When was tap water invented

Lead pipes carried water into public baths and some private homes, ending in brass valves. Remarkably, Ancient Roman taps worked with a similar mechanism to the ball valves still used today. Much of the sophisticated infrastructure built over the previous centuries gave way to a much simpler, more primitive civilisation. For the most part, this meant that Roman indoor plumbing, including taps, fell into disrepair.

But the vast majority of people used wells and streams as their water supply. For the meantime, taps were largely forgotten. For a while, indoor tap water was only available for the minority, but in the latter half of the 19th century, this began to change. In now-developed countries, taps began to become a feature of the everyday home. Meanwhile, the quality of tap water was improving drastically.

Indeed, 25 years after John Gibb used sand filters to purify water in in Scotland, Chelsea Waterworks Company provided London with the first ever treated water supply. This would soon be replicated across the UK. Historically, hot and cold water were only available out of different taps. These combined hot and cold water before it was dispensed out of a single outlet.

A quirk in British history, however, meant that hot and cold water taps remained separate in the UK. This originated in a law which prevented hot and cold water being mixed for fear of heated water undrinkable, due to it being stored in a tank contaminating the main supply.

Separate hot and cold taps are still widespread in the UK today — something which can cause confusion among foreign visitors! The concept of the boiling water tap was born in thanks to instant soup. Dutch manufacturer Henri Peteri had a vision to replace kettles with an instant boiling water dispenser, making instant soup truly instant.

After his son took up the task and with years of development, the first boiling water tap was launched in Able to provide water at the simple twist of a handle, the tap has always been about convenience.

He had come across an experimenter who had succeeded in purifying seawater by passing it downward through 20 vessels, and he assumed that if he dug a hole close to seashore, he would get pure water after the seawater had passed through the sand.

This method employed the use of three pairs of sand filters, each of which had an upward-flow filter and a downward-flow filter. Water would enter the settling compartment of the system after it had been strained through a perforated plate. Between the 17 th and 18 th centuries, filtration became the preferred water purification method for many communities, and more and more town officials were considering the possibility of providing clean drinking to all their residents.

In , French scientist La Hire proposed to the French Academy of Sciences that every household in Paris should have a rainwater cistern and a sand filter. His system included a covered and elevated cistern, which could prevent the growth of moss and freezing. Established in , this plant used gravel filters and concentric sand to treat water, and the water is distributed with the use of a horse and cart.

In , Robert Thom invented slow sand filters, which were installed in Greenock, Scotland, and two years later, James Simpson came up with a similar system that became widely used around the world.

Nonetheless, slow sand filtration used up a lot of land, and it could not keep up with rapid population growths. In , Jersey City, New Jersey was the first city in the United States to begin routine disinfection of community drinking water.

Over the next decade, thousands of cities and towns across the United States followed suit in routinely disinfecting their drinking water, contributing to a dramatic decrease in disease across the country Fig 1. Learn more about the history of U. The occurrence of diseases such as cholera and typhoid dropped dramatically.

In , the occurrence of typhoid fever in the United States was approximately cases per , people. By , it had decreased to In , it had decreased to 0. Typhoid fever decreased rapidly in cities from Baltimore to Chicago as water disinfection and treatment was instituted. This decrease in illness is credited to the implementation of drinking water disinfection and treatment, improving the quality of source water, and improvements in sanitation and hygiene.