In 1881 the drinking water of King’s Lynn received an impurity score of 110. A month later it had improved dramatically, falling to 48. Within another month it was back at 110.
The figures came from a national experiment associated with George William Wigner, a chemist born and educated in King’s Lynn. Wigner wanted to replace vague opinions about water with a standard numerical system. His method did not survive, but his wider career helped establish analytical chemistry as a recognised profession and gave Victorian consumers greater protection against contaminated or adulterated food.
He also investigated milk, sewage, wrote a substantial technical work on sugar refining and analysed the granite of Cleopatra’s Needle. He accomplished all this before his death at the age of forty-one.
From London Road to the laboratory
George William Wigner was born in London Road, King’s Lynn, on 19 October 1842. He was the eldest son of John Thomas Wigner, the Baptist minister associated with Stepney Chapel in Blackfriars Street, and was educated at Lynn Grammar School. His early biographer recorded that he showed a particular liking for chemistry and science.
At seventeen, Wigner left Lynn to work as a clerk in a private London bank. He remained there for five years, spending much of his leisure time studying science and giving lectures. One of these lectures was heard by Frank Hills, an industrialist with chemical works at Deptford. Hills offered him employment, allowing Wigner to exchange the bank counter for practical industrial chemistry.
He spent about four years at the Deptford works. It was an unconventional scientific education, but one closely connected with the urgent problems of Victorian towns.
Can sewage be turned into fertiliser?
Among the most pressing of those problems was sewage. Rapid urban growth had overwhelmed drains and cesspits. Rivers received immense quantities of untreated waste, while drinking-water sources were frequently exposed to contamination.
Wigner became involved in the A.B.C. sewage process, built around alum, blood and clay, with other substances sometimes added. The chemicals caused suspended matter in sewage to settle. The resulting sludge could then be dried and marketed as fertiliser under the optimistic name “native guano”.
Wigner worked with William Cameron Sillar and Robert George Sillar, took out patents and became connected with the Native Guano Company. In 1868 the three men published an account of experiments conducted at Leicester, Tottenham and Leamington.
The process offered two apparent benefits. It purified wastewater and recovered material that might otherwise be lost. In practice, chemical precipitation could remove a substantial proportion of suspended matter but could not solve every problem caused by dissolved pollution or disease carrying organisms. The A.B.C. system was eventually overtaken by more effective forms of sewage treatment.
It nevertheless brought Wigner into an important field of Victorian sanitary science. It also taught him that a chemical result was useful only if it could be applied outside the laboratory.
The public analyst
In 1872 Wigner opened his own analytical practice at Great Tower Street in the City of London. He examined food, water and industrial products, and appeared in court as an expert witness. At the Old Bailey in 1877 he introduced himself as a resident of 79 Great Tower Street and a Fellow of both the Chemical Society and the Society of Analysts. In another case, in 1881, he gave evidence after analysing bottles of spirits.
This was the emerging profession of the public analyst. Local authorities appointed chemists to examine samples collected by inspectors. Their work could reveal watered milk, coffee mixed with cheaper substances, butter adulterated with other fats or medicines containing unreliable quantities of their supposed ingredients.
The analyst’s certificate might lead to prosecution, so the work required more than laboratory skill. Methods had to withstand hostile questioning in court. Analysts also needed agreed standards by which a sample could be judged genuine or fraudulent.
Wigner served as analyst for Plumstead, Greenwich and Deptford, and became consulting chemist to the Thames Conservancy Board. His work placed him where chemistry met municipal government, commercial regulation, public health and criminal law.
Organising a profession
Britain’s early food laws were weakened by inconsistent analysis and uncertainty over what constituted adulteration. In August 1874 Wigner and the chemist Charles Heisch invited officially appointed analysts to meet at the Cannon Street Hotel. Twenty-five attended.
From this initiative emerged the Society of Public Analysts, established in 1875. Wigner served as its honorary secretary until 1883 and then became its president. He edited its Proceedings and, with John Muter, edited the Society’s journal, The Analyst, from its foundation in 1876 until his death.
The journal allowed chemists to publish analytical methods, compare results and report disputed prosecutions. It helped turn a scattered group of private practitioners into a professional community.
Wigner also took an active part in promoting the Sale of Food and Drugs Act 1875, which strengthened the appointment of analysts and provided a firmer framework for prosecutions. He was not the sole architect of the Act, but he helped create the professional machinery required to enforce it.
His reputation spread abroad. In 1880 the United States National Board of Trade awarded him $500 for an essay and draft legislation intended to prevent the adulteration of food and drugs without placing unnecessary restrictions upon legitimate trade.
The Society of Public Analysts later became the Society for Analytical Chemistry. In 1980 it joined other chemical organisations to form the Royal Society of Chemistry. Wigner therefore helped establish one of the institutional ancestors of Britain’s present professional body for chemists.
What was in King’s Lynn’s water?
Water analysis presented chemists with a difficult problem. They could measure ammonia, nitrates, chlorine and hardness. They could look for metallic contamination, examine sediment under a microscope and note unusual smell or colour. Deciding what those separate findings meant was far less straightforward.
One analyst might condemn a sample that another considered acceptable.
Wigner proposed converting the results into points. Suspicious findings increased the score, with a high total indicating poorer water. The system was intended to replace personal judgement with a consistent national measure.
