All the Modern Conveniences: American Household Plumbing, 1840-1890

Abstract

Green reviews "All the Modern Conveniences: American Household Plumbing, 1840-1890" by Maureen Ogle.

All the Modern Conveniences: American Household Plumbing, 1840-1890. By Maureen Ogle. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1996. Pp. xii, 191. Illustrations; index. $39.95.)

In 1985 my wife and I moved into a mid-nineteenth-century farmhouse in the countryside east of Rochester, New York. Italianate in style, it was a near replica of the large houses found in Andrew Jackson Downing's The Architecture of Country Houses. Oddly enough, the basement did not extend under the back wing of the structure, where the kitchen and washroom were located. A large pipe projecting through the floor near the back wall of the kitchen led us to further exploration and the discovery of a huge sheet metal and brick cistern beneath the two back rooms. The pipe had been part of a pumping system, and the cistern had been filled by rainwater that ran into it from an elaborate network of interior pipes. The entire arrangement was original to the house, although the original gutters and pipes were gone.

Maureen Ogle has written about houses of this type-and many others-in her excellent study All the Modern Convenience.s. Ogle identifies and explains technological innovation in the machines and the materials of domestic plumbing, including pumps and hydraulic rams (which allowed people to move water from wells to storage tanks and piping systems in houses) as well as toilets and tubs. Her illustrations are well chosen and judiciously placed, and she makes appropriate use of material culture as a source, rather than merely as examples of findings from research in written sources.

Ogle aims to "investigate the first half-century of American plumbing by examining the values, beliefs, and ideas that prompted first a mid-century desire for convenience and modernity and then an obsession with `scientific plumbing,' which took shape after 1870" (p. ix). Achieving this goal sets her work apart from both technological histories, which trace the technics but ignore the culture of which inventors, engineers, and consumers were a part, and cultural histories, which ignore the material world as if things mattered little in the matrix of customs, tradition, and beliefs that constitute a culture.

She finds that domestic plumbing in the middle nineteenth century was of a private, individual nature-homeowners drilled wells and used all sorts of pumps and other systems to get water into pipes and the house. This behavior has perhaps been hidden from historians because of their understandable concentration on the problems of contaminated water supplies, water-born epidemics, and the disposal of wastes in cities.

The sanitation crusade of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made plumbing a political, even moral, issue in Europe and the United States. It was a more dramatic effort than that of mere "convenience," which Ogle shows to be the motivating force for introducing plumbing into houses between 1840 and 1870. After 1870, and the successes of sanitary commissions in both the United States and England, Ogle demonstrates how household plumbing came to be considered as a "transfer and disposal system primarily intended to move water and wastes out of the house as quickly and safely as possible" (p. 143). By 1890, sanitarians had "turned the mid-century approach to plumbing on its head," stressing that plumbing was not a private matter but that sanitation in cities and towns was a public health concern, part of a system designed (it was hoped) to eliminate disease-carrying contaminants (p. 141). The introduction of plumbing building codes was "one episode in the larger, late-century shift toward a rational, science-driven culture dominated by experts and professionals" (p. 147).

Ogle found much information for her study in New England archives and libraries and is attentive to such nontraditional sources as trade catalogues, museum collections, and builders' and architects' drawings and specifications. Her focus on the ways in which "society use[s] technology to meet its needs" and her thorough research to that end make All the Modern Conveniences not only an excellent study in the history of technology but also a well-crafted work in the cultural history of the United States.