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History of Plumbing in America

First published in July 1987, P & M magazine

The history of plumbing in America is brought to you courtesy of P & M Magazine

we have received written permission to reprint

- 1995 our founder




New World settlers would copy the Indians casual discharge of waste and refuse in running water, open fields, shrubs or forests. Like their folks back home in Europe, the colonials would also toss garbage and excrement out the front door and windows onto the streets below. The country's first garbage disposers would be hogs and scavengers.


Thanks to the plumbing industry, the United States would set standards in health and safety unsurpassed in the world today. At the forefront was the unsung plumber, the skilled craftsman of lead, expert bell hanger, blacksmith, toolmaker, tin and sheet-iron worker.

Closet Lore: Over 2,800 years ago, the fabled King Minos of Crete owned the world's first flushing water closet, complete with a wooden seat. Lost for centuries in the rubble of the palace ruins, the invention did not materialize again until 1594. Then, Sir John Harington built a "prive in perfection" for his godmother, Queen Elizabeth, to use in Richmond Palace, and one for himself at his humbler estate. Once he published his pompous book of terrible puns and off-color jokes about the new device in 1596, A New Discourse of a State Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax, the ridicule and scorn would hound him for the rest of his days, and he never built another one. ("Ajax" was the slang in those days for a privy or "a jakes.") To the world's misfortune, another 200 years would pass before the idea took hold again.

Thus, when the colonists packed for the New World, they probably tucked a chamber pot in among other crockery items and tinware. But to a backwoodsman or a bride of 14, the term "chaise percee" or "commode" often disguised its use. In the early 1800s, a settler's wife reportedly bought several from the new stock at the local store for kitchen and table use.

The privy or outhouse slowly became accepted, albeit a peril for those walking by. One diarist disgustedly wrote: "Privy houses set against ye Strete which spoiling people's apparill should they happen to be nare when ye filth comes out ... Especially in ye Night when people can not see to shun them."

From the more humble and ramshackle outhouses of wood emanated more glorious structures. Human nature as it is, some became symbols of distinction, as would current bathrooms of the well-to-do. William Byrd's 1730 outhouse was made of brick and had five holes. Byrd was chef magistrate of the colonial court and thus sat on the largest seat at the center of a raised, semicircular bench. So did Mr. Byrd preside in the family privy.


How to bring a workable water closet into the house without mess or odor was an invention waiting to be born, however. Some of the country's leading citizens would try to improvise on the basic knowledge of the times.


In the early 1840s, the architect and designers of New York City's Central Park denounced the outhouse as "troublesome, unhealthy, indelicate, and ugly." It was all true. They tried to correct this by designing little Gothic structures combining a summer-house with a view of the garden on one side, and a two- or four-holer on the other.

Outside of a few private homes, hotels were the bastions of luxury and comfort - and indoor plumbing. In 1829, the brilliant young architect, 26-year-old Isaiah Rogers, sent ripples of awe throughout the country with his innovative Tremont Hotel in Boston. It was the first hotel to have indoor plumbing and became the prototype of a modern, first-class American hotel.


The bathrooms in the basement were fitted with cold running water, which also went to the kitchen and laundry. The bathtubs were copper or tin and probably had a little side-arm, gas furnace attached at one end. Perhaps shaped like a shoe as the French and English models, the water in the tub would flow and circulate backwards until the entire bath was heated to satisfaction.


In the Tremont, water was drawn from a metal storage tank set on top of the roof, the recently invented steam pump raising the water on high. A simple water carriage system removed the excretal water to the sewerage system. As with other individual buildings of the time, each had its own source of water and removal.

Five years later in New York City, Rogers surpassed his achievements of the Tremont Hotel. He built the Astor House with six stories, featuring 17 rooms on the upper floors with water closets and bathrooms to serve 300 guest rooms. The Astor and the Tremont were the first modern buildings built with extensive plumbing. (In contrast, the Statler Hotel in Buffalo caused a sensation in 1908 by offering "A room with a bath for a dollar and a half.")


In the 1830s, at least one private house, a James River mansion, had a wood-fired hot air heating system. Heat wafted up to the first floor via handsome brass registers. Ladies of New York City's High Society wasted no time in flocking to the parlor after dinner to stand over its registers for warmth.



Most Colonial bathing consisted of occasional dips in ponds or streams. More typical was a quote from Elizabeth Drinker, the wife of a highly-placed Philadelphia Quaker. She had a shower (probably a bucket arrangement) put up in her backyard for therapeutic use in 1799. She said, "I bore it better than I expected, not having been wet all over at once, for 28 years past."




