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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.
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The world’s most famous plumbers are probably video game superstars Mario and Luigi, of Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers series.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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A low flush toilet can save you up to 18,000 gallons of water per year.
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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.
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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)!
