Henry Leber Coit, a medical doctor, was the founder of the first Medical Milk Commission and the certified milk movement, which resulted in the availability of safe raw milk from regulated dairies for physicians, their patients and the public. In 1889, Henry Coit, MD, of Newark, New Jersey, asked the Medical Society of New Jersey…
Out of the study of the London sewage and its behavior in the Thames came the conviction that purification could be carried out by natural processes, without the intervention of chemicals, and thus was evolved the biological treatment in contact beds, which system, destined to revolutionize sanitary engineering, was developed at the Northern Outfall Works…
Mr. Lowcock in 1892, filtered the effluent from a chemical precipitation process at Malvern through a gravel filter at the rate of 300,000 gallons per acre per day. He also used a fine surface layer of gravel to distribute the sewage. Hence in order to maintain aerobic conditions, compressed air was forced into the lower…
Sedgwick and Batchelder were among the first to count bacteria in milk. Their pioneering work in Boston, from 1890 to 1892, was a revelation and their method was quickly followed by others. In 1990 New York was the first city to use this approach as a basis for setting a bacteriological standard for ordinary market…
Babcock is best known for his test for butterfat in milk, introduced in 1890. By using sulfuric acid to release the fat from its normal suspension and centrifuging and diluting, it was possible to measure directly the percentage of fat by observing it in the neck of a specially designed test bottle. The simplicity of…
Bitter reported that by heating milk for 30 minutes at 154° F. the process was sufficient to thoroughly pasteurize the milk. He built first pasteurizer with spiral coil. The primary way to make sure of the safety of milk was through pasteurization, a process Pasteur invented in the 1860s, although not used to purify milk until…
In 1890, Koch returned to his work on tuberculosis. He sought to arrest the disease by means of a preparation, which he called tuberculin, made from cultures of tubercle bacilli. He made two preparations of this kind called the old and the new tuberculin respectively, and his first communication on the old tuberculin aroused considerable…
Many new jobs for women were created during the Industrial Age. From 1880 to 1900 the number of employed women went from 2.6 to 8.6 million. In 1880 4% of clerical workers were women; by 1920 the figure was 50%, but women could not get management positions. Although middle class married women were able to…
Herbert W. Conn’s international fame in dairy bacteriology began during his tenure as the bacteriologist at the Storrs Agricultural Experiment Station on the campus of the Connecticut Agricultural College (1888-1906). His research on the formation of butter and the causes of milk spoilage led to advances in bacterial cultivation and dairy foodstuff production. His findings…
By the end of 1887 and beginning of 1888 the new Fiftieth Congress witnessed the renewed introduction of a large number of bills on behalf of carriers, including one by Crain that would have amended section 3738 to include all other persons who are now or who may hereafter be employed in manual or clerical…
Sergei Winogradsky founded microbial ecology and he was a founding father of microbiology. In an unusually long scientific career, he: Discovered chemosynthesis– an entirely new mode of life, in which the energy to build organic molecules comes from chemical reactions rather than from sunlight in the more familiar photosynthesis. We now know there are a great many…
The disposal of garbage by the reduction method was first introduced in the United States at Buffalo, N. Y., in 1886. The plant installed at Buffalo was known as the Merz process and the disposal was made by placing the garbage in dryers so as to break down the material and drive off the moisture,…
F. Spawn introduced dehydration as a form of food preservation in 1886 when he developed his Climax Fruit Evaporator to process excess apples in southern Tasmania. It has since been acknowledged to have been the beginning of mechanical dehydration. The drying of potatoes and other vegetables on a semi –commercial scale was first done apparently by…
In 1886, Franz von Soxhlet suggested the pasteurization of milk for infant nutrition.[To that point, pasteurization had been used for wine after Louis Pasteur’s proposal in 1868, but was not popular among makers of fine wines, who “had always safeguarded their wines by maintaining cleanliness in their cellars and by carefully following strict methods of…
Reilly of the U. S. Army built the first garbage incinerator in the United States on Governor’s Island, N. Y. New York City’s first incinerator, the first in the nation, was erected on Governors Island in 1885, and over the next century, incinerators burned much of the city’s waste. By the 1960’s, the city was…
One of the early advocates of bacteriology was Percy Frankland (1858– 1946), who worked with his father at the School of Mines, where he was an assistant in the water laboratory. After learning of the plate culturing method at an exhibition in London, he visited Koch’s laboratory to master this new method. Frankland used the…
Robert Koch’s discovery of the tubercle bacillus in 1882 was a major event in the history of medicine, a turning point in our understanding and conquest of that deadly disease which had plagued mankind for millenia. After centuries of speculation as to the possible infectious nature of tuberculosis, Koch proved conclusively that the cause of…
In 1859, the first milk inspector was appointed in Boston. In 1864, Boston prohibited the use of milk from diseased cows. As early as 1848, European veterinarians suspected that bovine tuberculosis was transmissible. The first city to inspect dairies may have been Newark, New Jersey, in 1882, and regular bacteriology examination of milk was first…