A Dr. Benjamin Rush had the bad luck to have a well with horrible-tasting water in his backyard. The whole town flocked to it to cure all kinds of ailments. When the over pumped well went dry, the people learned too late that the well connected to the doctor's privy.



But by 1845, the installation of sanitary sewers began to pay off. With an outlet for waste water, indoor plumbing and working water closets were getting closer to fruition. Unfortunately, bad plumbing and the stench from open sewer connections made some new homes uninhabitable.


Although the sewers provided for runoff water, sewer gas made the home practically unlivable. Although venting was unknown in those early years, there were traps in use since the early 1800s, although they were of little use since the traps constantly lost their water seal.

In 1874, there was a tremendous breakthrough when an unknown plumber solved the problem of venting. He suggested balancing the air pressure in the system with the outside atmospheric pressure to prevent the siphonage or blowout of a water seal in the traps. He installed 1/2" pipe at the traps and extended the pipe outside. It worked for a little while, but then the vent clogged and the stench returned. Through trail and error, the plumbers learned to increase the size of the pipe.

Boring Business: Early settlers knew nothing of lead or iron pipe - they knew only to build with wood, the country's bounty.


Wooden pipe laid below ground created several problems, however, especially in larger settlements or towns. Uneven ground below the joists would cause sags in the log where water would stagnate, infest with insects, and generally leave a woody taste.


They would set up a gravity water system, starting from a spring or stream on high ground, allowing water to flow downhill to the house or farm. It would cut a path to the back of the house, through the barn, and flow into a catch basin.


The line supplying water to Boston's wharves and other buildings ran from Jamaica Pond to the Faneuil Hall area, the meeting place for the Massachusetts rebels who held their Boston Tea Party in the nearby harbor on Dec.16, 1773. Just recently a section of a wooden water main was removed from that same vicinity. The log measured 22 feet long, the bore a 4" I.D. for the lower half of the tree, and 2 1/2" in the upper. Common with early wood pipe, the tree's natural forks branched out in wyes and tees.

In 1795, the Jamaica Pond Aqueduct Corp. followed through with 15 miles more of 3" and 5" wooden water pipe of bored logs, again using hemlock trees for construction. Since open wells provided easy access to contamination from nearby privies, the new supply of fresh water contributed to a lower death rate.

Crude by almost anyone's standards, these new pipelines were nonetheless invaluable to firefighters. They would punch a hole into the wooden pipe along the edge of the street, insert a smaller pipe, pre-sized to fit the newly-bored hole, and harness the hose of their fire wagon, a two-man pumper. The fire out, they would plug up the hole again with a pre cut conical stopper on the end of a long pole, insert it into the hole, and bang it shut. This was the " fireplug, " the wooden pole left sticking out of the ground marking the plug, ready to be pulled out for the next chimney fire.


Waterworks Come Of Age: In 1804, Philadelphia earned the distinction as the first city in the world to adopt cast iron pipe for its water mains. It was also the first city in America to build large-scale waterworks as it drew upon the ample supply of the Schuylkill River. A friendly neighbor, Philadelphia sold its cast-off wooden pipe to Burlington, N.J., where it remained in use until 1887, when larger mains were required.

Those were the days when the science of medicine in its infancy, and misguided notions of causes of disease ruled the day. Philadelphia was motivated to clean up its city and draw upon a new supply of water in the mistaken belief that yellow fever was caused by the city's polluted wells rather than the bite of the mosquito. Yellow fever hit Philadelphia in 1793 with an impact like the Great Plagues of London.

Efficient waterworks depends on pumps. Prior to steam power in the 1800s, water wheels harnessed river flow to raise the water. On the frontier and on farms, windmills and simple hydraulic pumps provided the most efficient means of pumping water for the entire farmyard. A storage tank large enough to hold two or three days' supply of water would be mounted on the upper floor of the barn, water then piped to individual locations.

By the latter 1800s, windmills would still be, in full force, their new and better workings keeping the farmers son from the lure of the big city. Who could resist this 1893 sale pitch from Aermotor Co.?

"Many a farmer's boy has been content to remain home through the great assistance rendered him by the Geared Aermotor. This tireless worker not only pumps water, but turns the grindstone, saws the wood, shells corn, churns and a dozen other things that are most disagreeable to the boy, and that would tend to discourage him and make him discontented."

