Fifty Years of Progress in Water Purification, 1913-63

FIFTY years ago, at its annual convention in Minneapolis, Minn., the Association organized a "Chemical and Bacteriological Section" which has since become the Water Purification Division. Why this remained unnoted in the published records of the Association for two years, is hard to say. Even then the new section was referred to by a single sentence in an account of its meeting attended by 50 members at the annual convention in Cincinnati, Ohio.1 W. F. Monfort, consulting chemist of St. Louis, Mo., was the section chairman, and the following officers were elected: president M. B. Litch, superintendent and chemist, filtration plant, Steelton, Pa.; secretary John Kienle, at one time chief engineer of the Wilmington Water Dept. and later vice-president, Mathieson Alkali Co., New York, N.Y. ; executive committee Paul Hansen, engineer, State Water Survey, Urbana, 111., later consulting engineer, Chicago, 111.; Wade Hampton Frost, USPHS, Cincinnati, Ohio, later professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, Baltimore, Md. ; and Charles P. Hoover, chemist, filtration plant, Columbus, Ohio, an authority on water softening. The slate attests to the high caliber of early water quality management in the United States. The difficulty of isolating a onesentence reference to so important a happening in the history of American water works supports the mounting concern of the scientific and engineering community over information retrieval in our time. So do, perhaps in grander manner, the more than 73,000 pages of the Proceedings (1913) and the Journal (volumes 1-54) that have been published by the Association. Laudably, the Association has sought to meliorate the situation through its abstracts of water supply literature ; its index to the Proceedings, Journal, and other publications; its reports of committees and task groups; and its occasional major publications, such as Water Quality and Treatment. The present review is also an exercise in information retrieval in that sense.