97 Fun Facts About Plumbing

The word plumber comes from the Latin plumbum, which means what?

The first effective pipes in the Roman era were made of lead, and the metal's chemical symbol Pb comes from the same root.

The Cloaca Maxima, ancient Rome's great sewer, still empties into which river?

The Tiber still takes the outfall of the Cloaca Maxima, which began in the sixth century BC as an open channel draining the Forum valley and was only roofed over with a stone vault centuries later.

The Roman hypocaust was an early form of what?

Underfloor central heating is what a hypocaust provided: a furnace sent hot air beneath floors raised on stacks of tiles and up flues inside the walls, so the walls gave off warmth too.

Sir John Harington, who described a flush toilet in 1596, installed one for which royal godmother?

Elizabeth I had her godson's flush toilet installed at Richmond Palace; his 1596 book about it, The Metamorphosis of Ajax, punned on 'a jakes', slang for a privy, and got him banished from court.

Who patented the S-trap, the bend beneath sinks and toilets, in 1775?

Alexander Cumming, a Scottish watchmaker, patented the S-trap in 1775, the key step toward the modern flush toilet; Bramah improved the mechanism three years later.

Joseph Bramah, who patented an improved flush toilet in 1778, is also famous for inventing what?

The hydraulic press, which Joseph Bramah patented in 1795, multiplies force through fluid pressure; he also offered 200 guineas to anyone who could pick his lock, a prize nobody claimed until 1851.

Which Victorian plumber, wrongly credited with inventing the flush toilet, still has his name on manhole covers around London?

Thomas Crapper ran a successful London plumbing firm and held nine patents, none of them for the flush toilet; the legend grew out of Flushed with Pride, a tongue-in-cheek 1969 biography full of puns.

What is the purpose of the U-shaped trap under a sink?

To hold water that blocks sewer gases: the bend stays full after every use, and if that seal evaporates in a rarely used drain, the smell of the sewer comes straight up into the room.

What is a plumbing vent stack on the roof for?

To stop a vacuum forming in the pipes, the vent lets air in behind each rush of draining water; when a vent is blocked, the drains pull air in through the fixtures instead and start to gurgle.

When the float in a toilet cistern rises to its set level, what does the ballcock do?

Shuts off the incoming water: the rising float lifts a lever that closes the fill valve, and when a flush drops the level the float falls and opens it again, so the cistern refills itself.

The banging noise in pipes when a tap is shut off suddenly is known as what?

Water hammer is the shock wave made when moving water is stopped dead; it can be strong enough to rupture pipes, and the hydraulic ram pump puts the same surge to work, lifting water with no outside power.

PEX, the flexible red and blue tubing used in home water lines, is short for what?

PEX stands for cross-linked polyethylene; the cross-linking greatly improves impact strength and resistance to stress cracking compared with ordinary polyethylene.

White plumber's tape wrapped around threaded joints is made of which material?

Thread seal tape is PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene), the fluoropolymer sold under the Teflon name; it lubricates the threads and fills gaps to seal the joint.

Which plumber's tool, with serrated jaws that tighten as it is turned, is still called a Stillson?

The pipe wrench was devised by Daniel Stillson, a mechanic at the Walworth company in Massachusetts; its hard teeth bite into the softer metal of a round pipe, which gives the grip to turn it.

Which drain-clearing tool is also known as a plumber's friend or a plumber's helper?

The plunger works by sealing its rubber cup over the drain, so each push and pull drives the water in the pipe against the clog; lift it far enough to break the seal and the force is lost.

The first Roto-Rooter drain cleaner, built in 1933, was powered by the motor from what?

Samuel Blanc of Des Moines, Iowa built it from a washing machine motor and a steel cable tipped with a blade, after clearing tree roots from the sewer at his son's apartment; his wife Lettie named it the Roto-Rooter.

The 'septic' in septic tank refers to what?

The anaerobic bacteria inside it give the septic tank its name: they rot the solids without oxygen, and 'septic' goes back to a Greek word for putrefying, the same root as antiseptic.

Which Wisconsin bathroom brand made its first bathtub in 1883 by enamelling a cast-iron horse trough?

Kohler was a Wisconsin foundry making farm implements until John Michael Kohler enamelled a cast-iron horse trough in 1883 and sold it as a bathtub; plumbing has been its main business ever since.

The Washlet, the electronic toilet seat with a built-in washing spray found across Japan, is made by which company?

Toto, the Kitakyushu-based sanitaryware maker, launched the Washlet in June 1980, and its 1982 'even bottoms want to be washed' television campaign made it a Japanese household name.