But metropolitan cities require more than windmills or simple hydraulic pumps to generate a water supply for an entire population, especially for those in the throes of the Industrial Revolution. The population of Chicago, for example, soared from 350 people in 1835 to over 60,000 by mid century. In 1869, the city unveiled a new engineering feat that made newspaper headlines around the world.

The Chicago Water Tower supplied the city with water via a twin-tunnel system which extended two miles out into Lake Michigan. Offshore, the clear take water entered an underwater shaft leading to the tunnel below the lake bed, the intake shaft protected by a wooden crib.

The first tunnel, completed in 1869, contained a massive three-foot-wide, 138-foot-tall standpipe that equalized pressure in the mains throughout the city's water system. The building was miraculously spared in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and still stands as a monument to the city's past.

Coal-fired, steam-driven engines drew water from the tunnel beneath the lake. They provided 15 million gallons per day into the city's water mains. When the pumping station was modernized in 1906 and new engines installed, the standpipe was removed. The station today contains six powerful engines which pump 72.5 million gallons on an average day.



Waste and garbage thrown onto the streets created abominable conditions, though people were merely following centuries-old customs. They were compounded by privy stations set against buildings whose "cleanup" presented even more problems. As early as 1700, concerned officials passed an ordinance prohibiting scavengers from dumping "tubs of filth" in the streets.


This distaste for water probably harkened back to the medieval notion that water caused the chills, ague and all sorts of ailments. The more likely reason was that the privy and the local well were too close together and spawned cholera and typhoid instead of good taste and purity.


New York's first real system of water supply consisted of a reservoir fed from wells and ponds, and distribution from wood piping. It was a crude operation and operative only a short time. It took another 50 years before New York constructed a truly viable public waterworks system. In this plan, well water was pumped to an above-ground reservoir and distributed via water mains of cast iron. The main carried the water to fire hydrants along the narrow streets. But five years later, the system broke down in the chaos of the great New York fire of 1835, which destroyed 530 buildings. The water supply could not cope with the demand of the firefighters.

OLD FASHIONED TOILETS - click here to look at todays great flushing old fashioned toilet


A Copper lined closet, with oak high tank and seat.


The pieces to the puzzle of good plumbing had finally come together --- proper venting, waterworks and sewers brought the closet indoors to stay. American potters duplicated the successes of their English predecessors, and then some. Finally, the mass production line brought down the cost of production of fixtures, fittings and valves, making them affordable and available from the rich on down. With the final correlation between disease and waterborne bacteria, the impetus to plumbing was complete.

The Closet Evolves: The development of the water closet in the United States parallels the experience of England where the modern closet was invented. But until the development of a one-piece toilet with no metal parts, the closet would continue to be a source a contamination and a health hazard.


Next came the pan closet, consisting of an upper earthenware basin and a shallow copper pan containing 3-5" of water as a seal at its base. It could be tipped to discharge the contents into a lower, large, cast-iron receptacle connected to the drainage system. The metal pan operated on hinges, activated by a lever.




John Randall Mann, an American, developed a siphonic closet in 1870. Three pipes delivered water into the basin: one fed the flushing rim around the basin's edge, one discharged about a half gallon rapidly into the basin and started the siphonic action, and the third provided the after-flush.



Ten years later, Robert Frame and Charles Neff of Newport, R.I., produced the prototype of America's siphonic wash-down closet, although it sometimes failed to develop the necessary action and the contents overflowed. Another decade passed before a redesigned bowl by Fred Adee would spur the production of the siphonic closet in America.

In the early 19th century, U.S. production of the closet was inferior to the English, and most closets were imported. By 1873, 43 British firms, including Twyford, Doulton and Shanks were exporting high-quality closets to the U.S.


It was tough to convince fellow Americans to buy American products, however, so Maddock carefully stamped each closet with a lion and a unicorn, and the following inscription: "Best Stafford Earthenware made for the American market."


Decorations were confined first to the bowl's interior because the wooden surround precluded any outside design---no one would see it. When the washout and the washdown models were now exposed in their entirety, the water closet became not only a functional product but an artistic one as well. The outside bowl could be embossed or colored for esthetic choice.

