Until you’re in a country town put on a ‘boil water’ alert, it’s very easy to take tap water for granted. Just turn on a faucet in the house, and a stream of clean, clear water gushes out. The very concept would have amazed any human being until just a few generations ago. Until the 19th century at the earliest, something as simple as a glass of water meant a trudge to the neighbourhood or village well for almost everyone.
Contrary to the fretting of anti-fluoride activists and bottled-water enthusiasts, the water that almost all human beings drank for most of our species’ history was far from pristine. There’s a reason beer was the standard drink during the Middle Ages: boiling the water to make the wort killed off the pathogens otherwise omnipresent in the water supply.
Prehistoric hunter-gatherers could hope to find running stream free of turbidity or animal-borne pathogens, maybe, but as humans congregated into cities, the water most often got even fouler.
Ancient Rome is famed for its relatively advanced plumbing, but drinking water in the city would not meet modern standards. In ancient Rome, “as the city’s population grew, the water of the Tiber became increasingly polluted.” Moreover, many of the city’s inhabitants may have suffered from lead poisoning. “Indeed, the name for lead craftsmen was ‘plumbarii,’ the origin for our word ‘plumbers.’ Lead pipes were in common use both in aqueducts and street connections to houses. There is also clear evidence that Romans ingested large amounts of lead, more than enough to cause lead poisoning and perhaps some of the strange behavior so common among the emperors.” And the behavior was often bizarre indeed.
The Roman engineer Vitruvius promoted earthen rather than lead pipes, noting that white lead used in cosmetics was also dangerous. Unfortunately, he was mostly ignored.
Interestingly, lead pipes may not have been the main cause of lead poisoning in Rome. “The most likely culprit was the Romans’ diet. Sugar was not an ingredient in Rome. Instead cooks would boil down fermented grape juice, reducing it to a thick syrup known as sapa. ... The sapa, unfortunately, was generally produced by boiling the mixture in lead pots or lead-lined copper kettles. Lead would leach into the acidic liquid, resulting in a sweet but poisonous elixir. Studies of sapa suggest that just one teaspoon of the syrup ingested once a day would have caused chronic lead poisoning over time. Modern analysis of lead in exhumed skeletons show much higher lead levels in the aristocrats than slaves, supporting the sapa theory since only the wealthy could afford a diet with sapa.”
Even millennia later water supplies were dangerously contaminated.
In 17th-century New York City, then called New Amsterdam, the earliest wells were “none too attractive. As Dr Benjamin Bullivant described at the time, ‘[there are] many publique wells enclosed & Covered in ye Streetes ... [which are] Nasty & unregarded.’” In the 18th century, the water was still “nasty.” “Peter Kalm, a Swedish botanist visiting New York in 1748, observed ... that the well water was so terrible horses from out of town refused to drink it.”
There was little improvement over the next couple of centuries. In 1832, a devastating cholera, a water-borne disease, outbreak swept New York. Cholera was also a persistent problem in the Antipodean wonder of the Victorian world, ‘Marvellous Melbourne’. Typhoid, also spread by water, was still killing thousands of Americans in the 1920s.
Europe and Britain fared little better.
In the 17th century, the English naturalist Martin Lister warned visitors to Paris that the city’s water caused “looseness, and sometimes dysenteries.” In London, the situation was also lamentable. For water, “the poor relied on the unsanitary and foul-smelling Thames […] the receiving body of the city’s sewers. Terrible cholera outbreaks were quite common but shrugged off as an unpleasant fact of urban living.” London’s water was filthy for the entirety of the pre-industrial age, as well as the early industrial era.
“For the most part, filth flowed out windows, down the streets, and into the same streams, rivers, and lakes where the city’s inhabitants drew their water. As a result, cities stank to high heaven. This state of affairs only became worse as cities grew in population through the Middle Ages. As late as 1854, journalist George Goodwin graphically described London as a ‘cesspool city. The entire excrementation of the Metropolis shall sooner or later be mingled in the stream of the river, there to be rolled backward and forward around the population.’ The Thames grew so polluted in an 1858 episode, dubbed ‘The Great Stink’ by the Times, that the overpowering stench forced Parliament to adjourn until the odors subsided.”
Water was so universally filthy that no one who could afford not to drank it. Drinking water was a sign of poverty. Anyone who could drank wine or beer.
In fact, water was so despised throughout the preindustrial age that drinking it was sometimes considered a punishment. “In the time of Charlemagne, high-ranking military officers were punished for drunkenness by the humiliation of being forced to drink water […] Drinking water – any water – was a sign of desperation, an admission of abject poverty, a last resort.
Imagine, the amazement of our ancestors, at wealthy posers paying a fortune for fancy bottled water.
But by the 1950s, even individual cases of typhoid had become rare. It has been claimed that chlorination of drinking water saved more lives than any other technological advance in the history of public health.”
Readily available, clean drinking water is one of the most unsung success stories of human progress. So unsung, that we can afford the luxury of disdaining tap water.
