Fun Plumbing Facts
- 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)!
- Copper piping (which is one of the main components for the plumbing industry today) is the same raw material that was used by the Egyptians over 3000 years ago.
- There was never any hard evidence to suggest that the infamous Thomas Crapper was the inventor of the traditional toilet as we know it today, it is widely considered he stole the design from Albert Giblin and made a better job out of marketing it than Albert thus stealing the lime light.
- Albert Einstein (the E=MC2 guy) went on record as saying if he had to do it all over again he would have been a plumber
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- Ozzy Osbourne the famous black sabbath singer was originally a plumbers apprentice in Birmingham before getting into the music industry.
- The word plumber dates back as far as the Roman Empire. They were originally called Plumbarius which was eventually turned into the shorter “plumbers” we use today.
- Out of all the water in the world today only 0.036% of it is actually drinkable, the rest is far too salty for us humans to consume.