How Does the Water Get into the Faucet?
It is easy for you boys and girls who live in the city to run into the
kitchen or bathroom when you are thirsty and by a simple turn of the
faucet tap secure a glass of cool and refreshing water, but did you
ever stop to think how many men must constantly work and how great
and perfect arrangements must be made before it is possible to supply
a great city with water to drink, to bathe in, and for cooking and
washing?
No one who has never had the experience of being in a town or city
from which the water supply has been cut off, for a day or a number of
days, can realize how necessary water is in our daily lives. We are so
used to having all the water we want at any time that we even complain
when in summer we are asked to drink water which is not iced. Drinking
ice-water is very much of a habit. In tropical countries where there is
no ice, people drink the water just as they find it, and if you were to
go there and drink the waters for a few days, you would soon find that
the water slakes your thirst even when quite warm, so it is not the ice
in the water that quenches your thirst, but the water itself, and the
ice-water is not good for you, as the doctor will tell you, because it
chills the stomach.
Where Does Our Drinking Water Come from?
The best way to find out where the water in the faucet comes from is to
follow it back to its source. Let us see. Here we are in the kitchen
and you have just had a drink of water taken from the faucet above the
sink. The faucet, you will notice, is attached to a small pipe which
is fastened to the wall back of the sink. We look under the sink and
see that the pipe goes through a hole in the floor, so we reason that
the water must come from the cellar. Let us go down cellar and see.
Yes, here is the little pipe that comes down through the floor under
the sink and we follow it along the wall toward the front of the house,
and well, well, there it goes right out through the stone foundation of
the house. So we conclude that the water comes from somewhere outside
of the house, and that the little pipe we have been following is only
a means of getting it from the outside into the house. We now mark the
place in the wall where the pipe goes through and run around to the
front of the house to see where it comes out, but we don’t see it. It
must be buried in the ground, so we get a spade and pick and begin
to dig a hole in the ground, and pretty soon we find the little pipe
pointing straight out toward the street. We keep on digging the dirt
away, and thus open a little trench from the house to the middle of
the street and when we get there after a great deal of digging we find
our little pipe attached to a larger pipe which seems to run along the
ground in the middle of the street; so we are still in the dark as to
where the water comes from, excepting that so far as our own home is
concerned we know that it gets into the house through a little pipe
which is attached to a big pipe in the middle of the street. By this
time we know we have a big job on hand.
[Illustration: HOW A BIG DAM IS BUILT