Science of Water : Concepts and Applications

Introduction 7
This scream of lost hope and imminent death was heard—but only by the sagebrush, the scorpions,
the rattlesnakes, and the cacti—and by the vultures that were now circling above her parched,
dead remains. The vultures were of no help, of course. They had heard these screams before. They
were indifferent; they had all the water they needed; their food supply wasn’t all that bad either.
This case sheds light on a completely different view of water. Actually, it is a very basic view
that holds: we cannot live without it.
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
An early human, wandering alone from place to place, hunting and gathering to subsist, probably
would have had little diffi culty in obtaining drinking water, because such a person would—and
could—only survive in an area where drinking water was available with little travail.
The search for clean, fresh, and palatable water has been a human priority from the very beginning.
The author takes no risk in stating that when humans fi rst walked the Earth, many of the steps
they took were in the direction of water.
When early humans were alone or in small numbers, fi nding drinking water was a constant
priority, to be sure, but it is diffi cult for us to imagine today just how big a priority fi nding drinking
water became as the number of humans proliferated.
Eventually communities formed, and with their formation came the increasing need to fi nd
clean, fresh, and palatable drinking water, and also to fi nd a means of delivering it from the source
to the point of use.
Archeological digs are replete with the remains of ancient water systems (man’s early attempts
to satisfy that never-ending priority). Those digs (spanning the history of the past 20 or more centuries)
testify to this. For well over 2000 years, piped water supply systems have been in existence.
Whether the pipes were fashioned from logs or clay or carved from stone or other materials is not
the point—the point is they were fashioned to serve a vital purpose, one universal to the community
needs of all humans: to deliver clean, fresh, and palatable water to where it was needed.
These early systems were not arcane. Today, we readily understand their intended purpose. As
we might expect, they could be rather crude, but they were reasonably effective, though they lacked
in two general areas what we take for granted today.
First, of course, they were not pressurized, but instead relied on gravity fl ow, since the means
to pressurize the mains was not known at the time—and even if such pressurized systems were
known, they certainly would not have been used to pressurize water delivered via hollowed-out logs
and clay pipe.
The second general area early civilizations lacked that we do not suffer today (that is, in the
industrialized world) is sanitation. Remember, to know the need for something exists (in this case,
the ability to sanitize, to disinfect water supplies), the nature of the problem must be defi ned. Not
until the mid-1800s (after countless millions of deaths from waterborne disease over the centuries)
did people realize that a direct connection between contaminated drinking water and disease
existed. At that point, sanitation of water supply became an issue.
When the relationship between waterborne diseases and the consumption of drinking water
was established, evolving scientifi c discoveries led the way toward the development of technology
for processing and disinfection. Drinking water standards were developed by health authorities,
scientists, and sanitary engineers.
With the current lofty state of effective technology that we in the United States and the rest of
the developed world enjoy today, we could sit on our laurels, so to speak, and assume that because
of the discoveries developed over time (and at the cost of countless people who died [and still die]
from waterborne-diseases) that all is well with us—that problems related to providing us with clean,
fresh, and palatable drinking water are problems of the past.
Are they really problems of the past? Have we solved all the problems related to ensuring that
our drinking water supply provides us with clean, fresh, and palatable drinking water? Is the water