In 1881 the Society of Public Analysts began publishing results from public water supplies across England. King’s Lynn was included. Its score fell from 110 to 48 in a single month, then returned to 110 the following month.
Such violent movement was difficult to explain as a genuine transformation of the town’s entire supply. Samples may have come from different places or been taken under changing conditions. Rainfall and pumping could alter results. More seriously, Wigner’s formula sometimes treated naturally occurring substances as evidence of pollution and combined findings that did not carry equal risks.
In February 1882 the Society voted by 25 to 11 against adopting the Wigner scale. Publication of the scores soon ceased.
The experiment had failed, but the question Wigner posed was a sound one. How could water analyses conducted in different laboratories be made comparable? Later public-health systems would depend upon the common methods and defined limits that he had been seeking.
There is no firm evidence that King’s Lynn Corporation employed Wigner personally. The town’s supply appears to have entered his work through the Society’s national programme.
Milk, sugar and an Egyptian obelisk
Wigner’s interests extended well beyond water.
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Milk received particular attention because it was widely consumed, easily diluted and capable of carrying infection. At the International Health Exhibition in South Kensington in 1884, Wigner served as a juror and helped analyse several hundred food samples. On 30 July he delivered a lecture entitled Pure Milk, discussing its composition and the methods by which analysts could detect interference with it.
He also specialised in sugar. In 1882 he collaborated with Charles George Warnford Lock and Robert Henry Harland on Sugar Growing and Refining, a technical work of more than 700 pages. Its subjects ranged from the cultivation of sugar producing plants to refining machinery, chemical testing, trade figures and rum distillation. The chapters on refining, analysis and patents were largely the work of Wigner and Harland.
One of his more unexpected assignments concerned Cleopatra’s Needle. After the Egyptian obelisk was erected on the Thames Embankment in 1878, Wigner analysed samples of its granite and considered how the stone might withstand London’s polluted atmosphere. On 20 November that year he presented his findings to the Society of Public Analysts.
The Royal Society’s catalogue eventually listed twenty-one papers written by Wigner alone, besides several produced with other chemists. Their subjects included water, sugars and the practical problems of chemical measurement.
A career cut short
Wigner’s wife died in January 1884. Later that year his own health deteriorated while he was still serving as president of the Society of Public Analysts.
He died at Brockley on 17 October 1884 from a stricture of the oesophagus, two days before his forty-second birthday. He left a son and a daughter.
Some of Wigner’s methods were superseded, while his water scoring system was rejected by his own colleagues. His more durable achievement was the organisation of analytical science. He helped establish common procedures, a professional journal and a body capable of advising legislators.
From a childhood in London Road and an education at Lynn Grammar School, he became one of the chemists who made laboratory evidence part of ordinary civic life. Food sellers could be challenged, water companies questioned and expert evidence tested in court.
King’s Lynn has commemorated many merchants, mayors and military figures. George William Wigner, who tried to discover what people were really eating and drinking, deserves a place among them.
© James Rye 2026
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References
- Association of Public Analysts. “George William Wigner and Cleopatra’s Needle.” Journal of the Association of Public Analysts 46 (2018): 1–8. https://www.apajournal.org.uk/2018_0001-0008.pdf
- Hamlin, Christopher. A Science of Impurity: Water Analysis in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft667nb43t
- Hartog, Philip Joseph. “Wigner, George William.” In Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 61. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1900. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography%2C_1885-1900/Wigner%2C_George_William
- Hillen, Henry J. History of the Borough of King’s Lynn. Vol. 2. Norwich: East of England Newspaper Company, 1907. https://archive.org/details/historyofborough02hill
- Historic England. “Stepney Chapel, Blackfriars Street.” National Heritage List for England, list entry 1298167. https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1298167
- Lock, Charles George Warnford, George William Wigner, and Robert Henry Harland. Sugar Growing and Refining: A Comprehensive Treatise on the Culture of Sugar-Yielding Plants, and the Manufacture, Refining, and Analysis of Sugar. 2nd ed. London: E. & F. N. Spon, 1882. https://books.google.com/books?id=LGJGAAAAYAAJ
- Old Bailey Proceedings Online. “Trial of January 1877.” Evidence of George William Wigner. https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t18770108
- Old Bailey Proceedings Online. “Trial of March 1881.” Evidence of George William Wigner. https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t18810328
- Royal Society of Chemistry. The Presidents of the Chemical Society and Royal Society of Chemistry. Includes the presidents of the Society for Analytical Chemistry. https://www.rsc.org/getContentAsset/d0ad01da-edae-425d-b0a4-48ea0ae1d0f9/f4c91d86-ac3e-4675-bdf3-f8325ded9710/presidents-of-the-chemical-society-and-rsc.pdf
- Sillar, William Cameron, Robert George Sillar, and George William Wigner. The A.B.C. Sewage Process: Being a Report of the Experiments Hitherto Made at Leicester, Tottenham, and Leamington, on the Purification and Utilization of Sewage. London: Elliot Stock, 1868. https://books.google.com/books?id=JZ5WAAAAcAAJ
- Wigner, George William. Pure Milk: A Lecture Delivered in the Lecture Room of the International Health Exhibition, July 30th, 1884. London: William Clowes and Sons, 1884. https://archive.org/details/b28525140