A New York Minute: Sumer 1776 - The Towering Waterworks

Source: Time Magazine - The 1776 Issue
Original Publication Date: 1975

-Technology
-Towering Waterworks
The impending battle for New York jeopardizes the future of one of the most ambitious engineering projects in America: Christopher Colles' plan to provide a public water system for all the 22,000 inhabitants of New York City.

Except for a few wealthy citizens who dig private wells in their back gardens, New Yorkers get most of their water from a haphazard network of more than 100 public pumps. In addition, bands of "tea-water men" fill up their carts at springs near Fresh Water Pond, north of the city, and then sell the water in the streets for 3 pence a hogshead. But New York pump water is brackish, so much so that horses of out-of-town strangers refuse to drink it.

European cities with similar problems have tried for years to build water systems powered by horses, paddle wheels or even windmills, but they have usually proved inadequate. Boston and Philadelphia still depend on a random collection of pumps and wells, and only the small Moravian settlement of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, can boast of an efficient system, which pumps spring water to a hilltop reservoir and then uses gravity to pipe it down through the town.

Now enter Christopher Colles, 37, who emigrated from Ireland only five years ago and wants to apply the Bethlehem system to all of New York. This may seem visionary but nothing is too visionary for Colles.

Two years ago he persuaded the city's Common Council to approve his plan for a water system. The council issued notes for 2,600 to get the project started. Almost half went to buy nearly two acres of high land on Great George Street, where Colles decided to build a roofed wooden reservoir of 10 by 60 by 140 feet holding 628,000 gallons. The rest was invested in the key part of Colles' scheme: a steam engine. Although there are a number of these devices in Europe, only one was ever shipped to America, to pump out a copper mine in New Jersey, and it was destroyed by a fire in 1773. Colles decided, however, to build one of his own, and the 18-inch cylinder was cast in New York last year. (Said the New York Gazetteer: 'The first performance of the kind ever attempted in America and allowed by the judges to be extremely well executed.') This spring Colles was finally ready to test his creation, and when he demonstrated that it could pump 200 gallons per minute from a 50-foot well up to the reservoir, he unfurled a flag that could be seen all the way to Bowling Green.

By now the Council has raised almost 7,000 in additional funds and has contracted for 60,000 feet of hollowed pine logs to be converted into more than 10 miles of pipes to service 67 streets and alleys. But can Colles get the job finished? As of last week, work had come to a virtual halt, for many laborers were fleeing the city, and those who remain are needed in the construction of fortifications.