on the concept of terroir, which Amy Trubek glosses as ‘taste of place’, through their tasting and smelling bodies to consolidate naming power to the metropole in the face of competing wines from the colonial periphery and other countries.23 Scholarship about other perceptual modes similarly highlight how sensing places bodies while embroiling them in larger geopolitical power flows. Hi’ilei Hobart argues that ice importation into Hawai’i in the latter half of the nineteenth century resulted in access to coldness becoming intimately tied to power.24 Emily Thompson, in her history of the development of modern acoustics in the United States, demonstrates that scientific research into and technological manipulation of sound profoundly reshaped place through altering not only the physical environment, but also modes of perceiving that environment. Nicholas Shapiro, echoing Michelle Murphy’s examination of the workplace, shows how formaldehyde circulating in the intimate, enclosed spaces of FEMA trailers profoundly disrupts being-in-place, a process that Deborah Jackson terms ‘dysplacement’.25 Not only is the ‘livingmoving body essential to the processes of emplacement’, as Edward Casey argues, it itself is shaped by technologies that link the landscape to the body.26 By examining smell and taste as something stretched out across bodies and technologies, this paper expands the analytical toolkit available to historical geographers as they consider how bodies and perceptible materials make place and shape larger geopolitical power flows. Literal processes of displacing water were central to Chicago’s growth and success. Located at the intersection of the Chicago river and the souther southeastern shore of Lake Michigan, the naturally occurring watershed not only served as fodder for nineteenth century boosters vaunting the city as an ideal transportation hub, it also provided a plentiful d albeit unruly d fresh water supply.27 Lake Michigan offered easy access to fresh water for fighting fires and hydrating bodies. It also offered a readily available industrial lubricant, a critical piece in what Daniel Schneider posits as the ‘industrial ecosystems’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.28 In this, the lake’s waters became the nexus linking together the individual and industrial metabolisms of the city, made visible as

22 J. Parr, Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday 1953-2003, Vancouver, 2010; M. Evenden, Debating water purity and expertise: The chlorination controversy in Vancouver during the Second World War, Journal of Historical Geography July 2019, 65, Pages 85-95, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2019.06.007. 23 K. Guy, When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity Baltimore, 2003; A. Trubek, The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir, Berkeley, 2008. 24 H. Hobart, Snowy mountaineers and soda waters: Honolulu and its age of ice importation, Food, Culture, and Society 19 (2016) 461e83. 25 N. Shapiro, Attuning to the chemosphere: domestic formaldehyde, bodily reasoning, and the chemical sublime, Cultural Anthropology 30, 3 (2015) 368e93; M. Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers Durham, 2006; D.D. Jackson, Scents of place: the dysplacement of a first nations community in Canada, American Anthropologist 113 (2011) 606e18. 26 E.S. Casey, How to get from space to place in a fairly short stretch of time: phenomenological prolegomena, in S. Feld and K. Basso (Eds), Senses of Place, Santa Fe, 1996, 24. 27 K. Warren, The American Steel Industry, 1850e1970: A Geographical Interpretation, Pittsburgh, 1987. 28 D. Schneider, Hybrid Nature: Sewage Treatment and the Contradictions of the Industrial Ecosystem, Cambridge, 2011.

