Geschiedenis van de techniek in Nederland. De wording van een moderne samenleving 1800-1890. Deel II

Gezondheid en openbare hygiëne. Waterstaat en infrastructuur. Papier, druk en communicatie

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Summary

Public health and sanitation

Chapter 1. Hygienic thinking and practice. In this section two types of technology will be discussed which were developed in order to improve public health: medical statistics and sanitary technology. The first was part of a new way of thinking about disease as a social phenomenon. The second was a group of techniques of a more material nature, involving waterpipes, sewerage systems and so on.

Chapter 2. Medical statistics. During the 1850s a group of young Dutch doctors, inspired by English and German colleagues, introduced a new way of measuring the health of the population. By counting the number of deaths, specified by cause of death, and comparing this figure with the total population of a town or region, they could show that some areas of the kingdom were much less healthy than others. High mortality rates could only be be explained by bad sanitary conditions, for which local governments were held responsible. In this way, the ‘hygienists’, as they were called, introduced an entirely new understanding of the relationship between health, the environment and government.

The success of the hygienists in influencing the public debate and stimulating reform is explained by (1) the fact that they offered a new and apparently more ‘scientific’ answer to the baffling problem of epidemic disease;
(2) by the prominence of the hygienists in the newly founded professional organization which operated as a national organization for collecting of statistical data;
(3) by the constitutional reform of 1848, which made local governments responsible for public health; and (4) by the extension of central and municipal agencies for collecting population statistics.

Chapter 3. Sanitation. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the quality of water became a central focus of concern, especially when doctors demonstrated the connection between epidemic disease and water pollution. In the cities, drinking water came from canals in which human and industrial waste was also dumped, or from wells which were similarly polluted. One solution would have been to create a separate system for providing clean water, but this was deemed too expensive, both by the government and by private investors. Therefore, all effort was concentrated upon improving the quality of surface water. Between 1865 and 1880 two methods of collecting human waste were introduced: the technically simple one of distributing and collecting barrels and a very sophisticated system (invented by the engineer Liernur) of pipes which collected the waste from toilets into a central reservoir by means of air pressure. Although both methods worked reasonably well, after 1880 they were abandoned in favour of the system that has become dominant ever since: the water closet, connected to a sewerage network which carries the waste material to a river or the sea. This chapter describes this shift and attempts to explain it.

Chapter 4. Professionalization and state formation. In the final chapter in this section, the emergence of modern systems of public hygiene is placed in the context of two aspects of the modernization process: the extension of government intervention and the professionalization of public health (especially the role of civil engineers and doctors).

Rivers and railways

Chapter 5. Restructuring the land and the state. During the nineteenth century the Dutch landscape changed

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dramatically: lakes were pumped dry, canals were built, the great rivers were canalized, cities expanded and a nation-wide railway network was constructed. In the following chapters, only the canalization of the rivers and the construction of the railway network will be discussed. The present chapter shows how the spatial integration of the economy and society effected by railways and canals was mirrored by the creation of a national bureaucratic apparatus, centralizing and professionalizing strategic decision making.

Chapter 6. Canalization of the rivers. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the great rivers which cut the Netherlands in two were a permanent danger to the surrounding countryside. When in spring the ice started melting, dikes often broke and large areas were inundated. This chapter discusses the plans made by engineers to solve this problem. The main reason why these were systematically carried out only after 1850 (besides financial problems and disagreements among experts about the best solution) was the fact that attempts at centralizing political power were forcefully and successfully resisted by the old aristocratic elite, some of whom owned property bordering on the rivers. The new constitution of 1848 and the discharge of state debts proved to be the necessary conditions for the execution of this large project.

Chapter 7. Railroads. In 1839 the first railway line, connecting the capital Amsterdam with Haarlem, was opened. During the 1840s and 1850s some additional lines were built by private concerns. However, a real national network was created only after 1860, when the Dutch government decided to plan and finance the construction of such a network. It was largely completed by 1880. This chapter describes the political decision making, financing and of course the technical aspects of railway construction and the building of locomotives and carriages.

Chapter 8. Professionalization and integration. The projects described in the preceding chapters were only part of a great number of changes in the infrastructure, including the improvement of roads, the building of canals and the creation of national standards for the water level, which facilitated the interconnection of waterways, public transport facilities in the cities and so on. Some of these innovations are briefly discussed here in the context of the four spatial and political levels on which they had an impact: the state, the region, the city and the individual citizen. An important conclusion of this short survey is that the expansion of the infrastructure did not simply create a more integrated and centralized society. Rather there were both centralizing and decentralizing tendencies; although these were increasingly attuned to each other.

Paper making, printing and communication

Chapter 9. Machines and readers. This chapter sketches the contours of the communication revolution in the nineteenth century: an increasing variety of printed material was reaching a constantly growing public.

Chapter 10. The market for reading material. The spread of literacy, reading habits and the expansion of the book trade and the periodical press are outlined in this chapter. Due to a relatively high level of literacy, as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was a large potential market for books and periodicals, which was, however, restricted by high prices. From the 1840s on, cheap books made their appearance and during the 1880s there was a strong expansion of the newspaper market.

Chapter 11. Paper making. Two innovations are discussed in this chapter: the introduction of the fourdrinier machine, which transformed an age-old handicraft into a mechanized industry, and the introduction of wood pulp and cellulose as raw material for paper. The first paper-making factories in the Netherlands were founded during the second half of the 1830s, while a second wave of mechanization occurred shortly after 1850. The problem of chronic shortages of raw materials was solved with the introduction of wood pulp and cellulose, which took place in the Netherlands during the 1880s, causing a reduction in the price of paper by 50% between 1875 and 1890.

Chapter 12. Type setting and printing. Printing remained a small-scale craft until at least 1850. The first cylinder machines, which permitted a three to fourfold increase in productivity, were introduced by some newspaper printers from 1828 on. Only after 1853, and especially after 1860, with the introduction of steam, did these machines become widespread. From about 1880 on, newspapers were printed on rotary machines, which made another great increase in productivity possible. New type-setting apparatus was only introduced on a very modest scale.

Chapter 13. Market, innovation and cost price: the printing firm De Erven Bohn. This short chapter describes the introduction of cylinder presses in one printing firm in Haarlem. The cost calculations made for books printed by this firm in the course of the century show that the cost of paper and authors' wages were much more important than those of printing.

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Chapter 14. Illustration. Wood engraving and lithography became the most popular illustration techniques during the nineteenth century. The diffusion of these techniques in the Netherlands shows marked differences, the wood-engraving industry being practically a failure, while lithography was very successful. After describing both diffusion processes, these differences are explained by the nature of each technology in relation to the market for illustrations.

Chapter 15. Innovation and the reading public. Combining the results of the preceding chapters, it seems clear that there was a close connection between the expansion of the market for books and periodicals and the introduction of new machinery. The mechanization of paper making and of printing during the 1840s and 1850s coincided with a fast expansion of the market for cheap books, while the growth of newspaper circulation coincided with the introduction of wood pulp and rotary machines. Another important connection was the increase in wages in the printing industry, which was the first branch to be unionized. This was a strong incentive for entrepreneurs to introduce labour-saving machinery.