- Person
- Abel Wolman
- Lived
- 1892–1989
- Field
- Sanitary engineering
- From
- American
The story
Abel Wolman was born in Baltimore in 1892 to Polish Jewish immigrants who had settled in the city’s East Baltimore ghetto. He studied engineering at Johns Hopkins and in 1914 joined the Maryland State Department of Health, where much of his job was inspecting water and sewage treatment plants.
At the time, typhoid fever and other waterborne diseases still killed many Americans. Chlorine was known to kill bacteria in water, and some cities were adding it, but there was no scientific way to choose the dose. Water from different rivers and reservoirs carried different amounts of organic matter, silt and bacteria, all of which soak up chlorine. Too little chlorine left water unsafe, and too much made it taste and smell bad, so dosing was often unreliable and failures led to outbreaks of disease.
Wolman worked on the problem with Linn Enslow, a chemist in the same department who had also studied at Johns Hopkins. They measured the rate at which many different water samples absorbed chlorine and analysed the results statistically. Their 1919 paper, Chlorine Absorption and the Chlorination of Water, published a test for a water’s chlorine demand and a way to calculate the dose needed to kill the bacteria in it. According to the National Academy of Sciences memoir of Wolman, the method was adopted worldwide.
Wolman applied it across Maryland, and the American Society of Civil Engineers reports that by 1930 typhoid cases in the state had fallen by 92 percent. He became Maryland’s chief health engineer, advised cities including New York, Detroit and Columbus, and later consulted for about 50 countries and the World Health Organization, where he pressed for a program on water supply. Wolman took the lead in promoting the method, but he and Enslow developed it together, and both are credited with the advance.
Why it matters
Measuring a water’s chlorine demand and dosing to match it remains a basic step in drinking water treatment, helping protect billions of people from typhoid, cholera and other waterborne diseases.
About Abel Wolman
Baltimore engineer who, with chemist Linn Enslow, worked out how to dose chlorine in drinking water scientifically, a method adopted worldwide that helped end waterborne typhoid.
Sources
- Abel Wolman 1892–1989, Biographical Memoir National Academy of Sciences
- Abel Wolman American Society of Civil Engineers
- Abel Wolman Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.