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sewers, slaughter and packing houses, and ships spilled their waste into the aquatic environment. Although appearing uniform, bodies of water constantly vary. Hyperbolically labeled ‘an inexhaustible reservoir of pure water’, water workers in Chicago and elsewhere along Lake Michigan in the nineteenth and twentieth century found its waters unevenly acceptable. Contamination levels were visibly and measurably highest at the areas where water was most accessible: the shore. Chicago engineers responded to the uneven quality of Lake Michigan’s waters of in the mid-nineteenth century by first moving intake pipes farther out, and then building a two-mile long tunnel out into the lake (completed 1867) to bring waters in to shore that were far enough away from contaminating sources to be considered safe.29 This effort proved temporary: population growth and industrial expansion extended contamination farther into Lake Michigan’s waters. In a move well documented by Chicago’s hagiographers and detractors as a turning point in the history of U.S. water pollution management, at the end of the nineteenth century city engineers reversed the flow of the Chicago River and opened the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal (1900). Both efforts sought to undo the increased effects of the industrial ecosystem on the health of the city and its inhabitants by sending the ‘cesspool of filth’ away from, rather than towards, the city’s water supply d much to the dismay of those living downriver. The next twenty-plus years witnessed additional efforts to shift drainage of the plains surrounding Chicago away from the lake. This included building intercepting sewers on the south and north sides of the city that drained into the Chicago river, rather than the lake, as well as the construction of the North Shore and Calumet Sag Canals.30 The search for improved public health, as measured by typhoid and cholera deaths, as well as increased water quality lay at the heart of these efforts to remake nature. The phenolic substances plaguing drinkers of Chicago’s municipal water, as well as water workers in 1927 (and, retrospective reports would indicate, much earlier) came from wastes produced by the very industries that had helped make Chicago the crossroads of the nation. Gerstein’s report highlights ‘wastes from coke and charcoal byproducts plants, from creosoting works and gas plants, and oily wastes from oil fields and oil refineries’ as contributing to the increase of e quality problems.31 Coke and charcoal byproducts point to the steel industry d itself made possible due to easily accessed shipping routes linking the iron deposits of the northern shores of the great lakes to the coal mines of the Midwest d while creosoting works highlight the production of railroad ties linking east and west. Many of these industries were located at the southeastern edge of the city and into Indiana, a spatial distribution understood to limit impact on the city proper, as long as winds, storms, or ice flows did not interfere with typical circulation patterns.32 But winds, storms, and ice flows insisted on interfering with typical circulation patterns, an environmental reality that resulted in a constantly changing raw water supply. In the early decades of the 1900s, this meant the quality of water coming out of Chicago taps, its turbidity, odor, and taste, occasionally brought evidence of the burgeoning twentieth-century industrial ecosystem into the intimate spaces of home, and elicited

29 J. Ericson, The Water Supply System of Chicago, Chicago: Barnard & Miller Print, April 1924, Chicago Public Library; Melosi, Sanitary City, 55. 30 A.E. Gorman, Chicago’s South District Water Filtration Project. Historical Aspects - Development of the PWA Project - General Description of the Project as Proposed by the Water Purification Division, January 16, 1939, Chicago Public Library. 31 P. Hansen et al., Tastes and odors in public water supplies, causes and remedies [with discussion], Journal American Water Works Association 23 (1931) 1495e1509. 32 Warren, The American Steel Industry.

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complaints in the process.

Mitigation and its discontents The challenge with tastes and odors, water workers posited as early as 1899, rested in the difficulty of communicating about embodied experience. ‘The observation and description of the odor of a sample of water is not such an easy matter as one might at first suppose,’ George C. Whipple noted in 1899.33 Co-founder of the Harvard School of Public Health and an early luminary in the world of water treatment, Whipple blamed ‘imperfect development’ of the sense of smell, as well as a ‘lack of any standard by which to describe an odor as to its quality or intensity’ for the problem. Drawing from an approach developed by the Massachusetts State Board of Health, he suggested that water workers adopt a graded scale ranging from very faint (1; an odor that the average consumer would not detect, but the water worker would in the laboratory) to very strong (5; an odor so intense that it would render the water unfit for drinking) to describe the intensity of the odor, accompanied by a descriptive adjective. By 1912 Whipple’s method was codified in the 2nd edition of the American Public Health Association’s Standard Methods for Examination of Water and Sewage. In proposing a numerical scale, Whipple suggested water workers shift how they communicate about sensory experience in a way that reflects the modernist drive towards simplification. ‘Numbers,’ Theodore Porter proposes, are ‘strategies of communication …. intimately bound up with forms of community, and hence also with the social identity of the researchers’.34 For Porter, numbers not only act as a mode of standardized communication, they summarize complexity with simplicity, can easily be transported across place and times, and d critically d decrease the need for interpersonal relationships of trust or intimate, embodied knowledge. Whipple’s proposal called on water workers to create a shared language of embodied experience distinctly different from the vernacular, imbued with the ostensible goal of improving the attractiveness of the product being produced. Although not the core mission of water workers, managing their product’s palatability was a central concern. The journal of the American Water Works Association is filled with reports of experimental efforts to eliminate and prevent off tastes and odors.35 These reports range in scope, scale, and procedure. Some recount experiments in aeration, others various types of filtration or application of differing levels of chlorine. In the latter half of the 1920s, additional treatments including preammoniation and application of activated carbon emerged. All shared one common reality: place mattered. Article authors regularly describe the qualities of their source waters and the local environmental conditions. These reports are in line with the drive for increasingly standardized forms of scientific communication. Yet in them one also sees an acknowledgment that treatment processes unevenly and unpredictably translate between locales. Indeed, despite the growing range of treatments available for removing objectionable