Pedestal models proved most popular, highlighted with elaborate patterns and fanciful names. Popular examples were the English Lion and the Dolphin models. The Dolphin curled up into a letter S, the bowl in the shape of a fluted shell. (Carvings of dolphins had separated the seats used by the Roman soldiers in the privy at Timgad, an ancient Roman city in what is now Algeria.) A Dolphin water closet of Edward Johns & Co. won a Golden Award for design at the Great Philadelphia Exhibition in 1876. (The company today, Armitage Shanks, has reproduced the original "Dolphin Suite," complete with mahogany toilet seat, vanity doors and polished brass taps and fittings.)


Without extensive piping and adequate sewer and supply systems, however, the "modern" water closet would have gone the way of Harington's old relics. Early American plumbers, unschooled in the impressive engineering feats of their old Roman forerunners, would have to learn on their own how to build and construct comparable supply and waste systems. The method was still trial-and-error.

Bathrooms Come Of Age: For the well-to-do, an unused bedroom converted into the novel bathroom. The practice probably foreshadowed the trend of present-day "empty-nesters" to make unused bedrooms into fitness and relaxation centers. By the mid-1850s, however, finer new homes were being designed with separate bathrooms.



But the country's first bathtub---with fittings---was commissioned by a Mr. Thompson of Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1842. He envied the invention of Britain's Lord John Russell, and had the same tub duplicated for himself. The tub was encased in mahogany and lined with sheet lead. It measured 7' x 4', and weighed nearly one ton.


Grander bathtubs a century later were encased in panelled or embossed wood. Big, brass fixtures were bold and showy in Victorian splendor. George Vanderbilt's bathroom of 1855 boasted a porcelain tub, and featured exposed pipe for all to see, the fittings reduced to a neat arrangement. Those with money tried to emulate Queen Victoria's bathroom where, it was said, the controls looked like those for a battleship.

The old Saturday night bath in front of the kitchen fire or pot-bellied stove was of tin or copper. Lead "gave way" to cast iron, which in turn was the forerunner of the modern enameled iron tub. Now we can add porcelain enameled iron and steel and acrylic, too.


When Johnny came marching home after the wars, builders could not keep up with the demand for housing. A land shortage in the throes of urban development sparked cubbyhole apartments and smaller homes than before. Tract housing would be one answer; downsizing the bathroom in sacrifice for more space was another tradeoff. Pedestal lavs disappeared as vanities with storage cabinets below topped the trend. Today, the reverse is true - bathrooms are bigger, the fixtures more imposing than ever. And at least two bathrooms are a must in most new houses.

Today, there are tubs for two and oversized tubs with accompanying oversized faucets, and lavs constructed from all materials including marble and precious stone. Where chrome and nickel-plated faucets stood, luxury materials such as gold, malachite, tiger's eye, onyx and polished granite would take their place. In such a setting, King Midas might well turn green with envy.




Stainless steel is also a relative newcomer to the surging market of plumbing materials, perhaps exemplified by the growth of Elkay Mfg. Originally incorporated to manufacture pantry sinks of German silver and polished copper, Elkay added a line of galvanized steel scullery sinks in 1921. By the 1950s, the company was spurring lines of sinks and faucets in stainless steel that would become mainstays of the plumbing industry.


But today's manufacturers are not content to rest on past successes, as research and development produce better pipes, valves, fittings and fixtures. In the 19th century, plumbers used plain or tin-lined lead piping for cold-water service, but they also had a choice of tin-lined, galvanized, enameled or rubber-coated wrought iron piping. Copper tubing was added after World War I, and now plastic under certain conditions.




The idea of sanitary plumbing systems within buildings was an American development that soon spread throughout Europe. Over the next two decades and more, plumbing health codes expanded its coverage to envelope examination, training and licensing.

Trade associations were formed, spearheading plumbing ordinances and laws for regulations and examination. Master plumbers, while they had developed methods of trapping and venting to guard against contamination, had no real knowledge of hydraulic principles. So they installed systems they didn't understand or know how to design. Standards had to be proposed, and lessons in business management learned.



An outbreak of amoebic dysentery in Chicago during the 1933 World's Fair was traced to faulty plumbing in two hotels. Tragic results were 98 deaths and 1,409 official cases. One year later, Major Joel Connolly, Chief Inspector of the Chicago Bureau of Sanitary Engineering, spoke these prophetic words:

"One of the lessons to be drawn from the amoebic dysentery outbreak ... is that plumbing demands the very best, painstaking effort that thoroughly qualified, certified plumbers can give in every building, and especially where the systems are complicated and extensive, and where large numbers of people may be affected by contamination of water."

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