It may surprise you to learn that flushing toilets are old news.
Believe it or not, toilets, plumbing, and irrigation have been around for centuries. In fact, humans have been managing water on a grand scale for thousands of years. The Romans aqueducts probably just popped into your mind; but as it turns out, we were innovating with water long before those were ever even built.
Thousands of years ago, mankind was considering practical ways to divvy up water for the people.
In what is perhaps one of the earliest records of mankind’s understanding of the value of water management, the ancient Hindu text the Atharva Veda declared it was the king’s duty to build dams that could leverage water for the community. The Atharva Veda is a roughly 10,000-year-old document written sometime between 10,000 and 8,000 B.C.
Years later, the 4,000-year-old Indus Valley Civilisation, which thrived in the region that is now Pakistan, became the first civilization in the history to create inner-urban water supply and effluent disposal systems. They supplied their water via brick cylindrical wells that ran meters deep, and household sewage flowed into drains that ran alongside the streets.
3300–1300 BCE Indus Valley Civilization
Meanwhile, to the west, on the Mediterranean island of Crete (off the coast of Greece), the Minoan Civilization was enjoying flushing toilets, baths, and tiled drains by 1700 BC.
http://www.sewerhistory.org/articles/wh_era/minoan/crete_corrigan.pdf
Photo: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/matpc.23191/
Then of course, there was Rome. It was the first city “defined” by water management structure
Not a hygienic arrangement = social arrangement
First aqueduct the Appia built in 312 BC
Some provided more than 30 million gallons of water daily to empire’s capital
Rome was the first city that managed drinking water as a priced resource
On the other side of the Atlantic, what was perhaps the earliest engineered water pressure system existing in the New World was just recently discovered in 2010 by two Penn State researchers in Mexico. The Mayans first occupied Palenque (Chiapas) sometime around 100 BC and remained until 800 AD. There, the two researchers found the the Piedras Bolas Aqueduct, which, using gravity and a narrowed opening to create pressure, could have moved the water upwards of 20 feet. Unfortunately, the aqueduct is in too bad of shape for the researchers to determine what the Maya used this design for - possibly for a fountain or wastewater disposal.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100504155421.htm
Of course, this leads us to the Incas. We can’t forget about Machu Picchu! Considered one of the wonders of the New World, lying above the Urubamba River in the midst of a mountain forest in Peru, Machu Picchu is a reminder of how much humans can do with so little. In fact, it puts modern engineering to shame. Built in 90 years, the Incas remained at Machu Picchu from 1450 to 1540 A.D. Not only did they move water from a distant spring to their capital, they had a complex drainage sytem.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/wright-inca-engineering.html
http://colleges.ksu.edu.sa/Papers/papers/AcientDRENG.pdf
Despite such ingenuity, somehow the first U.S. settlers still found themselves at square one.
Fast forward to the U.S. First Europeans to live in Manhattan, dutch settlers of New Amsterdam, collected rainwater in cisterns/shallow wells
New Yorkers relied on wells for free drinking water; sanitation, a problem in British cities, was becoming unmanageable
The Collect, one of the best sources of drinking water on Manhattan, became polluted by tanneries/slaughterhouses on banks
Peter Kalm, Swedish botanist visiting NY in 1748, said well water was so bad horses from out of town refused to drink it [pg. 59 Drinking Water]
People began purchasing water from springs outside of towns
24 separate distributers carted water around city