33 G.C. Whipple, The observation of odor as an essential part of water analysis, Public Health Papers and Reports, 25 (1899) 587. 34 T.M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, Princeton, 1996, viii. 35 A few examples include G.D. Norcom and R.I. Dodd, Activated carbon for the removal of odor and taste, Journal American Water Works Association 22 (1930) 1414e37; G.R. Spalding, Activated char as a deodorant in water treatment, Journal American Water Works Association 22 (1930) 646e48; Spaulding, Preammoniation; Hansen et al., Tastes and odors; J.W. Ellms and W.C. Lawrence, The causes of obnoxious tastes and odors sometimes occurring in the Cleveland water supply, Journal American Water Works Association 9 (1922) 463e73.ß

tastes or odors, operators publicly complained to each other d in print and at section meetings d about the difficulty of evaluating the efficiency of reported methods. After all, operators at different water treatment plants faced unique treatment challenges; the most ‘economical’ treatment depended on a range of factors including temporal conditions, operator skill, location, population tastes, budget and, most pressingly, the nature of the compound causing the problem. In other words, even as treatment process for making water potable became increasingly standardized (the first volume of what would become Standard Methods for the Examination of Waters and Sewage was published in 1905),36 amenable to circulating beyond their place of development, processes of evaluating and thus mitigating the tastes and odors of water remained distinctly linked to individual operators’ bodies and the bodies of water they were working with. Local treatment efforts to mitigate unwanted tastes and odors, according to John R. Baylis, the filtration engineer for the Bureau of Water Supply in Chicago, were troubled by the lack of concrete knowledge about the identity of the compounds responsible for the problem in the first place. Trained at Mississippi State College in railroad engineering and construction engineering for water and sewage plants, Baylis had been hired by the city of Chicago in 1926 away from Baltimore.37 Known for his work on measuring turbidity and improving water quality, Baylis was an especially attractive to hire to Loran Gayton, the Engineer of Chicago’s Water Works Design division. Increasing pollution levels in the raw water which had resulted in significant increases in chlorine doses during the 1920s: from approximately 673,000 pounds in 1923 to 1,250,890 pounds in 1924. A cluster of concerns drove Baylis’ hiring: uncertainty about the impact of chlorine levels on the ‘delicate tissues and organs of the human system’; certainty about the destructive impact of free chlorine on metal pipes and machinery; and city approval in 1924 to begin exploring the feasibility of building filtration plants. Ongoing complaints about the taste of the water helped make such an effort politically palatable.38 Chicago’s water quality, according to Baylis’ estimation soon after he was hired, was amongst ‘the most turbid water being supplied to any large city in [the U.S.]’, a problem that left ‘clarity and taste not all that is desired’.39 Matters of aesthetic concern quickly came to characterize Baylis’ everyday research activities. The late December phenol incident in 1927 further justified the hiring of Baylis at a time when political pressure to rid the city of ‘imported employees’ threatened his job and instigated an intensive study of methods for removing phenol.40 From 1927 to 1930, Baylis and colleagues focused their research on using various chlorine levels and activated carbons to mitigate off tastes and odors. Reports and discussion at the AWWA’s Toronto convention in 1929, and as part of a panel presentation before the Water Purification Division at the St. Louis convention in 1930, indicate that while some found activated carbon useful in their taste and odor removal efforts, others such as E.B. Showell, the water supply engineer for the DuPont Company, found carbon filters ineffective in removing ‘Bad’ and ‘Very Bad’

36 For a discussion of how Whipple’s method entered into and got written out of Standard Methods, see Spackman and Burlingame, Sensory Politics. 37 J.R. Baylis, Percolation and runoff, Journal American Water Works Association 55 (1963) 40; 42. 38 J. Ericson, The quality problem. 39 J.R. Baylis, Preliminary experiments on the treatment of Lake Michigan water for Chicago, Journal American Water Works Association 17 (1927) 710. 40 J. Doherty, Filter expert too good a man to get the ax, Chicago Tribune April 30, 1949.

