Taking A Step Back: The History of Drinking Water
Did people always have clean and safe drinking water? The answer is no because clean water has not always been available to the masses. Our collective approach to water has brought us to where we are today.
The individuals (or our ancestors, simply put) who preceded us generally experienced drastic sicknesses, diseases, and other water-related circumstances.
Shortly after the link between those illnesses and the quality of our populace's water supply, genuine endeavors were devoted to giving clean drinking water to significant populations. Since then, it was acknowledged that an external water source was required for drinking.
The Romans created water passages or aqueducts devoted to this purpose as early as 312 B.C. Afterward, in the seventeenth century, London developed the New River, a clean-water city.
However, as populations developed, this would eventually become insufficient to meet everyone's needs. Moreover, before present-day sewage and water treatment plants were established, people greatly improved water quality because of taste.
Sadly, we realize this is certainly not a precise test to decide the suitability of drinking water. A few unsafe and harmful agents are bland, scentless, and dry. Before long, people understood the need for a more exact method for testing their drinking water.
Although ancient records show that water was boiled and filtered through gravel and sand, it wasn't until the mid-nineteenth century that we saw a town providing water through a filter.
Paisley, Scotland, became the principal city that utilized a filter to supply a whole region with water. A couple of English urban communities stuck to this pattern for a long time, while European urban areas embraced some filtration.
However, in 1832, Richmond, Virginia's early endeavor to introduce a channel in the U.S. failed due to tough luck.
With the spread of infection and the staggering of city cesspools, it became clear to individuals that some sort of purification was important. Sickness became broad, yet many didn't trust the link between dirty drinking water and the presence of disease.
Finally, in 1890, William Thompson Sedgwick used bacteriology to demonstrate an association between contaminated water and cholera.
However, in the last part of the 1800s, numerous urban communities in the U.S. started to embrace water filtration processes for city drinking water. The early frameworks included straining water through sand and gravel to eliminate sediment.
By the beginning of the 1900s, urban areas started to understand that slow sand filters could eliminate some bacteria, especially the typhoid microbe.
Moreover, water treatment was perceived as essential. In the mid-1900s, numerous urban areas utilized chlorination to treat water. This included adding chlorine to the water, which was perceived as unsafe and risky.
The need for water treatment was urgent due to thousands of instances of typhoid fever and the runs. In 1914, the first federal regulations in the United States were sanctioned.
Afterward, during the 1960s, the acknowledgment that modern cycles were sullying the perfect water supply prompted more extreme limitations. Thus, the 1972 amendments, which are largely responsible for our ongoing regulation, were carried out.
The vast majority of what currently administers our drinking water is gone ahead in the Clean Water Act (CWA), which was changed as such in 1972.
As per the EPA, the significant changes made in the CWA include the following stipulations:
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Regulations for pollutant discharges into U.S. waters
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Assignment of pollution control programs to the EPA
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Maintaining existing regulations for contaminants in surface water
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The obtaining of a permit for discharging pollutants into navigable waters
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Funding for sewage treatment plants
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Recognized the necessity for problems related to pollution
Although these strategies have advanced fundamentally after some time, we are adequately fortunate to commit to protected, clean drinking water.
We have access to a clean water supply today, thanks to the mechanisms developed by recent innovators.
In this article, we will talk about the origin of clean drinking water and the different water purification methods we have incorporated into our daily lives.
The Origin of Clean Drinking Water
People nowadays tend to take for granted the broad accessibility of clean drinking water.
However, people have gone to great lengths since time immemorial to create clean drinking water, and such endeavors even date back to before they discovered how to make fire by scouring two sticks together.
In ancient times, individuals decided the purity of water by taste, and this strategy was viewed as erroneous later on. In any case, their persistent endeavors in getting clean and safe drinking water have prompted the improvement of numerous advancements that make water treatment more effective today.
Authors M.N. Baker and Michael Taras, in The Quest for Pure Water: The History of Water Purification from the Earliest Records to the Twentieth Century, an American Water Works Association book, hypothesize that the pursuit of pure drinking water started in ancient times.
Sanskrit writings and inscriptions in ancient Egyptian tombs or burial chambers document the earliest water treatment. The Sushruta Samhita, a clinical work from the fifteenth century B.C., references various water therapy strategies.
These techniques incorporate boiling water over the fire, heating water under the sun, plunging heated iron into water, filtering through gravel and sand, and utilizing the Strychnos potatorum seed and a stone called "Gomedaka."
The walls of the burial chambers of Egyptian rulers Amenophis II and Rameses II, which date back to the fifteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C., contain photos of water explaining the device.
1.1 Purification of Water
The Book of Scriptures, or the Bible, references water purification as having existed in the 12th century.
Accordingly, Moses and the Israelites observed that the water in Marah was bitter. God instructed them to cast a tree into the water; evidently, the water's taste became sweet and good.
Meanwhile, people in Jericho complained to Elisha that the city's water was "naught," so the prophet cleansed the water by projecting salt into it.
1.2 Drinking Cup
In the 9th century B.C., a Spartan lawgiver developed a drinking cup that could make mud stick to its side. Later on, the father of medication, Hippocrates, invented a device called the "Hippocrates Sleeve," a fabric sack utilized to strain boiled rainwater, disposing of hoarseness and bad odor in the process.
