4 ms·

Plumbing - fresh water piped directly to me, available on demand, and dirty water shipped away. Relatively simple technology and more useful than any other tech

• solardev 3y ago
  Can't understate how nice this is, lol. We all take it for granted, but it's such an amazing invention. When I was a kid we didn't have potable water all the time (we had to boil everything that came from the faucet) and it would frequently go out (we'd fill up bathtubs just in case). More recently, as a young adult I did some trailwork in the woods for a few months. We ran a long length of hose along a river and just used gravity to provide running water and piped it through a slow filtration system. Got maybe a gallon or two a minute, enough to do dishes and wash hands and slowly fill up water bottles, but that's it. No showers or laundry. It would frequently clog and we'd have to go and figure out why, in the rain or smoke or dead of night. The filtration also wasn't perfect and the entire crew got cryptosporadium and was out for a good week, keeled over in pain one after the other. Potable running water has probably saved more lives than anything else...