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chlorophenol tastes from the company’s drinking water.41 Aesthetic descriptors inhibited workers’ ability to evaluate removal approaches. At the 1931 Minnesota Section meeting of the AWWA Baylis noted that an operator from one locale could report success in removing a taste or odor using familiar reference words such as ‘decaying vegetation, earthy, fishy, grassy, moldy, swampy’. Another, located in a different municipality who faced a similar taste or odor episode may find the treatment reported by the first ineffective. The lack of an ‘accurate means of determining when the water is free from taste, or of determining the intensity of the taste’, further complicated mitigation efforts, Baylis stated. For Baylis, the method introduced by Whipple and codified in Standard Methods only vaguely expressed the quality or intensity of an odor and failed to give similar results amongst multiple workers testing the same sample of water, even when those operators were experienced at testing the taste of water.42 It also undermined Baylis’ ability to push his water worker colleagues to adopt his findings. Baylis was not alone in his discontent with Whipple’s method and with the inexact nature of treating taste and odor problems. Charles H. Spaulding, of the municipal water plant in Springfield, IL, similarly saw the hopeful rhetoric of new treatment efforts as premature. Like Baylis, Spaulding faced the problem of variable surface waters contaminated by industrial production and human waste. Like Baylis, Spaulding was interested in and actively researched filtration. The problem with the panoply of mitigation efforts, Spaulding commented, lay in the fact that water workers had no way to quantitatively measure odor and taste. As such, they could not report to what level mitigation efforts worked, even as reports rolled in of increasingly successful removal of off tastes and odors via treatment with ammonia or activated carbon. Experimentation without quantification, Spaulding intimated, was nearly useless.43 At the core of Spaulding’s complaint lay a long-standing concern amongst scientists about the subjective nature of sensory experience, especially the sensory experiences of smelling and tasting. Although Whipple’s measuring system acknowledged that water workers could develop some level of expert connoisseurship, it failed to speak to the desire for objective knowledge production devoid of the observer.44 Taking direct aim at Whipple’s approach, Spaulding called for a ‘yardstick,’ a means of determining odor that was not the ‘opinion of the observer based on a momentary impression which cannot be recorded and referred to for comparison’.45 Whipple’s approach, Spaulding claimed, was too rooted in personal experience to meet the needs of the discipline. Rather it was an ‘expression of opinion’. Spaulding instead proposed that water scientists adopt a method for determining the threshold level at which an odor was just barely detectable. ‘We [water workers] cannot as yet determine quantitatively many of the actual compounds causing odor,’ Spaulding pointed out. He instead suggested that in using his Threshold Odor Number (TON) approach, ‘we can measure their effects on the sense of smell just as we measure turbidity by sight’.46

Although not explicitly stated d or perhaps not even explicitly understood d Spaulding’s threshold measurement drew on the growing field of psychophysics.47 Psychophysics, as articulated via German philosopher Gustav Fechner, linked the physical experiences of the body with the psychic experiences of the mind. Grounded in the idea that small increases in stimulation would be proportionally accompanied by small increases in sensation, the Weber-Fechner law gave those interested in aesthetics (primarily visual and auditory) a way to express and test the relationship between stimulus and experience by identifying the point at which a difference in stimuli was ‘just noticeable’.48 Psychophysics offered a quantitative way to measure physical data and in the process infer otherwise ineffable experience. In adapting a threshold approach, Spaulding adopted the belief embraced by phsychophysics that one can learn about the unknown through measuring the known: in this case, one could learn about the unknown properties of a taste or odor by identifying the known point at which one could first distinguish odor-free water from water containing the unknown, odor causing compound(s). In November 1932, the newly formed Committee on Control of Taste and Odor, headed in part by Chicago’s Gerstein, reported to the AWWA that despite their charge to present on the state of the art, ‘the entire subject of tastes and odors is so much a matter of opinion that merely summarizing the reported experiences of plant operators fails to give more than a resume of the honest opinions of these workers, and brings home the fact that these honest opinions conflict in many cases’. The problem, they argued, was due in part to the ‘limitations of the present method of odor determination in Standard Methods, which relies too much upon the personal equation as to quality and intensity’.49 The committee’s report highlights the core challenge of researchers in the twentieth century interested in how bodies interact with the environment: interactions are hard to articulate in ways that easily circulate between individuals. The subjectivity of the sensing body, despite its usefulness in detecting the presence of off odors, failed when it came to the task of comparing treatment methods aimed at mitigating problems. They instead suggested that ‘the adoption of the Spaulding method for determination of the taste threshold point d the maximum dilution with tasteless water which will give taste d would be a step in the right direction’.50 Spaulding’s 1931 method, although relatively sparse in details, called for making up a series of dilutions of an unknown sample with odor free water (prepared through boiling until approximately ten percent of the volume had evaporated, and then cooling). Samples were then sniffed with comparisons made to the odor free sample. These initial dilutions, all made to a total volume of 100 mL, allowed one to estimate the range of perception, with additional samples being prepared to more closely isolate the dilution point at which the unknown sample was indistinguishable from the known sample. ‘We have not thus far noted any marked discrepancy in the

41 J.R. Baylis et al., Further observations on the use of activated carbon in removing objectionable taste and odors from water [with discussion], Journal American Water Works Association 22 (1930) 1438e75. 42 J.R. Baylis and C.L. Ehrhart, Taste and odor elimination, Journal American Water Works Association 24 (1932) 636. 43 Hansen et al., Tastes and odors. 44 For more on this see L.J. Daston and P. Galison, Objectivity, Cambridge, 2010, 17, 277e293. 45 C.H. Spaulding, Quantitative determination of odor in water, American Journal of Public Health 21 (1931) 1038. 46 C.H. Spaulding, Some quantitative odor determinations, Journal American Water Works Association 24 (1932) 1112e13.

