A son of East Baltimore
Abel Wolman was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on June 10, 1892, the son of Louis and Rose Wachsman Wolman. His parents and his eldest brother had emigrated from Poland and settled in the Jewish immigrant quarter of East Baltimore, which his son later called the ghetto. Abel was one of six children, the fourth of the family, and all of them went through Baltimore’s public schools. He graduated from Baltimore City College, the city’s academic high school, in 1909.
He lived his entire life in Baltimore, and he never forgot where he started. Decades later, when the city named its municipal building after him, he pointed out at the dedication that it stood about five blocks from the streets where he had grown up.
The doctor who became an engineer
Wolman wanted to be a doctor and studied as a pre-medical student at Johns Hopkins University, earning a B.A. in 1913. That year Hopkins announced that it would open an engineering school, and the family story is that his mother decided the matter: there was already one doctor in the family, his eldest brother Samuel, so Abel should become an engineer. He joined the first class in civil engineering and in 1915 became one of the first graduates of the new school.
It turned out to be a fortunate choice for public health. Even as a student he spent a year with the U.S. Public Health Service sampling water on the Potomac River, and in 1914 he joined the Maryland State Department of Health as an assistant engineer. His boss, Robert B. Morse, encouraged him to do research and publish, not only to inspect water and sewage plants.
The chlorine problem
In the early twentieth century, typhoid fever, cholera and dysentery still spread through city water supplies. Engineers already knew that chlorine could kill the bacteria in drinking water, and some cities were adding it. But there was no reliable way to decide how much to use. Water from different sources contained different amounts of organic matter, silt, colour and bacteria, all of which absorb chlorine before it can do its work. Too little left the water dangerous; too much made it taste and smell foul, which drove people to unsafe sources. Dosing was guesswork, and failures were marked by outbreaks of disease.
Beginning around 1918, Wolman teamed up with Linn Enslow, a chemist in the same department who had also studied at Johns Hopkins. They measured how fast chlorine was absorbed by many different samples of water and analysed the results statistically. Their paper, Chlorine Absorption and the Chlorination of Water, published in 1919, set out a test for a water’s chlorine demand and a method for calculating the dose needed to disinfect it reliably. His son and biographer, the geographer M. Gordon Wolman, wrote that the method was adopted worldwide and was perhaps the most important contribution to public health in the twentieth century.
Safe water for a state, then a world
Wolman applied the method across Maryland. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, by 1930 typhoid cases in the state had dropped by 92 percent. In 1922 he became chief engineer of the Maryland State Department of Health, a post he held for nearly two decades. Much of the job, he later said, was persuading towns and cities to build treatment plants, a task made easier at first by the terrible typhoid rates of the time. He helped set water quality standards, plan regional water and sewer systems, and create the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River.
His influence spread far beyond Maryland. He advised water systems in New York, Detroit and Columbus, Ohio, and during New York City’s water shortages of 1951 and 1965 he helped arrange supplies of purified Hudson River water. Abroad he advised about 50 countries in Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. As a member of the first U.S. delegation to the World Health Organization, he led the effort to give the new agency a program on water supply and sewage, which had been left out of its original medical focus, and he returned to Geneva for years to press for urban water systems. Against much contemporary opinion, he insisted that even poor villagers would pay for good water.
Teacher of students, plumbers and politicians
From 1922 Wolman taught part time at Johns Hopkins, and in 1937 he became chairman of the Department of Sanitary Engineering and of environmental health engineering in the School of Hygiene and Public Health. He believed engineers needed to understand epidemiology, toxicology and microbiology, and he pushed public health students to learn about water and sewage. Each year he also taught senior civil engineers a course on the social, economic and financial sides of engineering, which reflected his view that an engineer’s responsibility reached well beyond pipes and pumps. He edited the Journal of the American Water Works Association from 1921 to 1937, later edited the American Journal of Public Health, and served as president of both the American Water Works Association and the American Public Health Association.
He was also among the first to raise the public health questions posed by atomic energy. He served on the first Reactor Safeguards Committee and insisted that state health officials have a voice on the siting of nuclear plants and the disposal of radioactive waste. In his 1965 paper The Metabolism of Cities he described a city’s needs for water, sewage disposal and clean air as a single system and called for planning to meet them, an idea later researchers built on.
Ties to Israel and the Jewish world
Wolman’s Jewish background was the world of Polish Jewish immigrants in East Baltimore, and he kept close ties to the Jewish world throughout his career. As the State of Israel was being established he became chairman of the consulting committee on the development of its water system, a role he held until his death. He served on the board of the Technion, Israel’s institute of technology in Haifa, and in 1976 received the Ben Gurion Award.
His work in Israel was of a piece with his work everywhere else: practical, patient advice on how to bring safe water to growing populations. He was unenthusiastic about grand rhetoric and preferred what he called the M’s of public works: motivation, money, management and manpower.
Wit and character
Colleagues remembered Wolman as charming, witty and extraordinarily well organized. The geographer Gilbert White wrote of his gentle wit and soft-spoken sarcasm and his gift for asking the pertinent but disarming question. He enjoyed politicians and described himself as an amateur student of political relationships. He served every mayor of Baltimore from 1914 until his death, nine in all, and consulted for the city’s Department of Public Works from 1931 onward.
He married Anna Gordon in 1919, and they had one son, M. Gordon Wolman, who became a distinguished geographer at Johns Hopkins. When a university catalogue mistakenly listed the father as professor emeritus of mathematics, the son wrote a mock complaint to the dean, and Abel replied in kind, signing himself Professor Emeritus of Too Many Things.
Later years
Wolman formally retired as professor in 1965 but kept his office and went on working. He attended departmental seminars into his ninety-sixth year, so that visiting speakers criticizing work done sixty years earlier sometimes found its author in the room, ready with a question. Late in life he urged stricter limits on untested synthetic chemicals in water. His wife Anna died at the end of 1983.
He never earned a doctorate in the ordinary way, but Johns Hopkins gave him an honorary Doctor of Engineering in 1937, and the honours kept coming. He received the American Public Health Association’s Sedgwick Memorial Medal in 1948, the Lasker Foundation’s special public health award in 1960, the National Medal of Science in 1974, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement in 1976 and the World Health Organization’s Health for All Medal. He died at his home in Baltimore on February 22, 1989, at the age of 96. He had been scheduled to give a seminar two days later.
Legacy
The glass of water that billions of people drink without fear owes a great deal to Abel Wolman and Linn Enslow. Controlled chlorination, based on measuring how much chlorine a particular water absorbs, remains a cornerstone of drinking water treatment, and the near disappearance of waterborne typhoid from cities that adopted it is one of the great public health achievements of the past century.
He was also a founder and honorary president of AIDIS, the Interamerican Association of Sanitary Engineering and Environmental Sciences, which trained sanitary engineers across Latin America; when it opened a new headquarters in São Paulo in 1998, it was named for him. Many of its members were his former students, and his colleague Charles ReVelle recalled that for more than half a century, to see him required only a knock on the door.
Baltimore named its municipal building after him, Johns Hopkins named a residence hall for him, and the American Water Works Association presents the Abel Wolman Award of Excellence each year. In 1999 the Baltimore Sun named him Marylander of the Century. A plaque at the city’s Public Works Museum calls him, simply, a friend of the thirsty.
Sources & further reading
Abel Wolman 1892–1989, Biographical Memoir by M. Gordon Wolman, National Academy of Sciences · Abel Wolman, Notable Civil Engineers, American Society of Civil Engineers · Abel Wolman, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.