Both the Greeks and Romans had exceptionally elaborate water-filtering systems. Their water treatment experts utilized various strategies to create clean drinking water, including Diophanes's strategy of putting macerated laurels (or other shrubs) in water and Paramus's drenching of a sack of pounded grain and bruised coral.
Thus, in the eighth century A.D., an Arabian chemist named Gerber proposed using wick siphons to purify water.
1.3 Desalination
In 1671, Sir Francis Bacon published his thoughts on desalination in A Natural History of Ten Centuries. This is due to the sanitation history of the experimenter he encountered, who successfully purified seawater by passing it through 20 vessels.
Furthermore, this experimenter assumed that if he dug a hole close to the seashore, he would get pure water after the seawater had passed through the sand.
Likewise, an Italian physician named Lucas Antonius Portius gave subtleties of numerous sand filtration strategies in his compositions entitled Soldier's Vade Mecum. Through this, three pairs of sand filters (each had an upward-flow filter and a downward-flow filter) where water would enter after it had been strained through a perforated plate.
1.4 Filtration as the "Preferred" Water Purification Method
Between the 17th and 18th centuries, filtration became the preferred water purification method for many communities, and that's only the tip of the iceberg because more town officials considered the possibility of providing clean drinking water to all their residents.
In fact, in 1703, French researcher La Hire proposed to the French Academy of Sciences that each Paris family should have a rainwater cistern and a sand filter. His framework incorporated a covered and elevated cistern, which could forestall moss development and freezing.
1.5 First Purifying Plant
Thanks to La Hire's initial undertakings, Paisley, Scotland, presented the world's first municipal water purifying plant a century later. This plant utilized gravel filters and concentric sand to treat water, which was disseminated with a horse and truck in 1804.
However, in 1827, Robert Thom invented slow sand filters installed in Greenock and Scotland. James Simpson devised a comparative framework two years later that became generally utilized worldwide.
In any case, slow sand filtration required a lot of land and couldn't keep up with the rapid population development.
The rapid sand filtration strategy was introduced in the United States in the 1880s. This system incorporated fundamental elements of Thom's system, such as the reverse flow wash and the false bottom.
However, they used mechanical agitators to loosen debris and water jets or backwashes to clean filter media. As such, rapid sand filtration included pretreatments, such as coagulation and settling to lessen sediment load on the filter, and charcoal filtration for further developing taste and scent.
More importantly, it was also during the 19th century when it became apparent that water quality truly affects health.
Around the mid-century, London's town authorities saw that cholera deaths had diminished after the introduction of water treatment systems. Based on this, London passed the Metropolitan Water Act of 1852 to ensure that all water supplied to the city would be filtrated.
Finally, they understood and acknowledged the significance of providing clean drinking water to the people.
After the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, water worldwide became increasingly contaminated. Still, at the same time, new and more refined water treatment systems were being created to guarantee that everyone would have safe and clean water to drink.
Present-Day's Water Purification Methods
All credit to the historical undertakings of drinking water treatments, we now have all these present-day methods to use:
Boiling
Boiling water is perhaps the cheapest and safest water purification method. However, water sources and/or distribution channels may contaminate or pollute the water.
Parasites, germs, and other harmful microorganisms may reside in your water supply, and you may not even notice them because they are not visible to the naked eye. Still, the effects of water contamination can be life-threatening.
In this method, clean water ought to be brought to a boil and left on at a rolling boil for one (1) to three (3) minutes.
For individuals living in high-elevation regions, it is prescribed to heat up or boil your water for longer than water boiled at lower altitudes. This is because water boiled at lower temperatures in higher elevations.
Moreover, boiled water should be covered and left to cool for a few minutes before drinking. For water drawn from wells, pass it on to settle compounds before filtering it through clean water for use.
Filtration
Filtration is one of the powerful approaches to purifying water, and while utilizing the right media filters, it's compelling in freeing water of compounds.
This strategy utilizes chemicals and physical cycles to filter water and make it safe for human consumption. Through filtration, enormous compounds and little, perilous toxins (which can cause diseases) will be eliminated with a simple and fast filtration process.
Filtration doesn't drain all the mineral salts, so filtered water is "healthier" than water decontaminated using other techniques. Ultimately, it is an effective water purification method that utilizes a chemical absorption process to remove unwanted compounds from water.
Compared with reverse osmosis, filtration is viewed as powerful for the selective elimination of much more modest sub-atomic mixtures like chlorine and pesticides. The other variable that makes filtration less expensive is that it doesn't require much energy in distillation and reverse osmosis. In retrospect, it is a much more economical water purification method because little water is lost during the process.
Distillation
Distillation is a water purification method that uses heat to gather pure water as vapor. This technique is powerful, as scientific data shows that water has a lower boiling point than different impurities and illness-causing components tracked down in the water.
To do this, water is exposed to a heat source until it reaches its boiling point. It is then left at the boiling point until it vaporizes. The vapor is then guided into a condenser to cool and, immediately after, turns into liquid water that is perfect and safe for drinking.
This method removes bacteria, microbes, salts, and other heavy metals like lead and mercury.
Chlorination
Chlorine is a powerful chemical that has long been needed to treat water for home consumption. It is a powerful water purification technique that kills germs, parasites, and other disease-causing organisms in ground or tap water.
As such, water can be purified using chlorine tablets or fluid chlorine. As an off-the-rack water cleansing item, chlorine is relatively cheap yet effective.
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