William Lindley
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William Lindley (b. September 7, 1808 in London - d. May 22, 1900 in Blackheath, London), was a famous English engineer who together with his sons designed water and sewerage systems for over 30 cities across Europe.
As a young engineer he worked together with Marc Isambard Brunel and Francis Giles. In 1833 he went to Germany as Giles' assistant to design and build a railway line for Hamburg. The official opening had to be cancelled as a catastrophic fire in May 1842 left a third of the town in ruins. Lindley had already been commissioned to design a new sewer system for Hamburg, and the destruction was an opportunity to modernise the city.
His designs, influenced by English social reformer and public health inspector Edwin Chadwick, included the first underground sewers in continental Europe. Within three years 11 km of sewers had been built in Hamburg, and Lindley began work on a waterworks to supply the city with drinking water. In the following years he helped design and build water systems in a number of other German towns such as Altona, Stralsund and Leipzig.
In 1860 he lost the commission to oversee the water system in Hamburg, and moved with his family to London. This included his three young sons - William Heerlein Lindley (born 1853), Robert Searles Lindley (born 1854) and Joseph Lindley (born 1859). In 1863 he began work on the sewerage system of Frankfurt am Main, the benefits of which became apparent as between 1868 and 1883 the death rate from typhoid fell from 80 to 10 per 100,000 inhabitants.
Lindley's designs were in demand across Europe, and together with his sons he built systems for cities in Germany (including Düsseldorf) and elsewhere, including St. Petersburg, Budapest, Prague and Moscow. In 1876 the Australian city of Sydney even asked him to design a sewer system for them, but he turned them down as he had just been commissioned by Warsaw.
Between 1876 and 1878 he designed the Warsaw waterworks, which were constructed between 1881 and 1889 under the direction of his son, William Heerlein Lindley. To this day, there is a street in Warsaw named after him, which goes around the historical waterworks. Also named after the Lindleys' handiwork is "Filter Street" (ulica Filtrowa). As an interesting sidenote, the system that William Lindley designed for Warsaw is still operational, and the last sewer collector of his design was not replaced until 2001.
