Every day, millions of people step right over manhole covers and pay them little attention. Don’t feel bad about this; they’re meant to be ignored. If these pieces of ubiquitous urban industrial design tripped you up, they wouldn’t be doing their job of hiding the city’s underground infrastructure.

The thing is, manhole covers are really, really cool. Especially London’s. The city, known for its Victorian-meets-industrial aesthetic, is full of cast iron hatches imprinted with delightful patterns. In the new Pentagram Paper Overlooked, graphic designer and Pentagramandnbsp;partner Marina Willer created a small survey of London’s covers, transforming the functional metal pieces into Day-Glo graphic design. The book offers a colorful tour through the city’s industrial history, as seen through manhole covers.

Courtesy of Wired Magazine.

Many Americans take clean drinking water for granted. andnbsp;However, the town of Flint is still reeling from the contamination of its water supply, which exposed thousands of residents to lead-laced water. andnbsp;Time explains how this situation came to be.

The need for sewers in 19th-century Baltimore was abundantly clear to those who endured the “2,000-horse-power smell” of the city’s harbor. There, streams of human waste, trash, and industrial runoff converged and stewed under the summer sun, breeding deadly typhoid fever. City code required indoor toilets, but it was up to individual property owners to build cesspools, cisterns, or gutters. These emptied into an unfortunate stream called the Jones Falls; its polluted course ran from the wealthier to the poorer areas of town and finally into the harbor. An 1890 news story claimed that harbor steamboat passengers “were known actually to faint from the effects of the vile smell.” Baltimore was one of the last major American cities to build a public sewer system.andnbsp;

Happy Thanksgiving to all from Maurer-Stutz!

After 99 years, ASCE has righted a wrong committed against pioneering civil engineer and suffragist Nora Stanton Blatch Barney.

Stanton Blatch Barney was among the first women in the United States to earn a civil engineering degree, graduating from Cornell University in 1905. She was also the first woman to earn Junior Member status in ASCE.