A new process for purifying the waters supplied to the metropolis by the existing water companies : rendering each water much softer, preventing a fur on boiling, separating vegetating and colouring matter, destroying numerous water-insects, and withdrawing from solution large quantities of solid matter, not separable by mere filtration / by Thomas Clark.

  • Clark, Thomas
Date:
1849
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A new process for purifying the waters supplied to the metropolis by the existing water companies : rendering each water much softer, preventing a fur on boiling, separating vegetating and colouring matter, destroying numerous water-insects, and withdrawing from solution large quantities of solid matter, not separable by mere filtration / by Thomas Clark. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    compound is left in solution; for the caustic lime in the lime-water all falls down as a component part of chalk, along with other chalk from the bicarbonate of lime. This charac- ter of the patented process is as fortunate as it is rare in chemical processes. VI. The new Process compared with the late Mr, Telford's Project. When this eminent engineer made in 1834, at the request of Government, a Report on the best mode of obtaining pure water for the metropolis, he recommended that certain river- waters should be brought from a distance. The estimated cost was about 1,200,000. But so far as the estimate went, it was only for changing the source of supply to cer- tain of the Companies, who, taken together, did not then supply so much as a half of what the metropolis received. The water obtained after this outlay would have been little if at all better than what is now supplied. It would not have been softer; it would still deposit a fur; it would not be free from vegetation; it would have contained insects, It^is a triumph of chemical art over mechanical, that, by bringing into collision w^ell-known chemical properties of chalk, itself the largest impurity, water free from this im- purity and from all these defects can be obtained from sources at hand—water of a degree of purity such as the Patentee has not been able to obtain or hear of within a cir- cle around London of more than thirty miles' distance—and, not only at hand and purer than money could command by mechanical means, but in a copiousness of supply that must be as exhaustless as the Thames. Marischal College, Aberdeen, January 5th, 1844. PRINTED BY RICHARD AND JOHN E. TAYLOR, RED LION COURT, FLEET STREET.
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