47 ‘The writer claims very little originality in applying the dilution method to water. … After adopting the idea, I found it was well recognized in chemistry and that the International Critical Tables contain lists of odor values assigned to various chemical compounds based on threshold value …. The unit of this system is the olfacty’ Spaulding, Some quantitative odor determinations, 1113. 48 A. Hui, The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840e1910 Cambridge, (2012), chap. one; M. Heidelberger, Nature from Within: Gustav Theodor Fechner and his Psychophysical Worldview, trans. Cynthia Klohr, Pittsburgh, 2004, 202e9. 49 M.E. Flentje and H.H. Gerstein, Report of committee on control of tastes and odors [with discussion], Journal American Water Works Association 24 (1932) 1738. 50 Flentje and Gerstein, Report of committee, 1749.

Psychophysical estimation

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results obtained by this method in the hands of trained, conscientious observers’ Spaulding reported.51 In April 1933, less than five months after the Committee on Control of Taste and Odor reported to the AWWA their recommendation to adopt Spaulding’s method, Gerstein and Baylis’ colleague, Oscar Gullans, proposed to the Illinois section meeting that a modification of Spaulding’s method would be even more successful at allowing detection of odors that had until then been frequently missed by water workers but detected by consumers. Rather than relying on an initial set of dilutions to try to get the range as Spaulding had suggested, Gullans advised using Whipple’s method to identify the intensity of the odor. That intensity, Gullans noted, could then be used to ‘make an estimate of the probable “threshold points”’.52 In other words, Gullans argued he had an even better route to identify the just noticeable. Spaulding’s method and Baylis’ and Gullans’ later modifications were quickly brought into the official methodological approach: the seventh edition of Standard Methods (1933) included it under ‘Nonstandard Methods’; three years later it appeared as a standard method in the eighth edition (1936). The method made possible new modes of discussing mitigation efforts. These modes increasingly relied on communicating the multiplicity of water not through long discursive description, but rather via geographical variation encapsulated in numbers. Take, for example, a survey examining taste and odor control on Lake Michigan sent out in 1939 to water treatment plants along the western shore of the lake. Instigated by Norton A. Thomas, the chief chemist at the Milwaukee Water Works, the survey relied on odor numbers to make its case about how water in the singular body of the lake varied in different locales. Objectionable characteristics caused by microorganisms in eleven of the reporting plants and industrial waste and sewage in the twelfth were, through the transformative power of the TON, stripped of the inherent subjectivity of their production. ‘A tabulation of the data received from the different plants’ Thomas notes, ‘showed that the maximum raw water odor ranged from 10 to 100 as determined by the threshold number. For some water supplies these concentrations may not be considered unusual, but with Lake Michigan water, in the vicinity of the average intake figures well below 10 are usual’. As many of the plants responding were using activated carbon to address off tastes and odors in raw water, Thomas was able to compare pre- and posttreatment odor numbers. For Thomas, the combined findings of the survey, in conjunction with his own plant’s research examining the relationship between various microorganisms, as well as the raw odor threshold and raw odor temperature proved that ‘if rigid control of the treatment [enabled through threshold odor testing] is properly maintained, a palatable water can be produced’ (Fig. 2).53 Notable in Thomas’ report is how the survey portrays participants. In contrast to the concerns voiced by Spaulding, Gullans and Baylis over the individual variation found in their own bodies and those of their local colleagues, as well as those of their larger cohort of water workers, Thomas assumes that all who participated in the survey used their bodies in similar ways, following similar procedures to arrive at the numbers they report. Rather than considered uninformative when circulating beyond its location of production, the estimations of sensory experience, embodied in the

