The main drainage of the Houses of Parliament, Westminster, on the Shone Hydro-Pneumatic System : with drawings and hydraulic sewage table (for office reference for architects and engineers) explanatory of scientific and sanitary drainage / by Isaac Shone.

  • Shone, Isaac.
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The main drainage of the Houses of Parliament, Westminster, on the Shone Hydro-Pneumatic System : with drawings and hydraulic sewage table (for office reference for architects and engineers) explanatory of scientific and sanitary drainage / by Isaac Shone. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    sewer. Personally, I liold, and liave held for years, strong views in favour of the separate sijiitem, which our veteran sanitarian, Mr. Edwin Chadwick, C.B., has for years advocated, and which was originally the concep- tion of Mr. John Phillips, C.E. This latter gentleman, I am proud to say, acted as Resident Engineer in charge of the Houses of Parliament Works for me ; and I desire to add publicly here my belief that his conscientious testimony as to what he saw of the successful working of my system at Eastbourne induced the Select Com- mittee ultimately, after mature deliberation and in- vestigation, to recommend its adoption at the Houses of Parliament. (7). The remarks which Mr. Phillips makes in liis excellent pamphlet on Town Drainage, and which every sanitary engineer ought to possess, are worth reproducing here; and I have taken the liberty of doing so. He wrote, in 1872, as follows :— (a). The principle of drainage in towns which T advocate, and which was first proposed by me, is called the separate system* This was in 1847, when I was chief surveyor of a large portion of the nietropohtan sewers. While so engaged, 1 examined many miles of these sewers with the view to improving their form and con- struction ; experimented on the air currents, in order to determine where and how to ventilate them; and gauged the sewage and rain- fall currents, so as to arrive at the sizes of sewers necessary to drain different urban and suburban districts. After many years' labour and study in this employment, I perceived that it was a great mistake to discharge the sewage into the same channels that received the rainfall, as by so doing the ground we lived on, the air we breathed, and the water we drank were being continually polluted; * It is generally thought that Mr. Menzies is the originator of this system. But this is not the fact. I had matured and proposed it nearly eighteen years before he resuscitated it in 1865.