General Plumbing History
Plumbing has a great and ancient heritage. It can trace its
history back to the very early days of each of the great civilizations.
In fact, these early civilizations would most likely never have
developed without the help of their plumbers.
The ancient Egyptians were not only master builders (see their
pyramids and temples) - they were also master plumbers. Those same great
pyramids contain elaborate bathrooms for the dead to use on their
transcendent journey from one life to another life. These great
craftsmen knew how to coppersmith - which is still in use today.
The great rival civilization from the same period was Babylonia.
Here the plumbers participated in developing one of the great wonders
of the world - the "Hanging Gardens of Babylon".
A much smaller civilization was developing about the same time on
the island of Crete in the Mediterranean Sea. In the palace of King
Minos was found the world's earliest "flushing" toilet.
Unfortunately, this civilization was devastated and lost for centuries
by a cataclysmic earthquake.
It was the ancient Romans who had the greatest impact on the
development of plumbing and everything associated with it. In fact, the
word "plumber" comes from the Latin word for lead - "plumbus" - which
was used extensively as a material for plumbing. Romans built great
sewers (one of which, the Cloaca Maxima, is still in use today) and
stupendous aquaducts which brought water from the mountains into the
heart of Rome. They loved their public baths, with their heated water
and warm air, and the largest of them was able to seat over 3,000
people. Much of this plumbing was preserved in the lava-covered
cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
Most of the knowledge about water and sewerage was lost with the
fall of the Roman Empire, and the following centuries saw frequent
outbreaks of epidemics such as the Black Plague which at their peak
killed as many as a third of the people of Europe.
It was only in the 19th century that people came to understand the
importance of clean water and proper sanitation. This was partly the
result of advances in medical science. But it was also partly due to
the epidemics (such as cholera) that spread throughout the world and
killed so many. At last the profession of plumbing was once again to
receive the recognition that it was due.
The Roman Empire was the most dominant society the world had ever
seen until modern times. Cecil B. De Mille movies have made us conscious
of their ruthless military prowess, but the Romans also excelled like
nobody before in technology and social organization. And for all the
blood they shed, ancient Rome was generous in spreading its civilized
ways among the peoples it conquered. Their exported plumbing systems
probably saved more lives than the Roman legions slaughtered. The
fabled Roman baths helped spread a culture of cleanliness throughout
their empire, at least until near the end when those former community
recreation centers degenerated into brothels.
The Dark Ages
Rot from within combined with barbarian hordes from the East put an
end to Rome's achievements. This time, there were no worthy successors
to carry on civilization's legacy. The warriors who laid waste to
Rome were nomads and plunderers who had no appreciation for clean
running water and sanitary waste disposal. The aptly named Dark Ages
ensued, leading to 1,000 years of unrelenting ignorance, disease and
squalor.
What tiny remnants of civilization remained were harbored mainly in
monasteries, as Christianity took hold throughout the Western world.
Some of the medieval monks enjoyed a semblance of sanitation, with
privies set atop streams that would naturally convey away their waste
even as the incoming water provided for their drinking and cooking
needs. But for the most part, their lives were only a little better
than the miserable lot of the common man, who faced long odds against
acquiring gray hair. The early Christians rejected all aspects of
Roman culture-an understandable impulse in light of their ghastly fate
as so many lion lunches. The debauchery associated with Roman baths in
the latter stages of the Empire helped propel them toward the view
that life's purpose was to purify the soul rather than the body. Early
Christian tracts were filled with admonishment against physical
comfort. One fourth-century pilgrim to Jerusalem was recorded as
bragging that she had not washed her face in 18 years so as not to
disturb the holy water that had been splashed upon it at baptism.
These attitudes prevailed throughout the millennium lasting from
about the fifth through 15th centuries. As Western civilization
stagnated, so did plumbing. Even kings and queens routinely died from
typhoid and dysentery. Moats were open cesspools that served well to
deter enemies, but imagine living in one of those castles on a hot
summer day.
