NOTE ON 
EXPERIMENTS ON SEWAGE DISPOSAL 
IN GERMANY 
By A. S. GRUNBAUM, M.A., M.D., D.P.H. 
During the past few years the subject of sewage disposal has received much 
attention in Germany. The two annual supplements to the quarterly journal of 
Forensic Medicine and Hygiene* contain no less than nineteen papers on this 
subject. The experiments have been carried out in various directions by sanitary 
officials and engineers, partly independently but for the greater part conjointly with 
Government experts, local authorities, and practising engineers. To this system 
of co-operative experiment by Government and municipality much of the success 
and reliability of the investigations is due. Nobody has any object in falsifying 
the results, the municipality sees that the Government has an interest in its affairs, the 
inventor is encouraged by the subsidy which he receives, and any improvement 
suggested by the official experts becomes public property, even in the case of a 
patented process. It seems to me an error in this country that the local authority is 
required to place a definite scheme before the Local Government Board, instead of 
the latter offering expert advice for the particular circumstances. 
Most of the sewage disposal schemes which have been tried in Germany had 
their origin in Great Britain, but are often re-christened with a German name. Thus 
the closed sewage tank (so-called 'septic tank') system is known as Schweder's 
system, and Cameron's name is entirely omitted. The variations and changes are 
rather in mechanical details than of principle ; into these I do not propose to enter, 
but to limit my descriptions to the experiments on the three newer systems of sewage 
disposal, omitting entirely any reference to the merely mechanical or chemical 
precipitation methods, since practically all of them have been found wanting. 
These three systems are — 
(1) Contact beds — Hamburg and Charlottenburg ; 
(2) Closed sewage tank (Schweder's system) — Gr. Lichterfelde ; 
(3) Lignite paste (Roth e-Degener system)- -Potsdam and Tegel ; 
and concerning them the following notes of the results obtained may be of interest. 
In Hamburg, Potsdam, and Tegel I have seen the installations, but the data of all the 
experiments are taken from the published results. 
* Vitrttljahnchrift f. gevkbtl. Median «. ocffcntlichei Sanitatswesen, Jahrgange 1898 and 1900. Supplement. 
