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The History of Plumbing
We live in a world where plumbing is a given fact. It's easy to forget that plumbers were not always around and that sewers, or rather the plastic pipes that make up domestic plumbing systems, are relatively new inventions.
Lack of plumbing systems was the number one cause of diseases in the ancient world. In the ancient kingdom of Indus River, North West India, was discovered archaeological evidence of a technological solution for wastewater treatment and water supply lines.
At the same time, plumbing systems were also developed in the Assyrian kingdom and Pharaonic Egypt. These two cultures were the first to use running water, pumping facilities, and sewer systems that resemble modern plumbing.
The great plumbers of the ancient world were the Romans. Their plumbing systems, just like their cobblestone paths, still remain intact in many places to this very day.
In the sixteen century Sir Harington devised Britain's first flushing toilet. Over the course of the British Empire a new profession developed, that of the plumber – and for the first time laws were enacted requiring, for reasons of public health, the construction of plumbing systems as well as toilet units in every new home.
The next step, which brings us to present day, occurred in the American colonies. In the early eighteenth century the first ten plumbing systems appeared in New York and Boston and transported running water to many homes. From the nineteenth century America become the successor of ancient Rome, as the continent with the biggest and most complicated plumbing systems in history. From then on this plumbing technology immigrated from the U.S. to the rest of the world.
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