Robert Thom

Robert Thom is one of the forgotten luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment, but his work on water filtering
was behind one of the major revolutions in 19th-century sanitation.The cholera outbreak of 1849, one of three
major epidemics of the disease to hit Britain in the mid-1800s, was a stark illustration of the dire consequences
of polluted water supplies. It claimed the lives of more than 33,000 people in just three months.The disease is
thankfully a thing of the past in the UK, but if such devastation has now been consigned to history in this
country and many other parts of the world, it is thanks in no small part to one Ayrshire engineer who developed
an ingenious way of cleansing water.So effective was Robert Thom’s technique that it is still in use today across
the globe, from village communities in Afghanistan to the city of London.

Robert Thom began his working life in the cotton spinning mills, but the industrious young man from Tarbolton
had an insatiable thirst for knowledge, and educated himself by attending evening classes at Anderson’s
Institution, now the University of Strathclyde.He went on to forge an extremely successful career in the textile
industry, during which he attracted attention for his skill in hydraulic engineering, eventually designing a water
system to supply Greenock that is still in operation today.

Arguably his greatest achievement, however, was the development of the slow sand filter – a simple, cheap,
electricity and chemical-free device that can remove up to 99 per cent of bacteria from water. The filter works
by making use of a naturally occurring barrier of fungi, bacteria and protozoa to collect any impurities in the
water.In 1804 Thom’s version of the filter was used to create the first ever city-wide water filtration plant,
providing a flow of clean water to the whole of Paisley. The plant was such a success that other cities soon
followed suit and, after dirty water supplies were finally identified as the principal means by which diseases
such as cholera and typhoid spread, municipal water filtration was finally made obligatory across Britain in
1852.Today, over 200 years since Thom’s innovation, slow sand filters are still used as an effective method of
providing clean water. A significant proportion of the London metropolis is served by a filter largely based on
Thom’s principles.More importantly, perhaps, the relative simplicity of its design, its minimal environmental
impact and low cost of installation also make the device ideal for poorer communities. However, it is arguably
in the developing world – where water-borne diseases still account for four-fifths of disease – that the ingenuity
of a former cotton spinner from Ayrshire could yet have its greatest impact.

Mechanism of slow sand filtration states that this is a slow sand filtration is a simple and reliable process. They
are relatively inexpensive to build, but do require highly skilled operators. The process percolates untreated
water slowly through a bed of porous sand, with the influent water introduced over the surface of the filter, and
then drained from the bottom.

Model proposed by Robert Thom

John Snow

John Snow was born in 1813 in York, England, the first of nine children. His father was a laborer and later a
farmer. John saw unsanitary conditions in his hometown with a river contaminated by town sewage. As a
medical apprentice from age 14, he experienced a cholera epidemic in a coal-mining village. Snow vowed to
resist drink, gambling and marriage, and became a vegetarian. At age 23 he began medical studies and
graduated from the University of London in 1844. John Snow, a physician now considered a founding father of
modern epidemiology was the personal anesthetist to Queen Victoria and founding member of the London
Epidemiological Society. In 1848, Snow was developing his anesthesia practice in the cholera afflicted district
when he undertook an independent investigation of the epidemic.

John Snow conducted pioneering investigations on cholera epidemics in England and particularly in London in
1854 in which he demonstrated that contaminated water was the key source of the epidemics. His thorough
investigation of an epidemic in the Soho district of London led to his conclusion that contaminated water from
the Broad Street pump was the source of the disease and, consequently, the removal of the handle led to
cessation of the epidemic. He further studied cholera in London homes that were receiving water from two
water supply systems; one from the sewage contaminated portion of the Thames River and the other that drew
its water upstream from an uncontaminated part of the river. Rates of infection among clients of the distribution
system drawing contaminated water far exceeded the, rates among those served by the company whose water
intake was from above the contaminated section of the river. This demonstration reinforced the goals of the
sanitation movement, which developed sewage drainage systems and water purification systems in cities and
towns in the following decades, therewith vastly reducing the threats of cholera, typhoid and many other
waterborne diseases. Despite progress being made globally, the public health problems of waterborne disease,
including cholera, are by no means gone today, even in high-income countries. The tragic introduction of
cholera after the earthquake devastation in Haiti in 2010 resulted in many thousands of cases and deaths from
cholera indicating the still-present dangers of diseases spread into disaster situations. Cholera and other
waterborne diseases remain some of the heaviest burdens of disease and death in low-income countries,
especially after natural disasters or warfare as in Yemen in 2017 and are continuing challenges for global health.

Dr.John Snow
Jabir ibn Hayyan (Abu Musa Jabir bin Hayyan)

Abū Mūsā Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, variously called al-Ṣūfī, al-Azdī, al-Kūfī, or al-Ṭūsī), is the purported author of an
enormous number and variety of works in Arabic, often called the Jabirian corpus. The works that survive today
mainly deal with alchemy and chemistry, magic, and Shi'ite religious philosophy. However, the original scope
of the corpus was vast and diverse, covering a wide range of topics ranging from cosmology, astronomy and
astrology, over medicine, pharmacology, zoology and botany, to metaphysics, logic, and grammar.Jabir's works
contain the oldest known systematic classification of chemical substances, and the oldest known instructions for
deriving an inorganic compound (sal ammoniac or ammonium chloride) from organic substances (such as
plants, blood, and hair) by chemical means. His works also contain one of the earliest known versions of the
sulfur-mercury theory of metals, a mineralogical theory that would remain dominant until the 18th century.

