Duel with the Devil Read Online Free Page B

“and no doubt, many buckets from that quarter of town.” As to what was in those buckets, another proclaimed, it was “all of leaking, scrapings, scourings, p——s——gs, & ——gs, for a great distance around.”
    Schemes for clean running water had been bubbling up for as long as most residents could remember; aftera plan to pipe Manhattan with hollowed-out logs was proposed in 1774, a well was even dug and a crude steam engine erected before British invaders interrupted the project. Its engineer, the ingenious Irish émigré Christopher Colles, was held at bayonet point by British troops but managed to escape through the tall grass of Trinity Church’s graveyard; returning after the war, he found occupying troops had cruelly wrecked his work. It proved to be the only project that the hapless genius had ever come close to seeing through.
    “Had I been brought up a hatter,” he sighed, “people would have come into the world without heads.”
    After the great fever in 1798, thecalls for a solution had grown louder. “The health of a city,” warned physician Joseph Browne, “depends more on its water, than on all the rest of its eatables and drinkables together.” Browne’s own ambitious proposal for driving yellow fever out of Manhattan was to pipe in clean water from miles away, via an elaborate series of dams and reservoirs by the Harlem River. If the scale of Browne’s idea was a bit grand, the basic notionbehind it was entirely sensible, and in the spring of 1799 the state assembly passed a bill to charter a corporation that would provide the city with clean water.
    Dubbed the Manhattan Company, its board of thirteen local worthies hadreceived five proposal bids in short order; nearly all came from recognized contractors and inventors, men already well-known to the committee members. But the first to arrive bore a return address that led back to a boardinghouse, of all places. It read:
208 Greenwich Street
.
    Behind the archaic dress and the careful
thee
and
thou
of his manner, Elias Ring possessed the restless mind of a modern inventor. The young patriarch had mulled the mechanics of water for years sinceoperating a mill upstate. Along with tending the boardinghouse with his wife, Elias had painstakingly designed and built a patent model of his own contrivance, and for the past two years hadrun an ad in Philadelphia and New York newspapers for this grand invention:
    NEW PATENT WATER WHEEL
    The subscriber has taken this method to inform the public that he has invented a new WATER WHEEL to work in the TIDE or other CURRENT , which may be fixed at the end of any dock, where there be a good tide so as to go.… If it were necessary, he could produce sufficient proof of its efficacy from the best characters in the States, whose judgment may be relied upon as having seen it tried on a small scale were convinced that a wheel built on this principle, and fixed in a good tide, would go with any force sufficient to drive any works. This wheel may likewise be of great use in raising water out of large rivers and or for the use of watering Towns and Cities.
    But the city to be watered by his inventions, he now realized, was his own. And unlike the rather fanciful proposals of JosephBrowne to bring in water from Harlem, Elias made an astoundingly practical proposition: The supply they needed, he claimed, was the much-abused and fouled waters of the meadows nearby.
    “The Collect has been unjustly stigmatized with the name of a filthy stagnated pond,” Ring began, “but the Collect proceeds from a collection of springs. [It] is rendered in some measure filthy by throwing dead carcases into it.” The solution was simply to fill in clay over the more putrid banks and erect a high fence to bar tanneries and butchers from using the Collect anymore. Refilled with sweet new water by its springs, and pumped out by a steam engine, “the Collect will supply a daily sufficient quantity of water for the consumption of the