• machine politics (the boss system)--
  
• Progressive movement
• bring order to cities that were chaotic because they had grown too fast
• less politics, more expertise, turn to engineers to figure out the best way to do things
  

Scientific transformation--coming of the germ theory of disease

• 1677 Antoni van Leeuwenhoek invented the microscope
• bacteria were observed, but it was believed they could spontaneously generate
• Ignaz Semmelweis in the 1840s argued that childbirth fever could be reduced if doctors washed their hands between patients, but this was resisted by the medical community
  
• Louis Pasteur in the 1860s refuted spontaneous generation and showed microorganisms were responsible for fermentation
• Joseph Lister in the 1860s began to develop antiseptic techniques for surgery
  
• Robert Koch in the 1870s showed that specific microbes caused specific diseases: anthrax, tuberculosis, cholera
• Dmitri Iwanowski in the 1890s identified the first virus
• some bacterial diseases could be treated with sulfa drugs starting in the 1920s
  
• Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, the first antibiotic, in the 1920s, but it took until the 1940s to figure out how to mass produce it in stable form

Transformation of public health

• filth does not cause disease
• laboratory work to identify particular bacteria
• is levels of dangerous bacteria the only thing that matters?
  

Water supply:

• how to meet rapidly growing demand for water
• cities got more ability to take on expensive projects through self-rule and changing laws that allowed them to borrow more money via bonds
• problems of monopoly (the robber barons) led to negative views of private industry--government would do things more fairly
  
• filtration systems
• metering was just beginning to catch on

Water treatment

• first to make it clearer
• bacteriology--set standards for levels of bacteria in water
• water filtration was most popular
  
• chlorination to kill bacteria became available after 1910, but there was some resistance from the public

Sewer system

• a big investment, justified by public health concerns (first sewer gas, then bacteria)
  
• but the waste was simply released into the nearest river
• treat the water for use rather than treat the sewage
• first form of treatment was filtration
• development of ways to decompose the sludge, either with oxygen or without (fementation)

Refuse

• clear refuse from streets and dump it somewhere
• should this be a government service?
• how to dispose of what was collected--incinerators replaced dumps in some big cities