51

Spaulding, Quantitative determination, 1039. O. Gullans, Procedure for making odor determinations, Journal American Water Works Association 25ß (1933) 977. 53 N.A. Thomas, Taste and odor control on Lake Michigan, Journal American Water Works Association 32 (1940) 1883, 1886. 52

reported TONs, could be mobilized to actively compress excess information and facilitate evaluation of potential treatment routes. Indeed, by 1938 the AWWA sub-committee on Specifications and Tests for Powdered Activated Carbons noted that ‘the Threshold Odor Test is capable of practical application in the control of tastes and odors, and in the evaluation of competitive carbons’, a recommendation that situated the test within a small cadre of approved evaluation methods.54 Using the test would not only supplement the commonly used phenol test, the committee pointed out, it would also allow ‘verification of its validity as a means of providing predictable performance in actual taste and odor removal from natural supplies’.55 Workers felt that the Threshold Odor Test’s relied on estimation of experience rather than true, ‘objective’ quantitation. Nonetheless, they understood the test as a scientific means to using embodied knowledge in their efforts to proactively remove offensive sensory cues before water left the tap. By transforming individual sensation into a ‘matter of public agreement,’ estimations of sensory thresholds expressed in numbers came to stand in for the unknown chemical nature of contaminating compounds. These numbers allowed workers at geographically disparate plants working with materially distinct waters the ability to quantitatively, rather than qualitatively, evaluate mitigation techniques. In quantifying odor, water workers could now quantify odor mitigation, a process that at least appeared to offer the ability for techniques to travel between water treatment plants. The sensory politics of noticing A dual politics of sensing lay at the core of Spaulding’s suggestion.56 He and others saw in unwanted or offensive tastes and odors a constant threat to water workers’ authority over the safety of water. ‘Confidence in the ability of the chemist … is lessened if he states the tests show no odor in the water yet some of the users of the water detect objectionable odors,’ Baylis and his colleague Oscar Gullans reminded fellow water workers in their 1936 refinement of Spaulding’s method.57 Their statement reflects the early truism within the water worker corps that ‘potable waters are not always palatable,’ a truism that continues to present day.58 After all, despite the December 29th, 1927 claim by the superintendent of water treatment in Chicago that the water was safe to drink, residents still went out and bought bottled water. Lacking knowledge about the compounds causing unwanted tastes and odors that could have guided treatment, water workers turned to the TON as a way to solidify their expertise and mastery over the olfactory world. In the process, they differentiated their sensory acuity d and approach d from that of the people they were producing water for. As much as local weather patterns and seasonal variation forced water workers to attend to the local multiplicity of the water they treated, it was industrial pollution that truly linked Illinois water workers, and their colleagues throughout the country, to place. Nicholas Bauch, in his examination of biotechnology and the

54 L.C. Billings et al., Specifications and tests for powdered activated carbon final report of the sub-committee, Journal American Water Works Association 30 (1938) 1133e1224. 55 Billings et al., Specifications and tests, 1137. 56 For an expansion of the idea of sensory politics, see Spackman and Burlingame, Sensory Politics. 57 J.R. Baylis and O. Gullans, An improved odor test on water, Journal American Water Works Association 28 (1936) 507. 58 J. Mallevialle and I.H. Suffet, eds., Identification and Treatment of Tastes and Odors in Drinking Water Denver, 1987.

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Fig. 2. The relationship between micro-organisms and threshold odor at the Milwaukee Water Works in 1939. Source: Thomas. Journal American Water Works Association: 1185. Used with permission of John Wiley and Sons.

growth of the Kellogg enterprise, suggests that one begin by reading the landscape as an entrance to understanding why the Kelloggs practiced and taught digestion the way they did. Read this way, Bauch argues, the body is revealed as extending into the landscape in a manner that ‘erodes divisions between inside and out’.59 In the process Bauch shows that remaking landscapes through technologies can remake entire populations. This remaking comes in the form of often imperceptible, but sometimes perceptible, materials linking bodies, infrastructures, ecosystems, and industries. The sources of unwanted aesthetic cues had noticeably shifted within the first few decades of the twentieth century. Early reports of off tastes and odors caused by plankton and algae in the 1900s d which by the 1920s were considered as ‘definite known causes’ d gave way to reports detailing the interaction of natural events such as wind, temperature changes and ice flow with industrial and sewage contamination.60 Baylis and workers acknowledged this new landscape of industrial production as filled with potential

59 N. Bauch, A Geography of Digestion: Biotechnology and the Kellogg Cereal Enterprise Berkeley, 2017, 8. 60 N.J. Howard, Modern practice in the removal of taste and odor, Journal American Water Works Association 9 (1922) 768; Gerstein, Chloro-phenol tastes; Ellms and Lawrence, Causes of obnoxious tastes and odors.

