Download e-book for iPad: The History of the London Water Industry, 1580–1820 by Leslie Tomory

Beginning in 1580, a couple of competing London businesses bought water on to shoppers via a wide community of wood mains within the increasing city. This new water flourished during the 1600s, finally increasing to serve tens of hundreds of thousands of houses. by means of the past due eighteenth century, greater than eighty percentage of the city’s homes had water connections—making London the best-served city on the earth whereas demonstrating that it used to be legally, commercially, and technologically attainable to run an infrastructure community in the greatest urban on earth.

In this richly specified e-book, historian Leslie Tomory indicates how new applied sciences imported from the Continent, together with waterwheel-driven piston pumps, spurred the fast development of London’s water undefined. The company used to be extra sustained via an explosion in buyer call for, rather within the city’s filthy rich West finish. in the meantime, numerous key neighborhood suggestions reshaped the through enlarging the scale of the availability community. by way of 1800, the good fortune of London’s water made it a version for different towns in Europe and past as they started to construct their very own water networks. The city’s water infrastructure even encouraged developers of different large-scale city initiatives, together with fuel and sewage provide networks.

The background of the London Water undefined, 1580–1820 explores the technological, cultural, and mercantile components that created and sustained this striking undefined. Tomory examines how the joint-stock shape turned well-liked by water businesses, supplying a sturdy criminal constitution that allowed for enlargement. He additionally explains how the roots of the London water industry’s divergence from the Continent or even from different British towns was once rooted either within the measurement of London as a industry and within the overdue seventeenth-century shopper revolution. This attention-grabbing and distinct examine of crucial utilities within the early glossy interval will curiosity company historians and historians of technology and know-how alike.