Which bathroom fixture takes its name from an old French word for a pony?

The bidet borrows the French word for a small horse because the user sits astride it as if riding; English had the word for a pony for well over a century before it meant a bathroom fitting.

The 1858 Great Stink, which drove Parliament to act on sewage, was caused by the smell of which river?

The hot summer of 1858 cooked untreated sewage on the Thames's banks until the stench reached the Commons, whose curtains were soaked in chloride of lime.

Which Victorian engineer built the great intercepting sewers that answered the Great Stink of 1858?

Joseph Bazalgette, chief engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works, built a network of intercepting sewers that helped end the capital's cholera epidemics, and laid out the Victoria, Albert and Chelsea Embankments.

Which institution displayed a piece of the 2017 Whitechapel fatberg?

The Museum of London showed an air-dried chunk of the sewer blockage in 2018; inside its sealed case the lump changed colour and hatched flies in front of visitors.

Fatbergs form when fat, oil and grease combine with what flushed item in particular?

Wet wipes, even those sold as flushable, do not break apart in water the way toilet paper does; they snag in the sewer and bind with congealed fat and grease into a rock-like mass.

The Tremont House, which in 1829 became the first hotel with indoor plumbing, stood in which American city?

Boston's Tremont House raised water by steam pump to a tank on its roof, which fed eight ground-floor water closets and the hotel's bathrooms by gravity; every room also came with free soap.

The 2014 water crisis in Flint, Michigan began when the city switched its supply from Lake Huron to what?

A local river, the Flint, replaced treated Detroit water in April 2014; officials added no corrosion inhibitors, so its harsher water corroded the city's ageing pipes and poisoned the tap water.

Hard water, which leaves limescale, is rich in dissolved compounds of which two elements?

Hard water carries dissolved calcium and magnesium salts, which precipitate as limescale when heated; a water softener swaps those ions for sodium using an ion-exchange resin.

The US Energy Policy Act of 1992 capped new toilets at how many gallons per flush?

1.6 gallons a flush became the limit for new toilets from 1994, less than half the 3.5 gallons then typical; the first low-flow models performed poorly, and it took redesigned bowls to make the saving work.

The dual-flush toilet was first put into practical production in the early 1980s by a company in which country?

Australia's Caroma built the first practical two-button cistern, with a full flush of 11 litres and a half flush of 5.5; the idea caught on so widely that new buildings there are often required by law to have one.

John Hammes invented the garbage disposal in 1927 and later founded which company to sell it?

Hammes, an architect in Racine, Wisconsin, founded InSinkErator with his sons in 1938; the company then spent years persuading American cities to lift their bans on putting food waste down the drain.

A sump pump is typically installed where in a house?

The basement's lowest point holds the sump, a pit where seeping groundwater collects until the pump throws it clear of the house; many pumps have a battery backup, because the storms that flood basements also cut the power.

In a medieval castle, the toilet was called a garderobe, a French word that literally means what?

Wardrobe is what garderobe means in French: first a lockable store for clothes and valuables, then a polite name for the castle privy, where, by one account, cloaks were hung so the ammonia would keep moths away.

Rolled toilet tissue was popularised in 1890 by which American firm?

Scott, the Philadelphia paper firm founded by brothers Irvin and Clarence Scott, popularised toilet paper on a roll from 1890, but for years it sold the rolls under dealers' brand names and kept its own name off them.

What traditionally seals the joint between a toilet's base and the floor flange?

A wax ring is squashed between the toilet's outlet and the closet flange to make a seal that is both watertight and gas-tight; the bowl itself is bolted to that flange, not to the floor.

Which Bronx plumber became the first president of the AFL-CIO?

George Meany followed his father into the plumbing trade and its union; as head of the AFL-CIO he had the Teamsters expelled in 1957, after hearings exposed corruption among the union's leaders.

The world's most famous fictional plumber, Mario, made his debut in which 1981 arcade game?

Mario first appeared as Jumpman, a carpenter rescuing Pauline from the ape in Donkey Kong (1981); he became a plumber with Mario Bros. in 1983.

'Joe the Plumber' became a household name after questioning which candidate about tax policy in 2008?

Barack Obama was questioned by Samuel Wurzelbacher about small-business taxes on a street in greater Toledo, Ohio, in October 2008; John McCain then invoked 'Joe the Plumber' again and again in the final debate.

World Toilet Day began with the World Toilet Organization, founded in 2001 in which city-state?

Singapore is where Jack Sim founded the World Toilet Organization on 19 November 2001; in 2013 his country tabled the United Nations resolution that made the date an official World Toilet Day.

