London's Water Supply before 1800 and the Roots of the Networked City

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4026162
AutoresLeslie Tomory (0000-0002-7361-683X, autor de correspondencia)
Año2015
Volumen56
Número3
Páginas704-737
Fecha de publicación2015-07-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaTechnology and Culture (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0040-165X • E-ISSN: 1097-3729
EditorialProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/tech.2015.0082
PMID26387527
OpenAlexW1894558455
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas3
Referencias citadas28

The New River Company was founded in London in the early seventeenth century to provide water for its inhabitants through a network of pipes. Although it grew slowly at first, after 1660 the company began to take on tens of thousands of customers. The company's rapid expansion caused it serious problems in distribution, forcing it to re-evaluate its strategy for distributing water. Relying on the recommendations of Christopher Wren and others, the company reorganized its network by adopting a host of technological and business measures. In doing so, it was forced to work increasingly by designing individual components in light of their effects on the whole network. This integrated design stabilized the infrastructure sufficiently to allow its further growth in the eighteenth century. In the early nineteenth century, London's water supply infrastructure explicitly became a model for water networks and other kinds of large-scale urban infrastructure elsewhere in the world

Business · Economics · Economy · Forcing (mathematics) · Geography · Scale (ratio) · Supply network · Water supply · Water supply network · Work (physics) · American Environmental and Regional History · Engineering · Environmental Engineering · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Mechanical Engineering · Water Governance and Infrastructure