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Unintended Consequences: Dealing with the Population Density Explosion
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The reconstruction of Magdeburg brings to mind issues in population density. Although relatively large cities existed in 1634 in OTL, none of them qualifies as a really modern city, as the up-timers would recognize them. The up-timers will cause an unparalleled population density explosion, based on the technologies and the social systems that were developed in the late nineteenth and in the twentieth centuries to handle the growth of the megalopolis.
None of the large cities of Europe or Asia qualified as metropolitan until nearly the end of the nineteenth century. Why? To handle large scale urban populations of the density of even a twenty-first-century Hamburg, you require a combination of the effects of the development of five things. You need the germ theory of disease and epidemiology, centrifugal pumps and the associated high pressure piping, electricity, and the modern safety elevator. What, you say? They had pumps, they had running water . . . All that’s true, but this is a synergism. You need all of them to make a modern metropolis work.
So, what’s a large, modern city? Here are the 2007 top five:
By Population
1 Tokyo/Yokohama Japan 33,200,000
2 New York Metro USA 17,800,000
3 Sao Paulo Brazil 17,700,000
4 Seoul/Inchon South Korea 17,500,000
5 Mexico City Mexico 17,400,000
Now, contrast this with what passed for a large city in the seventeenth century. The two largest cities in the world were Beijing and Constantinople, both with roughly 700,000 people. Edo, Japan, the core of modern Tokyo, had roughly 575,000 people. London and Paris were the largest cities in Europe, with close to a half million people each, while Naples had 300,000 and Amsterdam had 200,000.
In order to cram 33 million souls into 6,993 square kilometers, as Tokyo does, or close to 18 million into 8,683 square kilometers, you have to build high. Tokyo and New York are both in the top five of cities with the most skyscrapers.
Epidemiology
You need a clear understanding of the germ theory of disease, especially for waterborne illnesses. It is arguable whether cholera existed in northern Germany in 1630 but it would not be long before it came there. It was the understanding of how cholera is transmitted that created the discipline of epidemiology, and led directly to the concept of making drinking water safe. This didn’t happen until Dr. John Snow, who appears to have singlehandedly created the modern science of epidemiology, and his friend, the Rev. Henry Whitehead, determined the importance of the Broad Street Pump to the London Cholera Epidemic of 1854. Granted, Whitehead and Snow didn’t understand the germ theory of disease, but their work pointed to it and it provided the final key in the lock of safety from disease.
At the time, London had the highest population density on record, more than two million people in a ten mile circumference. But what was true for London in 1854 had been true for every large population center in history.
Cities had sewers. Cities had water companies. Some cities had running water in some wealthier dwellings, and some even had flush toilets. What they did not have was a clear understanding of how to ensure that the water supply was drinkable, because they didn’t understand the link between water-borne bacteria and disease.
Cities generally obtained their water supplies from either surface water (rivers, lakes, and stormwater catchments) or ground water, or a combination of the two. Water intakes were, as often as not, downstream from wastewater discharges since there was no understanding of water-borne pathogens. Groundwater supplies tended to be shallow subsurface wells, since drilling deep water wells was not yet technically practical, and would not be until deep drilling techniques became powered by steam. These “groundwater supplies” were actually easily contaminated by surface pollution, as the story of the Broad Street Pump describes.
Getting the water from its sources to the population was not trivial, either. Modern cities are built over a grid of water pipes that is divided into pressure zones. Pumps and elevated storage are used to maintain relatively constant pressure in all the pipes in each zone. In some cases, it required the development of cast iron pipe and high pressure pumps to produce high enough pressure to feed all the parts of the grid.
Getting wastewater away from its sources was also non-trivial. Ranging from simply putting the contents of the chamberpot in the basement (England) to opening the window and splashing it out into the street (in France and Scotland “gardy-loo” or garde l’eau was the traditional cry given just before the toss) to saving it for collection and re-sale to the dyers and tanners (Germany, the Low Countries, and Italy) there was virtually no organized attempt to collect and remove wastewater, and treat it before it returned to the surface water and ground water supplies.