sources of ‘obnoxious’ tastes and odors. The waste sources greatly varied: food production facilities ranging from meat packing houses to beet sugar mills; manufacturers of glue, paper, textiles, and dyes; and the coke-oven plants feeding the steel mills of the United States all contributed flavorful compounds to nearby water ways.61 As the ‘universal solvent,’ water’s ability to dissolve or wash away unwanted industrial byproducts d an ability that made it critical to the industrial work of enterprises across the United States d also meant that surface waters near plants were at increased risk of pollution from products distinctly shaped by human hands. Intake cribs and pipes, often located miles away from taps (Fig. 3), brought tasting mouths and smelling noses into intimate contact with the decisions taken by industrial actors far removed from city limits. Notwithstanding their awareness of the causes of unwanted chemical materials in the water, workers’ internal discourses in the interwar period focus on treatment and removal, rather than agitating for prevention of industrial pollution. Baylis, for example, despite having played a key role in determining the phenol content of the contaminated water that plagued Chicago in late 1927, and

61 Baylis and Ehrhart, Taste and odor elimination, provide a list of industries ‘known to discharge wastes that produce taste in water,’ 637.

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Fig. 3. Map of Chicago’s water supply system. Source: Ericson, Water supply system of Chicago.

again in 1928, embraced a pragmatic view of manufacturing industries: ‘most industries have certain waste products that must be disposed of in some manner,’ he stated to the Minnesota Section Meeting of the AWWA in October 1931, ‘and sometimes it is possible for the industry to exist only where its waste products can be disposed of cheaply… it is impossible to eliminate all industrial pollution of objectionable character’.62 Instead of placing an emphasis on industrial waste disposal, a step Baylis saw as potentially leading to the loss of employment as well as regional power,

62

Baylis and Ehrhart, Taste and odor elimination, 638.

he suggested a spirit of cooperation between inhabitants and industry. Key to this spirit of cooperation? Mobilizing the ability to catch the perceptible markers of the places water came from, to reliably test that water, and to treat it to remove as many markers of place as possible. At the same time, the limited ability of water workers to measure, mitigate, or persuade others to remove the sources of unwanted tastes and odors affected the spirit of cooperation Baylis pushed for. As Romain Garcier suggests in examining the emerging concept of pollution in nineteenth century France in this journal, thinking of waste as pollution allowed ‘engaging with the relationship of industrial society with the environment and the new,

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troublesome, circulation of matter it induced’.63 Through framing pollution as both a legal object and something with a threshold, Garcier argues, industrial interests were able to shape regulatory understandings of what was and was not considered polluting. Max Liboiron similarly highlights that techniques of measurement developed to examine the assimilative capacity of water facilitated policies in the United States focused primarily on identifying acceptable limits rather than seeking removal of pollutants.64 Water workers in the Chicago region found the increasing presence of polluting compounds causing off tastes and odors in raw water in the late 1920s especially concerning. Pollution strained technical competence and the fiscal resources available to water workers. Pollution forced water workers to straddle between acting as guardians of public health d a role they primarily continued to understand as preventing bacteriological threats d and facilitators of regional growth. We see the water worker painted as a sentinel and facilitator in Baylis’ comments: attentive to developments in water treatment, ever-prepared to combat increased pollution, yet also willing to aim for the pragmatic goal of balancing cost, politics, and public safety with the desire for ‘quality’ water. This is not to say that water workers were endlessly willing partners with industry. Indeed, they quickly began using the newly adopted technique for identifying and quantifying off odors for making claims on local and national producers of pollutants. In 1934 the Committee on Oil Pollution d sponsored by the Conference of State Sanitary Engineers on Oil Production and Refinery Wastes d surveyed states with public water supplies polluted by oil production. They found that six of seven had experienced objectionable taste and odor episodes. ‘With the exception of phenols,’ the committee noted, ‘quantitative determination of taste and odor producing compounds was not reported by any state. It has been found more practical to evaluate odor intensity of the wastes, receiving stream and water supply by determination of the threshold number’.65 The report reveals water workers mobilizing TONs to make claims on oil producers for abatement processes, even though those processes produced incomplete mitigation. Managing a water’s palatability intersected with a larger power struggle over who should and could know the stuff of raw water. The newly acquired ability of water workers to transform suspect waters into waters free from disease situated them as gatekeepers over the population’s health. Present in treated water, obnoxious tastes and odors d be they from natural sources or traces of industrial activity d threatened the authority of water workers to make publicly accepted claims regarding the health and safety of the supply. Conclusion Water workers in the interwar period understood tastes and odors as rooted in both the natural and human-made world. The causes of tastes and odors came from a fraction of known compounds, and a much larger fraction of yet unknown compounds. In connecting the physiological ability to detect trace levels of uncharacterized compounds with psychophysical modes of measurement, water workers sought to create a synergistic efficiency across their professional association. Rather than relying on reports that method x or method y worked, they sought a method of

