Plumbing is important. John William Gardner, a scholar and past president of the Carnegie Corporation said: "The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water."
Managing water and wastes by a system of conduits is not new, nor is it American in origin. The Ancients had canals, aqueducts, running water, public toilets, and hot bath houses, long before Europe was civilized or America was settled by Europeans. Before the Europeans came to North America,the primal inhabitants understood the need to keep water supplies clean, and those dwelling in places where water for agriculture was not plentiful used systems of ditches and canals to manage water for irrigation. But the native peoples weren't fans of centralizing waste disposal facilities. They didn't develop plumbing, as we know it.
The Europeans, when they came here, and really most everybody, up until the late nineteenth century, used privies outside, and chamber pots inside, sometimes with enclosures, seats, and attempts at comfort, privacy, and sanitation. The contents of those chamber pots became important in the South late in the War-Between-the-States, when wagons went 'round the town to collect the "night-soil", for the manufacture of niter to be used in the manufacture of gunpowder. That was a war effort the ladies were allowed to make, though they were thought too gentle to join in the fighting. But mostly, we just always wanted to find a good system to bring clean water in and carry waste away.
Pipes were tree trunks, hollowed out, at one time. That of course worked about as well as you'd think, and lasted about as long. Which is to say, not very well, or very long at all. Well into the early twentieth century, a well with a hand crank was a common source of water, the once-weekly bath was taken in a tub before the fire place, using water carried in buckets. The toilet was outside, or the porcelain or enamelware pot under your bed, if you didn't figure to venture out.
Not that there weren't attempts to beat that system. Jefferson, inventor as well as statesman, developed a system of pots containing wood ash, situated below the seat of a privy, said pots to be carried and emptied by servants. Things weren't always so democratic back in the early days of our democracy. Reinforced concrete pipes came along, along with other forms of manufactured conduit, that made plumbing gradually more common and more practical, as well as more democratic. By the middle of the twentieth century most folks living in town had good indoor plumbing, though many families got along with one bathroom, no matter how large the family grew.
So now we have flush toilets, and plumbers if there's a problem. And we have treatment plants, along with the question of what to do with the product of these operations. Some back-to-nature types are advocating composting toilets, like Jefferson's, sort of, but without the servants. We have for sure got to figure out something. We can't keep running our waste into our lakes, oceans, and rivers. We can't if we want to take healthy fish and clean drinking water back out, anyway.
But we are doing some things about it. We have low-volume flush toilets, that will use less water. We're working to use gray water where we can, and do a better job of managing waste water. We won't be seeing it in the headlines, but we'll work it out. We love our plumbing, and depend on our plumbers, whether of not we want to talk about it out loud.