The 1632verse is different. Grantville appeared, complete with physicians, nurses, medicines, textbooks, and a public health praxis that the Early Modern Europeans could see working.
Grantville’s largest impact in its first few years of existence in Thuringia will be the dissemination of modern public health practices—not modern medicine. Simple adherence to the basics of modern public health as the up-timers knew them (especially regularly washing hands with soap) will have a huge impact on reducing infant mortality, lengthening lifespan, and reducing death from disease. And, since no good deed goes unpunished, this will, of course, lead directly to a population explosion.
More and more people, living in close proximity, eating and excreting . . . a breeding ground for cholera, typhoid, and other water borne diseases.
Disinfection
The second thing you need is a practical means of disinfection for both water and wastewater. This means: easy to produce, understand, and maintain. In addition, you need to have the ability to make sure that any given amount of water is drinkable and safe.
This didn’t occur in OTL until after John Snow and Henry Whitehead proved that cholera (and by extension, other diseases) was caused by contamination of water by human feces. Shortly afterward, Semmelweis, Pasteur, Lister and Koch proved that the microorganisms first being identified in the seventeenth century by microbiologists like van Leewenhoeck were the proximate cause of diseases like cholera.
Once we knew what caused cholera and typhoid, it was a quick step to find a means to destroy the enemy bacteria.
In 1913, a typhoid epidemic struck Northern New Jersey, and the source was identified as a stream feeding into a reservoir in Boonton that was the water supply for Jersey City. Charles Wallace and Martin Tiernan finally found a way to inject measured amounts of chlorine gas into the water in a repeatable way, providing the first reliable means of disinfection of a public water supply. Chlorine, in either gaseous form or in the form of sodium or calcium hypochlorite, had been tried previously, but too little chlorine has no effect, and too much chlorine in the water produces diarrhea and vomiting in victims. Wallace and Tiernan made it possible to accurately meter chlorine into the water supply. Why chlorine? Chlorine carries a residual which means that you can be sure that the water in which chlorine is present is disinfected. And this residual is easy to measure.
Grantville came through the Ring of Fire with three working disinfection systems: the power plant’s cooling water system, the city water treatment plant, and the city wastewater treatment plant. The engineering library at the water plant and the public works department and the wastewater treatment plant had multiple copies of Standard Methods for the Examination of Water and Wastewater, the treatment and testing bible of late-twentieth-century water treatment as well as copies of The Manual of Practice for the Disinfection of Wastewater and Chlorination of Water. So they understand how to do it, and have working systems to pattern from.
It isn’t enough to understand epidemiology, you also have to have the technology and tools to do something with it.
A brief mention must be made of the social response to the new theory of epidemiology and disease. Laws were passed ensuring that public urination and defecation were forbidden. Renewed importance was given to bathing and general cleanliness, especially after Nightingale, Lister and Koch proved that disinfection lowered mortality rates in hospitals by orders of magnitude. As it will in the 1632verse, simply making the washing of hands a socially-important behavior will do more to increase population growth than almost any other thing.
Centrifugal Pumps
There are two reasons why buildings in large cities throughout history have been low rises. One is the fact that climbing stairs is a real pain after about five or six floors, and the other is that it just isn’t possible to use a positive displacement pump (think the well pump from the Old West farmyard, or the infamous Broad Street Pump) to pump water higher than about twenty-two feet in the air. Buildings with floors higher than this had no water on the upper floors, and were unpleasant to live in, as well as being serious fire hazards, since the fire department couldn’t get water up there either, if there even was a fire department.
Luckily, in the middle-seventeenth century, OTL, inventors in England, Holland and Germany came up with a mechanism for moving large amounts of water that could pump very high pressures. It was called the centrifugal pump.
That ends the preview. Probably in the middle of a sentence. Sorry.