Normandy’s Patent Marine Aërated Fresh Water Company: a family business for 60 years, 1851–1910

Abstract

In today’s desalination community, we are usually too wrapped up in the present and the future to pay much attention to the distant past. Yet our ‘technological ancestors’ dealt with many of the problems that face us today, albeit with a very limited tool box with which to address them. In addition, they were often interesting and multi-faceted individuals with skills and interests beyond desalination and with private lives that also bear telling. This paper offers one such example. From the mid-1850s until 1910, Normandy’s Patent Marine Aërated Fresh Water Company of London manufactured some 2000 ship board and land based seawater distillers for the production of both drinking and boiler make-up water. By the turn of the twentieth century, it was a competitor of as well as a supplier to G&J Weir of Glasgow. Units were installed in Aden, Suez, Heligoland, India, South America, India, Grand Turks Island, Key West and quite possibly Malta. The Company also supplied major steam ship lines and the Royal Navy. The authors describe the Company’s founder, Dr Alphonse Rene le Mire de Normandy, some of his early accomplishments and the founding and operation of the Company itself. Included is a discussion of its technology and of individual units placed throughout the world. The case will be argued that Normandy was the first to apply multi-effect distillation to desalination applications. Competitors are identified. There is also a brief review of the book ‘A Practical Manual on Sea Water Distillation’, authored in 1909 by Frank Normandy, younger son of Dr. Normandy, who was Managing Director of the Company in its final years. (This is quite likely the first book ever published on the topic of desalination.)

Keywords:

• History of desalination
• Normandy
• Multi-effect

Acknowledgements

The authors have been supported throughout this project by many librarians and archivists who have given their time to pursue somewhat peculiar requests and their help is here acknowledged. Special thanks go to Tom Pankratz for informing us of Frank Normandy’s book and Dr Normandy’s grave site and to Melissa Birkett Nicholls for leading us to the grave itself. The Friends of West Norwood Cemetery very kindly put us in touch with Mrs Elizabeth Panourgias-Morrison, great-great-granddaughter of Dr Normandy, who supplied us with much background information and useful clues, especially regarding the family (Pangourias-Morrison, 2008).