Reviewed by Sarah S. Elkind, University of Wisconsin -- Stevens Point,
for H-Urban <selkind@uwsp.edu>

Maureen Ogle.  _All the Modern Conveniences:  American Household
Plumbing, 1840-1890_.  Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
 xii +160 pp.  Illustrations, notes, bibliographic essay, and index.
$39.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8018-5227-7.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Americans embraced indoor
plumbing.  According to Maureen Ogle's _All the Modern Conveniences_,
they celebrated appliances because they decreased household drudgery and
increased privacy.  That their much-loved appliances smelled as bad as an
outhouse and frequently clogged, froze or broke did not initially reduce
their enthusiasm.  Americans grew critical of bathroom gadgetry only
after their justifications for indoor plumbing shifted from convenience
to disease-prevention.  Ogle dates this change to the rise of sanitary
science in the 1860s and 1870s.  For a few years thereafter, fear that
deadly sewer gas could leak into private homes actually drove some
Americans to return to the outdoor privy and the pitcher and washbasin.
Seeing plumbing in terms of health, rather than convenience, prompted
Americans to reconsider the links between individual and community,
household appliance and municipal service network, and household and
metropolis.  According to Ogle, the emphasis on the part within the
whole both led sanitarians and engineers to build comprehensive, water
supply-sewerage networks, and gave rise to the antecedents of modern
appliances.

Ogle begins her story before the rise of the sanitary revolution
explored most extensively in the literature.  But she is still
interested in the transition from private to public solutions for common
household needs.  She seeks the origin of the networking of the
American city in individuals' expectations of household plumbing, in the
cultural roots of technological change.  According to Ogle, Americans
embraced indoor plumbing well in advance of urban water and sewer
service.  They risked extensive water damage to their homes to build
cisterns in attics and closets.  Once filled, these tanks provided a
household with running water for a wide variety of appliances.
Families, plumbers and architects developed a wide variety of
idiosyncratic solutions to specific plumbing needs.  These Ogle has
described in detail, supplemented with excellent illustrations.
Quotations from advice manuals and home-owners portray these inventions
as consistent with conceptions of privacy and domesticity; specifically
they removed private acts from public view and reduced the drudgery
associated with carrying water, washing, and removing household wastes.
In addition, Ogle notes, plumbing was valued as a celebration of
technology and a physical manifestation of American initiative and
prosperity.

Isolated from urban public service networks, according to Ogle, those
who installed early plumbing appliances did so in response to their
perceptions of their own needs.  Without the constraints of larger
technological networks, building codes and public health considerations,
early devices reflected the individualistic spirit of the early
nineteenth century.  Much of this changed after the Civil War.  New
scientific studies emphasized universality, and when applied to
practical problems, standardized solutions to common problems.
Sanitarians attacked as filthy and dangerous the mechanisms once
heralded as models of convenience and modernity.  Fear of sewer gas
prompted the innovative ventilation pipes, water-traps and
non-mechanical flush toilets that eventually yielded modern bathroom and
kitchen fixtures.  As sanitary scientists and public health officials
took over from home-owners and architects, plumbing became subject to
increasing public regulation and seen as part of a much larger network.
According to Ogle, the same conceptual framework that brought Americans
the pipelines carrying water to and from their homes increasingly
emphasized individuals' connections to the larger society.

Ogle's approach yields a number of important insights.  Her exploration
of the technologies that preceded widespread public service networks is
an important contribution to the history of technology and public works,
as are her observations about individuals' and society's priorities for
plumbing.  But her focus on refuting the work of other authors leads her
away from the strengths of her own argument, particularly in her
introduction and conclusion.  She never fully explores the context of
social and infrastructural transformation.  This transformation of
private to public services in the nineteenth century took place in the
context of massive social and cultural change.  Identifying
commonalities between the technological manifestations of these changes
in domestic plumbing and their impact on municipal politics, urban
planning, social reform and medicine, for example, could only have added
to this work.  Greater discussion of changing gender roles or domestic
culture might have been interesting as well.

Just as Ogle's narrow focus directs her attention away from social and
political contexts, it tends to limit her discussion of the values that
determined choice of technology.  In particular, Ogle overlooks the
importance of health in early public water systems, and social or
economic status in private reactions to new technologies.  Boston's
public water debates, for example, focused on the health benefits of
pure water as early as 1823; in the 1840s, the city actively promoted
domestic water use to ensure that the new water system had the greatest
possible impact on public health.   As Ogle states, many American cities
did build public works after the 1870s because the standards for
services changed.  Many others, however, adopted networks to attract
business and because such public investment defined communities as
proper cities.(1)  Similar perceptions of status may very well have
motivated individuals before the age of the network.  A slightly broader
scope and greater consideration of the nineteenth political, cultural
and environmental context in which plumbing evolved could have added
richness to this work.

Ogle seems to intend her work to refute existing literature on the
expansion of public works, and the relative importance of cultural
values and technological innovation in nineteenth century municipal
enterprise.  This literature has sought the origins of increased public
responsibility in nineteenth century politics, culture and technology.
Most notably, Joel Tarr has examined the role of technological advances
in solving specific urban problems, precipitating new ones and, in the
process, casting urban needs in new light.(2)  Martin Melosi and Robin
Einhorn have focused on the political battles that surrounded and found
expression in sanitary reforms.(3)  Meanwhile, historians of medicine,
public health and urban planning have explored the way changing
explanations of disease increased public enterprise on the grounds that
a clean and orderly city would breed healthy, moral citizens. The
distinction that Ogle wants to draw between cultural engines of
technological change and technology's influence on society are not
mutually exclusive.  Culture and artifact clearly influence each other;
Ogle gains little by so vigorously attacking technology's contribution
to the networking of American cities.  Ogle's conclusions complement
rather than contradict this literature, and provide an interesting view
of the private choices behind public decisions.

_All the Modern Conveniences_ describes not only how individuals
actually built and used household plumbing in the early nineteenth
century, but also what motivated them to experiment with innovative
technology.  Ogle offers an important perspective on why technology
changed after the Civil War, and how that change was linked to other
cultural trends.  Her greatest strength lies in her detailed
descriptions of actual appliances and the nitty-gritty of individuals'
use and perceptions of mechanical innovations in the mid-nineteenth
century.

Notes:

1.  William Cronon discusses the role of boosters in promoting public
enterprise in _Nature's Metropolis:  Chicago and the Great West_
(Norton, 1991).  For a discussion of small cities emulating larger neighbors,
see Thomas Scott's "The Diffusion of Urban Government Forms as a Case of
Social Learning," _Journal of Politics_, 30 (1968): 1091-1108.

2.  Tarr has written extensively on this subject.  His recent collection
of essays, _The Search for the Ultimate Sink:  Urban Pollution in Historical
Perspective_, (Univ. of Akron Press, 1996), provides a good introduction
to his conclusions about technology and urban public works.

3.  Martin V. Melosi, _Garbage in the Cities:  Refuse, Reform and the
Environment, 1880-1980_ (Texas A & M Univ. Press, 1981); Robin Einhorn,
_Property Rules:  Political Economy in Chicago, 1833-1872_ (Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1991).



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