Abstract For centuries noses, eyes, and mouths have assessed the safety of drinking water. Yet by the end of the long nineteenth century, the nascent professional water worker corps in the United States and Europe began to distance themselves from everyday sensory approaches to judging a water’s potability. Historians and geographers have explored the rise of urban water infrastructures as well as shifting approaches to water analysis. However, the changing role of sensory analysis in erasing waters’ biogeophysical histories, as well as the political ramifications of creating authoritative modes of sensory labor that exclude aesthetic evaluations of quality, remains relatively unexamined. This paper asks how water workers’ efforts to standardize and make objective the embodied labor of managing municipal water shifted not only how sensory knowledge is made, but also who has access to sensory knowledge about place. Drawing on technical documents, scientific papers, and production manuals, I examine the emergence of a new standardized system for characterizing and mitigating off odors and flavors found in raw and treated water during the first half of the twentieth century in the United States. This analytical assemblage was built on the precepts of nineteenth-century Fechnerian psychophysics. Grounded in the idea that small increases in stimulation are proportionally accompanied by small increases in sensation, psychophysics offered a way to express and test the relationship between stimulus and experience by identifying the point at which a difference in stimuli was ‘just noticeable’. Through attending to the role of tasting, smelling bodies as sites of scientific knowledge production, and as sites where scientific knowledge is called into question, I show that water workers used estimation of the ineffable to break away from or transcend locale. In the process, they made the water treatment laboratory into a space thoroughly embedded in place, even as they in turn set in motion efforts to remove place from the water sent to consumers throughout the provisioning system.

中文翻译：

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值得注意的是：在两次世界大战期间，美国市政水处理中的一席之地

摘要 几个世纪以来，鼻子、眼睛和嘴巴一直在评估饮用水的安全性。然而，到了漫长的 19 世纪末，美国和欧洲新生的专业水工队伍开始将自己从日常感官方法中分离出来，以判断水的可饮用性。历史学家和地理学家探索了城市水基础设施的兴起以及水分析方法的转变。然而，感官分析在消除水域生物地球物理历史方面不断变化的作用，以及创造排除质量审美评价的权威感官劳动模式的政治后果，仍然相对未经审查。本文询问水工如何将管理市政用水的具体劳动标准化和客观化，这不仅改变了感官知识的产生方式，还涉及谁可以获得有关地方的感官知识。我利用技术文件、科学论文和生产手册，研究了 20 世纪上半叶在美国出现的一种新的标准化系统，用于表征和减轻在原水和处理过的水中发现的气味和味道。这种分析组合建立在 19 世纪费希纳心理物理学的戒律之上。基于刺激的小幅增加与感觉的小幅增加成正比的想法，心理物理学提供了一种表达和测试刺激与体验之间关系的方法，它通过识别刺激差异“刚刚注意到”的点。通过关注品尝、嗅觉身体作为科学知识生产场所的作用，以及作为科学知识受到质疑的场所，我表明水工使用不可言喻的估计来脱离或超越场所。在这个过程中，他们将水处理实验室变成了一个完全嵌入到位的空间，即使他们反过来开始努力从整个供应系统发送给消费者的水中去除空间。作为科学知识受到质疑的场所，我展示了水务工作者使用不可言喻的估计来脱离或超越场所。在这个过程中，他们将水处理实验室变成了一个完全嵌入到位的空间，即使他们反过来开始努力从整个供应系统发送给消费者的水中去除空间。作为科学知识受到质疑的场所，我展示了水务工作者使用不可言喻的估计来脱离或超越场所。在这个过程中，他们将水处理实验室变成了一个完全嵌入到位的空间，即使他们反过来开始努力从整个供应系统发送给消费者的水中去除空间。