History of Sanitation

116 HISTORY OF SANITATION Following the historic investigations of the Massachu- setts State Board of Health, numerous engineers and in- vestigators commenced applying to practice the principles there laid down, and with such good results that there are upwards of 200 purification plants in the United States to- day, and in Pennsylvania alone plans are under way at the present time for over one hundred sewage disposal works. Such a showing is encouraging, and leads to the hope that within a decade no city of any importance within the States will be pouring impurified sewage into public streams or lakes. Up to within the last quarter century no thought was given in the United States to the disposal or destruction of the grosser particles which make up the waste of a large city, nor was provision made at sanatoria, hospitals and like institutions for the destruction of materials which might prove infectious; yet, no less important than the removal of sewage by water carriage is the systematic col- lection and subsequent destruction of all matter of no value which might prove a vehicle of disease, if a clean, sanitary environment is to be maintained. The necessity for such removal and destruction was first felt in hospitals, sana- toria, barracks and camps, where many people are brought together under unusual circumstances, and infective mat- ter is liable to accumulate, thereby proving a menace to the community. It is not surprising, therefore, that the desirability of destroying such accumulated wastes was first brought home to the medical staff connected with military service, and that the medical authorities should be connected with the British army. The first garbage destructor, or garbage furnace, of which there is any record, was constructed about i860, at Gibraltar, for the exclusive destruction by fire of all waste matter from the British garrison. In the United States, likewise, it was at the army posts where the need for waste destructors was first felt, and in 1885 Lieutenant H. I. Reilly, U. S. A., built the first American garbage furnace at Governor’s Island, New York Harbor. From that time