The Neolithic village of Skara Brae in Orkney had what built into its 5,000-year-old stone houses?

Internal drains ran from the stone huts into a shared sewer some 5,000 years ago; the village then lay buried under a sand dune until a great storm stripped it bare in 1850.

In the ancient city of Mohenjo-daro, waste water from houses ran into what?

Household waste water at Mohenjo-daro, built around 2500 BC, ran through pipes into covered brick drains along the streets, which were fitted with inspection holes for cleaning.

The drain pipes laid under Pharaoh Sahure's pyramid temple at Abusir about 4,500 years ago were made of which metal?

Copper sheet was beaten into pipes that ran beneath Sahure's temple, carrying away the water used in rituals from stone basins, each of which had a stopper to close its outlet.

Why did Roman officials have the owner's name stamped on water pipes?

To prevent water theft, each pipe named whoever held the water grant, so an unlicensed tap stood out; the water commissioner Frontinus still complained that fraud and illegal outlets were draining the aqueducts.

PVC, the rigid plastic of modern drain pipes, is short for what?

Polyvinyl chloride was too brittle to be of much use until 1926, when BF Goodrich chemist Waldo Semon found that blending it with additives made it workable.

Which pipe material was the usual choice for water lines in American homes from the late 1800s until about 1960?

Galvanized iron, pipe coated in zinc against rust, filled American homes from the late 1800s until about 1960; once the zinc wears away the pipe rusts from the inside and slowly chokes itself with scale.

The flexible coiled cable that a plumber feeds into a blocked pipe is nicknamed after which animal?

A snake, or drain auger, is a coiled wire that the plumber cranks round as it goes in, so that its tip either breaks the clog apart or hooks it to be pulled back out.

Which bacterium, first traced after a 1976 outbreak at a Philadelphia hotel, can grow in shower heads and water heaters?

Legionella pneumophila was identified after the 1976 outbreak at an American Legion convention in Philadelphia; it thrives in warm, stagnant water in shower heads, water heaters and cooling towers.

Which sizing system is used for PVC and threaded steel plumbing lines?

Iron pipe size is the old wrought-iron scale that PVC and steel pipe still follow; tubing such as PEX is measured on a different scale, so the same nominal size means a different width in each.

The White House Plumbers, a covert unit created in 1971 to stop press leaks, became infamous through which scandal?

Watergate grew out of the Plumbers' work: former operatives of the unit went on to the 1972 break-in. Their nickname was a joke about fixing leaks.

Manhole covers over sewer shafts are usually round for which reason, a classic job-interview puzzle?

They cannot fall in: a round lid is the same width in every direction, so it can't drop through its own opening, whereas a square one can slip through diagonally.

A long-running urban legend claims that which animals live in the sewers beneath New York City?

Alligators, the story goes, were bought as baby souvenirs in Florida and flushed away once they grew too big. The city does rescue a few abandoned ones each year.

Which 1960 film broke a Hollywood taboo by becoming the first mainstream American movie to show a flushing toilet?

Psycho shows Marion Crane flushing torn-up notes, a shot that worried the censors: no flushing toilet had yet appeared in mainstream American film or television.

Which US city reversed the flow of its river in 1900 to keep sewage out of its drinking water?

Chicago turned its river around with a canal and locks, so waste drained toward the Mississippi instead of into Lake Michigan, where the city drew its tap water.

American plumbers nicknamed one of their busiest days 'Brown Friday'; it falls the day after which holiday?

Thanksgiving sends grease, rice and potato peelings down kitchen drains in houses full of guests, so calls about clogged pipes and jammed disposals jump the next morning.

The Jacuzzi brothers, whose surname became a word for a whirlpool bath, emigrated to California from which country?

Italy was home to the seven Jacuzzi brothers, who first made aircraft propellers and farm pumps. The bath grew from a 1948 pump built to ease a son's rheumatoid arthritis.

Which effect, named after a French scientist, is wrongly said to make sinks drain opposite ways in each hemisphere?

The Coriolis effect steers hurricanes, but in a sink it is negligibly small: the shape of the bowl and any leftover swirl in the water decide which way it drains.

In Tudor England, a 'gong farmer' was allowed to work only at night doing which unpleasant job?

Emptying cesspits was thought so off-putting that gong farmers could work only after dark, which earned them the name nightmen; the waste had to be carted beyond the town boundary.

The American term 'fire plug' recalls the days when firefighters drilled into water mains made of what?

Wood was the usual material for early water mains: crews dug down, bored a hole to fill their buckets, then sealed it with a plug that the next crew could find and reuse.