The sulfur-mercury theory of metals, though first attested in pseudo-Apollonius of Tyana's The Secret of
Creation was also adopted by the Jabirian authors. According to the Jabirian version of this theory, metals form
in the earth through the mixing of sulfur and mercury. Depending on the quality of the sulfur, different metals
are formed, with gold being formed by the most subtle and well-balanced sulfur. This theory, which is
ultimately based on ancient meteorological speculations such as those found in Aristotle's Meteorology, formed
the basis of all theories of metallic composition until the 18th century.This teory is significant in water
management during the 18th century.

Jabir Ibn Hayyan discovered hydrochloric acid and nitric acid. These were discovered by the distillation of
several salts with sulfuric acid. He then went on to combine both hydrochloric and nitric acid to form
nitrohydrochloric acid, which is more commonly known as aqua regia that contains a 3:1 ratio of hydrochloric
to nitric acid and can dissolve gold, which is extremely useful for gold extraction. Jabir Ibn Hayyan also
discovered several laboratory techniques such as crystallisation, distillation, filtration and calcination. For
distillation, he used an alembic (Fig. 2), which originates from the word ‘beaker’ , and is a type of
still.Distillation is an important process in the filtration of water.Jabir Ibn Hayyan is known as the father of
filtration.

Jabir Ibn Hayyan

Richard Adolf Zsigmondy

Richard Adolf Zsigmondy was an Austrian-born chemist. He was known for his research in colloids, for which
he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1925, as well as for co-inventing the slit-ultramicroscope and
different membrane filters. The crater Zsigmondy on the Moon is named in his honour.

The nobel-prize winning chemist Richard Zsigmondy invented the first membrane filter and an ultra-fine
membrane filter in 1922. In 1927, working with Zsigmondy, the pharmaceutical company Sartorius AG began
commercially producing membrane filters. This was vital for the filtration of food, blood and medicine on a
microscopic level.

Membrane filtration, used to remove dissolved substances and fine particles from solutions, has the potential to
continuously separate and concentrate dyes from effluents. Compared with other methods, this process has some
specific properties, such as resistance to temperature rise, adverse chemical environments, and microbial attack.
Membrane filtration is suitable for the treatment of effluents containing low concentrations of dyes and
recycling of textile wastewater, but is not effective in reducing the dissolved solid content, which may make it
difficult to reuse water. There are four common membrane separation processes: microfiltration (MF),
ultrafiltration (UF), RO, and NF. The main advantages of membrane technology over other separation processes
are low energy consumption, simplicity, and environmental friendliness MF is similar to conventional raw
filtration processes in textile wastewater treatment and has a limited application area. MF membranes generally
have pore sizes in the range of 0.1–10 μm, and separation by MF is generally effective at low pressure
differential within 2 bar. The process is mainly used for removal of particles suspension and colloidal dyes from
exhausted dye bath and from discarded rinsing bath discharge. However, MF membranes may not prevent
leakage of unconsumed auxiliary chemicals, dissolved organic pollutants, and other soluble contaminants.

UF is a membrane separation process that is mainly used to separate macromolecules and colloids from a
solution and their application in the textile industry is limited. This is due to the fact that the molar masses of the
dyes present in the highly colored textile discharge are much lower than the molar mass cut-off of UF
membranes NF, a newly developed membrane technology for various water treatment and purification purposes,
is a membrane separation process where pressure is the main driving force responsible for the separation process
and has performance characteristics between RO and UF. NF is a pressure-driven membrane-based separation
process, using pressures from 4 to 20 MPa where particles with molar mass of 350–1000 Da and dissolved
molecules can be retained.RO is a process of reverse of the normal osmosis in which the solvent is pushed
through a membrane from a zone with high solute concentration to a zone with low solute concentration, and its
operating pressures are generally between 7 and 100 bar. RO processes can remove hardness, color, many types
of bacteria and viruses, and organic contaminants such as agricultural chemicals and trihalomethane precursors
simultaneously (Abid et al., 2012). The studies on the removal of various dyes using different physical methods.

The mechanism of membrane filtration technology in detaining microorganisms is a combination of two

phenomena: firstly, the effect of physiochemical interactions between the membrane and microorganisms; and
secondly, the sieving effect. The microorganisms that are larger than the pore size of the membrane are retained,
and in a similar way the membrane that is negatively charged retains the microorganisms through the repelling
force.The filtration and membrane pretreatment system mainly reduces the formation of biofouling by removing
the available nutrients for microorganisms in the feed stream of the RO system. When installing filtration
techniques ahead of an RO system, the filter can form a barrier that retains the available nutrients in the passing
water, leaving the microorganisms in the RO feed water in a starvation condition. Starvation can compromise
the reproducibility of microorganisms and their ability to produce dense and widespread biofilm.

Richard Adolf Zsigmondy Membrane filtration