Story
Abel Wolman was a Baltimore-born Jewish engineer who treated clean water as an infrastructure problem, not a miracle. The early twentieth-century city still killed people with its taps. Typhoid was a municipal habit. Wolman wanted a dose you could calculate.
With Linn Enslow he worked out how much chlorine a given water needed, and how to keep that dose honest as the river changed. The method was dull on purpose. Dull is how you keep a million people from getting sick on a Tuesday.
He taught at Johns Hopkins for half a century, advised cities and nations, and stayed in the unglamorous profession of pipes, plants, and standards. Awards came late and large because the work had been everywhere, quietly.
Jewish Baltimore produced doctors, lawyers, and this: a man who thought a waterworks was a moral assignment. Every glass of treated water is a little monument he would have refused to call a monument.
Photographs
Hero photograph: Wikimedia Commons