Which physician traced an 1854 London cholera outbreak to a contaminated water pump on Broad Street?

John Snow mapped the deaths in Soho and persuaded the parish to take the handle off the pump, yet officials went on rejecting his idea that dirty water, not foul air, spread the disease.

The Bronze Age palace of Knossos, with clay water pipes and stone sewers, stands on which Mediterranean island?

Crete was home to the Minoans, whose capital at Knossos brought in clean water, carried waste away and even had storm channels to cope with heavy rain.

Why do many towns store their drinking water in tall towers rather than in tanks at ground level?

Gravity provides pressure for free: about 30 metres of height is enough to serve most homes, so a full tower keeps taps running even through a power cut.

In 1868 the London painter Benjamin Maughan named his instant gas water heater after which natural feature of Iceland?

Geyser was the name Maughan borrowed from Iceland's gushing hot spring, and it became the everyday word for a water heater in South Africa and South Asia.

In the plumbing trade, which rank comes after apprentice and before master plumber?

Journeyman has nothing to do with travel: the journey is the French journée, a day, because a qualified worker had earned the right to charge for each day's work.

On a kitchen sink, the small 'air gap' fitting stops dirty drain water siphoning back into which appliance?

The dishwasher empties through the air gap on its way to the sink drain, and the open break in the line means a backed-up sink cannot push dirty water over clean plates.

Which rock singer from Birmingham worked as a trainee plumber and in a slaughterhouse before finding fame?

Ozzy Osbourne left school at 15 and went through jobs as a building-site labourer, trainee plumber, apprentice toolmaker and car-horn tuner before Black Sabbath took off.

In plumbing, what name is given to waste water from sinks, showers and laundry but not from toilets?

Greywater carries far fewer germs than toilet waste, so it is easier to treat and can be reused on site for flushing or for watering the garden.

Which gas, produced as waste rots in stagnant drains, is responsible for their rotten-egg smell?

Hydrogen sulfide is more than a bad smell: it deadens the nose quickly, so workers in confined drains can stop noticing it just as the level turns dangerous.

Which American inventor designed a one-handle mixing tap after scalding his hands under a two-handle one in 1937?

Al Moen spent ten years on the idea before a Seattle metal firm agreed in 1947 to produce his one-handle design, and the company that grew from it took his name.

Which comedy act poses as plumbers and floods a mansion in the 1940 short A Plumbing We Will Go?

The Three Stooges turn plumber only to escape a policeman, and their repairs end with water pouring out of every electrical appliance in the house.

In the 1983 arcade game Mario Bros., which twin brother joins Mario as a fellow plumber clearing pests from the pipes?

Luigi began as a simple recolour of Mario so that two people could play at once, and the game's network of giant pipes is the reason the pair were made plumbers at all.

Which city's sewers, described by Victor Hugo in Les Misérables, can be toured at a museum beside the Pont de l'Alma?

Paris has offered sewer tours since the 19th century,when visitors rode through the tunnels on boats and wagons; the museum sits inside the working system.

The 1949 film The Third Man ends with Harry Lime being chased through the sewers of which city?

Vienna's real sewers appear in the chase, though most of the location shots used doubles for Orson Welles and the rest were filmed on sets built at a studio in England.

Ancient Chinese salt makers piped natural gas and brine for miles through pipelines made from which plant?

Bamboo, hollow and easy to joint airtight, carried gas from deep boreholes to the pans where it was burned to boil the brine down into salt.

A dripping old-style tap is usually cured by replacing which small rubber part that presses onto the valve seat?

The washer is screwed down onto the seat every time the tap is closed, so years of squeezing wear it until it no longer seals; the seat itself may then need resurfacing.

A plumber's snake, the flexible coil fed into a blocked drain, is more formally known as a drain what?

An auger is the next step when a plunger fails: the operator turns a crank so the coiled wire tip spins its way into a clog too stubborn to be pushed loose.

What is the name of the small screen screwed onto the tip of a tap to soften the stream and cut splashing?

The aerator draws air into the water and splits it into many tiny streams, so the flow feels just as full while using less water and making less noise.

The relief valve fitted to the top of a storage water heater is there to prevent which rare disaster?

A tank explosion is the danger: if the controls fail and the water overheats, the valve opens and dumps water before the pressure can burst the cylinder.

Residents of old Edinburgh shouted 'Gardyloo!' from upper windows to alert people below to what?

Waste about to be thrown from pails and chamber pots was the danger; the cry mangles the French for 'watch the water', and a 1749 act limited the habit to night hours.

Which journalist's 1917 hoax article gave the bathtub a fake American history that newspapers repeated for decades?

