The Development of Universal Water Supply in Montreal, Mid-19th Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1863, all Montrealers, rich and poor alike, have tap water at home. This paper relates the history of the development of the universal service of water supply in Montreal. First in the hands of a private company, water supply was taken over by the municipality in 1843-1845. But despite public ownership, the provision of the service remains based on commercial principles, and this hampers the expansion of the system considerably. In fact, due to this (legal) obligation and to the technological risk associated with water supply at the time, the change in ownership did not change anything as regards the water system’s development. In 1851, however, new legislation entitles the municipality of Montreal to compel each Montrealer to use the municipal water supply service. From then on, water supply is subject to what can be termed a public provision regime. Admittedly, this regime based on compulsory use was only established once the general interest of universal water supply had been acknowledged, but it also allows the set up of a new financing “scheme” for water supply that municipal leaders had been longing to implement for a certain time. The technical and financial interest of the service provider thus meets the general interest of the population of Montreal in this process that leads to the universalisation of water supply — an important (although admittedly forced) form of solidarity among the city’s population.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".