Sir John Harrington is credited with the invention of the toilet—patented, however, by Alexander Cummings, who called it a flushing water closet. Many decades later, Thomas Crapper is credited with improving the early flush toilet. Crapper was a plumber that is often mistakenly called ‘John Crapper’.
Standardized plumbing can be traced back to around 3,000 B.C. when the Indus River Valley civilization used earthen plumbing pipes to provide transportable water and drain wastes.
If you have a leaky faucet that drips twice per minute, you’ll waste over a gallon of water in a week. This is a mild leak, however, waste for more serious leaks can get considerably higher.
President Richard Nixon had set up a White House Special Investigations Unit to plug intelligence leaks in the governmental processes associated with the Vietnam War. The members of this convert group were popularly called “plumbers.”
U.S. residents use about 100 gallons of water per day. It takes about seven and a half years for the average American resident to use the same amount of water that flows over Niagara Falls in one second (750,000 gallons).
In 1939 Alfred M. Moen, who founded Moen Faucets in 1956, invented the single-handle faucet allowing the control of both hot and cold water in just one turn.