H. L. Mencken invented the tale that Millard Fillmore put the first bathtub in the White House. He confessed more than once, yet kept finding it reprinted as fact.

The French drain is named not for France but for Henry French, a lawyer and farm-drainage writer from which country?

United States Treasury official Henry French popularised the gravel trench in his 1859 book Farm Drainage, building his own drains from ordinary roofing tiles laid with small gaps.

Crystal drain cleaners such as Drano rely mainly on which caustic chemical, better known as lye?

Sodium hydroxide does the dissolving, while aluminium shards in the crystals react with it to give off gas bubbles that stir the lye through the clog.

Henry Parmelee invented an automatic fire sprinkler in 1874 to protect his own New Haven factory, which made what?

Pianos were the business of Parmelee's Mathushek company, whose factory is credited as the first building in America to be fitted with a fire sprinkler system.

After a 1937 gas blast destroyed a school in New London, Texas, what was added to natural gas?

A warning odour, supplied by sulfur compounds called mercaptans, was added within weeks, because untreated natural gas has no scent and the build-up under the school had gone unnoticed.

Tongue-and-groove pliers, a plumber's staple, are widely known by which brand name from Meadville, Pennsylvania?

Channellock became so closely tied to the pliers that their maker, the Champion–DeArment Tool Company, renamed itself after its own product in 1963.

On a plumbing job, what is the paste nicknamed 'pipe dope' used for?

Sealing threaded joints is its job: the paste fills the tiny voids between the threads and also lubricates them, so the parts do not seize when they are taken apart later.

Which TV series' 1983 finale inspired a lasting story that New York's plumbing buckled when viewers flushed afterwards?

M*A*S*H drew 106 million viewers for its final episode, and the story goes that so many New Yorkers waited for the end before using the toilet that the system could not cope.

Defective hotel plumbing let sewage into drinking water during the 1933 World's Fair, causing a deadly outbreak of what?

Amoebic dysentery struck more than a thousand people and killed 98 before a city sanitary engineer traced it to faulty pipework in two hotels.

A jammed garbage disposal can usually be freed by turning its motor shaft from below with which tool?

A hex key slots into the motor shaft underneath the unit so the stuck turntable can be worked free by hand; some higher-end models clear a jam by reversing themselves instead.

Which future US president, as Commerce Secretary in the 1920s, issued model building rules nicknamed after him?

Herbert Hoover told Congress that clashing local codes added 10 to 20 percent to building costs; his committee's report, with a chapter on plumbing, became the Hoover Code.

In Wisconsin, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, a public drinking fountain is commonly called by which name?

Bubbler recalls an early design that shot water an inch straight up; a former Wisconsin resident took the word to Portland, Oregon, home of the Benson Bubblers.

Which small sensor shuts off the gas to an older water heater whenever a pilot flame goes out?

The thermocouple sits in the flame and turns its heat into a tiny voltage that holds the gas valve open, so when the flame dies the valve closes by itself.

The 'sacrificial' anode rod hung inside a storage water heater gives itself up to protect the steel tank from what?

Corrosion eats the rod in place of the steel; once the rod is used up the tank rusts much faster, which is why it should be inspected and replaced in good time.

The first full-scale cast-iron water system, laid in the 17th century, fed the garden fountains of which palace?

Versailles needed some 35 km of the pipe, cast in one-metre lengths with flanged joints, to spread water through gardens whose supply was pumped up from the Seine.

Orangeburg pipe, a mid-century sewer pipe notorious for failing early, was made of pulp fibre bound with what?

Coal tar pitch bound the pulp fibres into a cheap pipe named after its home town in New York State; lacking strength, it has been known to fail in as little as ten years.

Copper plumbing tube comes in wall thicknesses known as K, L, M and DWV; which grade has the thickest wall?

Type K is the heavy-duty grade, thick enough to be buried deep under streets and pavements, while the thinnest, Type DWV, suits only unpressurised drain and vent lines.

What is the name of the decorative plate that hides the hole where a pipe passes through a wall?

Escutcheon comes from the Latin scutum, a shield, and the same word is used for a piece of door furniture.

The deep ceramic Belfast sink differs from the similar London butler's sink by having which built-in feature?

An overflow weir lets a Belfast sink carry excess water away before it spills over the rim, a safeguard the shallower London version was made without.

In Desperate Housewives, which Wisteria Lane newcomer poses as a friendly plumber and falls for Susan Mayer?

Mike Delfino has a hidden motive for renting on the street: he is quietly searching for his missing ex-girlfriend while his romance with Susan begins.