Slow Recovery
Gutenberg's printing press enabled knowledge to spread beyond
monastery walls, leading to the Renaissance, which gave Western
civilization something to be proud of once again. But the intense
blossoming of the arts in the 15th and 16th centuries was not matched by
progress in plumbing.
The earliest known flushing toilet of modern times has been
attributed to Sir John Harington, a godson of Queen Elizabeth I who is
said to have put the device in one of her castles as well as his own
home around 1595. It was a crude contraption that inspired jokes and
which the Queen reportedly declined to use. He never made another one.
(No, Thomas Crapper did not invent the toilet. He was a successful
artisan who lived in the late 19th century and practiced plumbing
among other crafts, but most of what you've heard about him is myth.)
The earliest patent for a flush toilet belonged to another Englishman,
Alexander Cumming, in 1775. Improvements were made on these devices
over the years, but for the next century they remained Rube Goldberg
contraptions that didn't work very well and tended to reek from all
the waste matter collected in their ill-fitting joints. The Industrial
Revolution, triggered by James Watt's harnessing of steam power in
the mid-18th century, led to frightful conditions in European and
American cities. Waves of peasants, seeking work in the burgeoning
factories, crowded together in decrepit tenements without running
water or sewage disposal. The rivers upon which most major cities were
built became overwhelmed by the volume of waste dumped into them.
England's Parliament shut down for a while in 1859 because of the
stench from the nearby Thames River. A New York City newspaper in the
1830s had a daily front-page report of neighborhood cholera outbreaks.
Virtually every U.S. and European city suffered hideous casualty
tolls from waterborne diseases.
By the middle of the 19th century, fancier homes and buildings
began to acquire indoor plumbing, but most owners were sorry they did.
Toilets were tied to unvented and often poorly sloped drainage
systems. Early plumbers were basically metal workers with strong arms
who made their own pipe by hand, but they knew nothing of hydraulics
or sanitation. The U.S. Census Bureau categorized plumbers and gas
fitters in a single category until the 1880s.
The "Heyday" of Plumbing
Then something profound happened that led, in the 1880s and 1890s,
to a flourishing of the plumbing industry into the grand enterprise it
is today.
Throughout the last decade and a half, a steady stream of press
releases have crossed my desk celebrating the 100th anniversary of
industry companies and trade groups. The PHCC organization began as
the National Association of Master Plumbers in 1883. The forerunner of
the Mechanical Contractors Association of America formed in 1889, as
did the United Association plumbers union. ASSE traces its origin to
around the turn of the century. Numerous plumbing manufacturers
started up in the 1880s and 1890s, quite a few of which are still in
business. What set off this explosion? I think more than anything else
it was the discovery and promulgation of correct venting procedures.
Venting had been known for decades, but primitive plumbers tended to
do it on a hit-and-miss, trial-and-error basis. There was no systematic
guide as to sizing and placement of vents. Correct venting and
drainage procedures did not become widespread knowledge until the
1870s. Particularly important was the 1876 publication of George
Waring's landmark book, The Sanitary Drainage of Houses and Towns,
along with various other books and articles explaining how to
correctly design plumbing systems that worked the way they were supposed
to. And thus began the good life as we know it today. Famed
physician-writer, the late Dr. Lewis Thomas, former Chancellor of the
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, wrote in 1984:
"There is no question that our health has improved spectacularly in
the past century...One thing seems certain: It did not happen because
of medicine, or medical science or even the presence of doctors.
"Much of the credit should go to the plumbers and engineers of the
Western world. The contamination of drinking water by human feces was at
one time the single greatest cause of human disease and death for us;
it remains so, along with starvation and malaria, for the Third
World. Typhoid fever, cholera and dysentery were the chief threats to
survival in the early years of the 19th century in New York City, and
when the plumbers and sanitary engineers had done their work in the
construction of our cities these diseases began to vanish."
