Jason Crawford

And not only did we have the science or the concept behind the germ theory, but we also had methods.

Robert Koch gave us methods to test the water and count the bacteria and actually quantify something about the concentration of harmful bacteria in the water.

And with that, we could start to actually do another round.

So after the mid-1800s, in the late 1800s in Europe, and then early 20th century in America, we started to really clean up the water supply

This is a cartoon from 1919 representing, I forget what city exactly, I believe some American city that this is sort of representing progress in.

So in 1890, you can see typhoid, which is a waterborne disease, reigned.

Typhoid here is represented as sort of a skeleton monster with a cape and a top hat smoking a cigar or something like that.

In the second panel, the water filtration plant comes along to start beating him up.

And in 1906, the death rate was reduced.

And then in the third panel, liquid chloride has been added to the water supply.

And that's a chemical that is going to kill the bacteria in 1918.

So this happened at different times in different cities.

The association between the filtration and chlorination and the disease rates are quite dramatic.

So again, we see...

Based on no theory, but on some empirical correlations or even on a wrong theory, some progress is able to be made.

That progress plateaued at a certain level.

And then a better scientific understanding came along and allowed us to go even further and to optimize the processes that we were doing.

Okay, so science can provide concepts that point inventors in a promising direction, give them phenomena to exploit.

It can also help optimize and expand the workings of existing inventions or systems.

It can also guide the tinkering process itself.