- Albert Einstein was
named an honorary member of the Plumbers and Steamfitters Union
after saying publicly that he would become a plumber if he had
to do it all over again.
- The world’s most famous plumbers are
probably video game superstars Mario and Luigi, of Nintendo’s
Super Mario Brothers series.
- Copper piping, which is the #1 material used
for plumbing work in today’s world, is the same material
that the Egyptians used to lay their own pipe - some 3000 years
ago!
- Archeologists have recovered a portion of a
water plumbing system from the Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt. The
evidence of indoor plumbing in palaces has dating back to 2500
B.C.E.
- Since 1963 (the year CDA was established),
more than 28 billion feet or about 5.3 million miles of copper
plumbing tube has been installed in U.S. buildings. That’s
equivalent to a coil wrapping around the Earth more than 200
times. The current installation rate now exceeds a billion feet
per year.
- In a typical home, more than 9,000 gallons
of water are wasted while running the faucet waiting for hot
water. As much as 15% of your annual water heating costs can
be wasted heating this extra 9,000 gallons.
- Though we all have heard the many slang-words
of which his cognomen is probably responsible for, the truth
is… there is no
hard evidence anywhere that English plumber, Thomas Crapper,
was the inventor of the modern-day amenity that often bears his
less-than-flattering name (it’s believed Crapper may have
bought the patent rights from another man - Albert Giblin - and
marketed the concept as his own).
- If a drip from your faucet fills an eight ounce
glass in 15 minutes, it will waste 180 gallons per month and
2,160 gallons per year.
- A low flush toilet can save you up to 18,000
gallons of water per year.
- In the tomb of a king of the Western Han Dynasty
in China (206 BC to 24 AD), archaeologists discovered a 2,000-year-old “toilet” -
complete with running water, a stone seat and even a comfortable
armrest! The finding: marked the earliest-known water closet,
which is quite like what we are using today, in the entire world.
- The Earth has somewhere in the neighborhood
of 326,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons (326 million trillion
gallons) of water on the planet. Roughly 98% of our water’s
in the oceans of the world, and therefore is unusable for drinking
because of the salt content. That means only around 2% of the
planet’s water is fresh,
but 1.6% of that water is locked up in ice caps and glaciers.
Another 0.36% is found in very deep, underground sources - meaning
only about 0.036% of the planet’s total water supply is
found in lakes and rivers (our main supplies of drinking water)!
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