George Warren Fuller, Who Made Water Safe

This marker honors George Warren Fuller, a sanitary engineer whose work in Louisville helped change how the whole world drinks water. Born in eighteen sixty-eight, Fuller trained in chemistry and bacteriology, and in eighteen ninety-five the city of Louisville hired him to study how to purify the muddy Ohio River for human use. As the company's chief chemist, he ran landmark experiments that shaped modern rapid sand filtration plants and helped pioneer the chlorination of drinking water in the United States.

Disease that once spread freely through city taps, like typhoid, was driven back by methods he proved here and carried to advise more than one hundred fifty cities and agencies across the country. He led both the American Water Works Association and the American Public Health Association, and was called the pre-eminent sanitary engineer of his time. He died in nineteen thirty-four.