About Doulton

DoultonUSA values your use, appreciation, and desire for healthy drinking water. 

Background

In 1815, John Doulton was taken into partnership by the widow Martha Jones who had inherited from her late husband a pottery shop in Vauxhall Walk, Lambeth, by the side of the Thames River. Her foreman John Watts was also taken into partnership and the firm became Jones, Watts and Doulton.

The original company produced the Doulton brand of English china and other fine ceramics. Employing students from the Lambeth School of Arts, the company inaugurated a long tradition of artist-designed fine ceramics that bore comparison with any in Europe.

"Offensive to the sight, disgusting to the imagination and destructive to the health." This was how London drinking water, which was drawn from the Thames, was described in a pamphlet published in 1827. The Thames was heavily contaminated with raw sewage; cholera and typhoid epidemics were rampant.

Coincidentally, this was also the year in which the company started expanding their ceramic technology to industrial and other specialized applications such as insulators for electrical telegraph.

In response to public awareness of the danger of the polluted water, they began making water filter cases packed with powdered carbon.