by Joe Brooks

Created on: June 05, 2010

The history of plumbing certainly does include clay, cast iron, and copper. The title may be a little misleading, in a strictly linear historical sense, as the progression is not really clay-cast-copper, and many major historical plumbing types are omitted. However, the clay to cast to copper progression can be made to serve if a frequency of usage model is adopted.

Clay came first, with the earliest reported being from around 4,500 years B.C. But copper was not long behind it. The Egyptians had copper pipes as early as 4,000 B.C., though these were not for the commoners, by any means. The use of cast iron for cannon is recorded well before the first usage of cast iron for pipes. You might imagine that someone looking at a cannon, perhaps a faulty casting open on both ends, might have had an "aha" moment and decided that durable iron might out-do fragile clay or perishable wood as a plumbing material. But we do know that in 1455 the first known cast iron plumbing was used in a castle in Germany. So, from a historically correct viewpoint, the history of the usage of these three materials for plumbing would be: clay, closely followed by copper, and after a span of a thousand years or more, cast iron.

From the popularity of pipe material standpoint, the progression would be clay, cast, copper, with a great variety of other materials included. The first pipes were not exactly pipes, as we know them, but more like lined trenches or even half-pipe shapes. The earlier preserved remains tend to be clay mixed with straw, or bored stone. Wood, as in bored out logs, was used, but of course these do not stand the test of time. The Romans had fairly good plumbing, but seemed to exert most of their ingenuity in ways to get water in, by clay, stone, or lead pipes. In fact our English word plumber is from the the Latin word for lead, which is plumbum. Getting water and waste out of the house and town was done by way of trenches, often open, and leading down to the river.

As we humans began to pack more and more into cities, it became obvious that something had to be done about the open sewers. Open ditch sewers in the streets gave us the charming custom of men walking on the street side, when escorting a lady, to avoid the delicate female having her fine garments splashed with the unmentionable contents of the gutter. Systems were developed to get the waste out of the city in covered trenches or tunnels, but the destination was still most likely to be whatever river was nearby.

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