We’ve installed our channel mixer in water treatment plants across the country because it’s designed for efficiency and flexibility. Offering a reduced chlorine consumption of up to 50% with 100% energy savings, it’s the ideal choice for a variety of different reasons. While water chlorination is the norm these days in water treatment, though, that hasn’t always been the case. A quick look at history shows us the slow progression it’s made toward becoming the standard throughout the world.

• 1893 – Hamburg, Germany: The earliest recorded attempt at implementing water chlorination in a treatment plant happened right here. It managed to prevent a cholera outbreak, and its success led to a similar implementation in 1897 when the town of Maidstone, England, became the first in the world to have their entire water supply treated with chlorine.
• 1908 – United States – The first continuous use of chlorine actually occurred in Lincoln, England, but it managed to reach the U.s. three years later when the Boonton Reservoir, which supplied water for Jersey City, was achieved by adding controlled diluted solutions of calcium hpychlorite at a dose of .2 ppm. Once this proved successful, drinking water systems around the world began to copy it.
• 1910 – United States – Major Carl Rogers Darnall, working on a philosophy developed by British military officer Vincent B. Nesfield, offered a practical demonstration of using compressed liquified chlorine gas to purify municipal water solutions. Just three years later, this process came online in continual form at the Belmont filter plant in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It would take a few decades, but the process would become standard throughout the U.S. by the time World War II was in full force.

Today there are many new forms of water chlorination coming on line, and as technology changes, the process will likely change too. No matter what happens, though, Komax will be there to support those changes with the best equipment in the industry.