Rudolph Hering (environmental technician)
Rudolph Hering (born February 28, 1847 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , † May 30, 1923 ) was an American engineer. He is considered the founder of modern environmental technology and developed, among other things, the water supply and sewer systems for several American cities.
Life
Rudolph Hering's father was the physician Constantin Hering , his grandfather the composer Carl Gottlieb Hering . Rudolph was thirteen years old to Dresden sent to go to school and at the Polytechnic to study, where he joined the connection Polyhymnia joined that renamed in 1927 in Corps Old Saxony.
After returning to the USA , he initially worked as a scientist in Prospect Park in Brooklyn and in Fairmount Park in Philadelphia. In 1872 he was commissioned to survey Yellowstone National Park . In 1888 he was appointed Consulting Engineer for the public works of New York . In 1897 he became director of the American Society of Civil Engineers and in 1913 President of the American Public Health Association of the United States. He was responsible for the water supply and sewer systems for the cities of New York , Chicago , Washington , Philadelphia and San Francisco .
In the case of Chicago, the problem was that the sewage that was discharged via the Chicago River into Lake Michigan seriously polluted the city on the banks of the lake and repeatedly led to epidemics. The watershed between the catchment area of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi catchment was only about 20 km from Chicago, with a relative height of a few meters. At Hering's suggestion, a canal nearly fifty kilometers long was built between 1887 and 1900 to re-bed the Chicago River and overcome the watershed. This not only created a shipping connection to Mississippi (the Illinois Waterway ), it also reversed the course of the river, so that the city's sewage no longer entered the lake from this point on.
From 1901 to 1911 he ran the Hering & Fuller office with George Warren Fuller .
Public debates
As a scientist, Hering also contributed to public discussions in the form of letters to the editor. In December 1906, for example, he criticized an article in the New York Times about Berlin's exemplary character in matters of wastewater management. The journalist Poultney Bigelow , well known by German standards , had a letter to the editor with the title “The Hudson River as a sewer. The example of Berlin makes New York look poor ”, who raves about the fact that you can drink the water of the Spree in Berlin without any problems, and that the farmers in the surrounding area use the sewage sludge optimally for fertilization, whereby the city generates significant income. Rudolph Hering, on the other hand, held that in New York City with its high population density there was comparatively little space for sludge clarification, and that the Spree, which he knew well, was a brook against the mighty rivers with their tides around Manhattan. In addition, the income from the sale of fertilizers in Berlin does not pay off because the construction and operation of the pumps alone cause high costs. Hering closes his criticism with the sentence:
May esteemed Mr. Bigelow not mix fantasy and fiction with facts.
In October 1912, he attacked an article in the same newspaper about mortality statistics. The newspaper reported that the death rate of Americans over 40 had increased "alarmingly". In the letter printed on October 21, Hering referred to the basics of statistics:
All people have to die, so everyone has a 100 percent chance of dying. If we reduce mortality among young people, it must increase accordingly as they get older. [...] Modern hygiene has lowered the death rate of the younger generation, so the death rate of the elderly has increased accordingly. This fact is not "alarming" but describes the successes that every hygienist has strived for.
Honors
- In 1914, Hering was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .
- Since 1924, the American Society of Civil Engineers has awarded the golden “Rudolph Hering Medal” for outstanding engineering achievements in environmental technology.
- 1930 he was in honor of a lake in Yellowstone National Park by the United States Board on Geographic Names in Heringlake named.
- 1979 Hering was inducted into the "Hall of Fame" of the American Water Works Association .
Web links
- Biography: www.altsachsen.de ( Memento from August 3, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
- The reversal of the Chicago River
- The ASCE on the herring medal
Individual evidence
- ↑ Dr. Rudolph Hering, well known water works engineer, dies. Fire and Water Engineering, June 6, 1923.
- ↑ ERRORS IN SEWER PLAN .; Mr. Hering Says Berlin's System Is Not Possible in This City. Retrieved December 22, 2018 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Hering, Rudolph |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American engineer, founder of modern environmental technology |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 28, 1847 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Philadelphia , Pennsylvania |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 30, 1923 |