The Spring That Never Stopped

In 1888, a cholera outbreak swept through Hamburg, Germany, killing over eight thousand people in ten weeks. The city's water supply had been drawn from the polluted Elbe River, and no amount of boiling or filtering could keep pace with the contamination. But just upstream, the smaller city of Altona drew its water from a deep artesian spring — clean water rising from bedrock, unpolluted by anything on the surface.…