| Chapter 1: | Water Supplies |
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Plate 1. Big house roofs.
Source. Author's drawing of a big house roof illustrating the multiple rain catchment surfaces.
house roofs as depicted in plate 1. Thus, the force of gravity enabled it to be piped in the downspouts to where it was to be stored. Unfortunately, the least intrusive location for a sizable storage cistern would have been in the roof space, to which an unassisted flow from the roof would have been impossible. There were several solutions to this problem. The cistern could be mounted below roof level in as inconspicuous a place as possible in the house or externally on a tower, although this might have been visually objectionable. These two methods retained the convenience of a gravity feed. Another possibility adopted in many big houses was to conduct the rainwater to an underground cistern, which, since it was not visible, had the advantage that it could be made large enough to give a considerable storage capacity.1 It was important to collect as much rainwater as possible when it was intermittently available. A serious disadvantage of the underground cistern, however, was that the contents had to be pumped or drawn up in buckets, even to ground level. Often, all that was installed was a lift pump situated in the kitchen, the laundry, or the yard. The pump had to be manually operated every time water was required to fill a bucket or sink.
The earliest pumps were “tree” pumps made from wood and had been in use for hundreds of years. By the nineteenth century, London plumbers, who were expert in casting lead for use as church rainwater