Karel Werstadt

The engineer Karel Werstadt was one of the prominent experts in water-supply engineering and the gas industry in Pilsen. He worked as a central technical counsellor, and as Director of the Municipal Waterworks and Spa as well as being a permanent sworn expert in water supply and health-technical areas with the Pilsen Regional Court.

He studied at a grammar school in Pilsen and later studied machine engineering at the Prague Technical University, where he graduated with a state exam in 1901. Due to a crisis in the engineering industry, he started working at the Pilsen Water Supply Office in 1902 (which has subsequently, thanks to him, become an engineering department of the city administration dealing with all health-technical matters). In the year 1911, he went on study trips to Germany, Belgium, France and the UK to get to acquaint himself the equipment of waterworks, hospitals, spas and market places; later, he also visited Italy, Yugoslavia, Switzerland, Austria and Poland. He disseminated the knowledge gathered during his travels through lectures for associations of experts and also in the magazine Gas and Water (which he became editor of in 1932). The engineering equipment of the city’s slaughterhouse, crematorium and hospital was realised according to his projects.

His professional career started to become very successful the mid-1920s – in 1925, he became the first director of the Pilsen Waterworks; in the years 1928–1931, he chaired the Engineers Club in Pilsen; in 1931, he was entrusted with managing the city’s spas; in 1933, he authored a grand-scale project of a collective water-supply system for the city’s surroundings (40 municipalities); in 1937, he was appointed the Central Technical Counsellor.

Selection of Werstadt’s bibliography:
Laciné lázně lidové: O zařizování nejlacinějších lázní domácích i veřejných (1909)
Zásobování města Plzně vodou (1923)
Vodárna města Plzně (1926)
Zásobování měst vodou s ohledem na zastavovací plán (in: Architekt SIA, 1930)
O výstavbě a provozu plzeňských lázní (in: Architekt SIA, 1933)
Vodárenský kurz (1937)

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