Are you planning to buy a water filter in Cambridge? There is a heritage of water filtration that dates back more than a century to the present-day location of Cambridge, Ontario, and it contains all the historical elements: small-batch pioneering innovators, the power of industrial manufacturing, and the civic passion to deliver clean drinking water to the community it became synonymous with that launched a global water filter product.
The Early Days: Preston’s Penchant for Pure Water
Cambridge, three decades before that, was known in the late nineteenth century as three separate towns: Preston, Galt, and Hespeler. Inspired by the foul water from the local Speed River that supplied the rapidly growing town with its needs, Preston in many ways led the national charge toward the treatment of water.
Filtration efforts appear in the records as early as the eighteen eighteen, and in eighteen ninety-four, a whopping seven hundred-and-fifty-foot row of sand infiltration beds was installed to treat river water prior to distribution. However, those first filters were not a great success, with pathogens routinely washing out of the stones. Public health issues also became recurrent topics as cholera, typhoid, and other waterborne illnesses plagued the city.
An Innovation is Born: The Frankel Filter
This public-health crisis led another local entrepreneur, Moses J. Frankel, an Eastern European immigrant to the United States of America, to develop something more sophisticated in the early years of the twentieth century. He replicated the innovation he found in his native country—a multistage filter of riverbed sand and coke, both of which he used—to make his water filter work wonders.
Using Frankel’s filters, which filtered out up to ninety-eight percent of the particulate matter and most bacteria, the water was now drinkable—essentially safe. The Town of Preston purchased the filtering technology, and by nineteen hundred and seven, the plan called for several Frankel-designed filter plants to be built on the Speed River. (TIP: Call Air and Water Care to buy a water filter in Cambridge without leaving your home!)
An Industrial Titan Takes Shape
Cementing this industrial heritage, those same Frankel filters were amplified by the large manufacturing base and expertise of the town to add ion exchange to the growing water purification toolbox. A year later, the Permutit Company was founded to use the latest ion exchange process to soften water and reduce hardness-causing minerals such as calcium and magnesium.
It soon started manufacturing residential and industrial water softeners and even more sophisticated municipal water treatment systems, which were exported throughout North America and abroad, eventually reaching about six dozen countries. Peace had come to the Science City. The Permutit Company had made it the global capital of water treatment.
Modern Marvels: NSF Certification and Beyond
By the mid-twentieth century, thanks to new filter media and multi-step filtration processes, water filtration was a viable technology in the home, though it continued in a craft tradition that lacked oversight and assured standards. That all changed in the nineteen-sixties with the development of NSF (National Sanitation Foundation, Michigan, USA) certification standards. The residential water-filter industry, first incubated in Cambridge’s back yards, became a modern industry.
The first NSF-certified home filters were developed by Waterloo-based small players that could assure North Americans that their products were removing major contaminants from the water effectively so they could consume it safely. In industrially advanced countries, innovation was driving water purification technology forward, from reverse osmosis membranes and ultraviolet disinfection to, in the ensuing decades, precise microfilters that were capable of removing hydrophilic particles down to fractions of a micron. Call Air and Water Care now to buy a water filter in Cambridge!