63 R. Garcier, The placing of matter: industrial water pollution and the construction of social order in nineteenth-century France, Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 133. 64 M. Liboiron, Redefining pollution: plastics in the wild, PhD Dissertation, New York University, 2012, Ch. 2. 65 H.F. Ferguson et al., Oil pollution and refinery wastes, Sewage Works Journal 7 (1935) 112.

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estimation that would allow them to quantitatively compare methods. Adoption of the TON fundamentally changed communication about treatment efforts during the interwar period; it allowed water workers to use their own bodies, inextricably rooted in place by the very materials they worked with, as reliable instruments, while still working under the premises of objective science associated with the modernist project. The regional and national circulation of TONs through the AWWA’s communication mechanisms facilitated evaluation of the exuberant number of unverified treatment methods available. The belief that knowing the material nature of the compound(s) responsible for causing unwanted tastes and odors would allow water workers total control over the end experience is threaded throughout the arguments for adoption of the TON system. In 1940, Baylis would hopefully claim that, ‘In the very near future there will be little, or almost no unpalatable water served the public.’66 His statement reveals an anticipated future where sensory information no longer informs the public of anything other than water workers’ complete mastery over the natural world, a world where the public would be completely uprooted from the many ways human hands and industry had shaped the place they lived. Although Baylis’ dream would remain far from reality, in adopting TON as a standardized, scientific way of estimating the ineffable, water workers began mobilizing taste and smell as a rhetorical tool in their efforts to achieve technological and scientific mastery over water. Water workers enacted this gustatory rhetoric through the methodological infrastructure of TON and their increasingly effective, albeit imperfect, mitigation techniques. Sensation done in place facilitated water workers as they sought to reducethe chlorine-scented mark of their work, and to remove the most egregious markers of locale. Unlike the visual rhetoric mobilized by built infrastructures in the early twentieth century, management of taste and smell remained largely imperceptible except when it failed. Despite the unrealized nature of Baylis’ hoped-for future, attending to water workers’ efforts to curate sensory cues highlights the larger role that management of sensory experience played in twentieth-century efforts to engineer bodies and landscapes. Making municipal water modern relied on intervention that went beyond the visual and hygienic. Rather, it encompassed a much wider aim of protecting both individual bodies and industries. In her examination of art critic Clement Greenberg’s life, Caroline Jones suggests that modernism ‘does not exist outside persons, but produces them as persons’, and does so by bureaucratizing, segmenting, and organizing the body’s sensorial modes.67 TON sought to do exactly that: it visibly bureaucratized, segmented, and organized how water workers engaged with the sensorial excesses of polluted waters. The technique transformed water workers into mediators between a place, with all its attendant activities, and the people who lived in a place and drank its waters. In the process, TON set in motion a gustatory rhetoric that claimed the ability to make landscape and technological systems fade away for all but the professionals and regulators tasked with attending to water, a modernist effort grounded in the technocratic dream of total control over all of water’s sensory aspects. The gustatory rhetoric embraced by water workers simultaneously aimed to erase perceptible markers of place from tap water even as it transformed water workers and their laboratories into people and spaces thoroughly embedded in place. Despite the simplification offered by TON, attaining control over off tastes and

66 J.R. Baylis, General discussion on water purification, Journal American Water Works Association 32 (1940) 1195. 67 C.A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses, Chicago, 2005, xv, 390.

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smells required a constant negotiation with weather, industry, budgets, and limited technology. However, the rhetoric that TON helped establish d grounded in removal of noticeable contaminants d nonetheless facilitated water workers efforts to mediate between public, industry, and state. Read within the larger landscape of historical geography, the work of managing taste and smell demonstrates that geographical perception, and its impacts, extends well beyond the ocular.

Fellowship in Science, Technology and Society at Harvey Mudd College and the Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam. I am grateful to the organizers and participants of the Estimated Truths Workshop held at the Max Planck Institute for early feedback, to the three anonymous reviewers, and to Hi’ilei Hobart for feedback on later drafts.

Appendix A. Supplementary data Acknowledgements This work was supported by a Hixon-Riggs Early Career

Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2019.10.014.

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