The Brilliance of the U-Bend
Before plumbing took off there weren’t very many options for people to deal with their waste. It was thrown into the street or over fields and generally ended up being very unpleasant for people everywhere. There were some lucky people who had access to large pits, and even people who had people that they paid to carry excrement from their homes to somewhere far away.
Obviously, this wasn’t ideal. Disease was a problem when sewage was spilt in the streets, and the problems of smell aren’t to be underestimated either. As people realised that these were issues that could and should be solved, and the technologies became available that let people take care of them, vast public works were put in place to make plumbing something that was common in most industrialised nations.
Of course, with plumbing came new problems. The sewage was moved off the streets and into vast networks under the cities, but to make the best use of these systems, people had to have direct connections from inside their homes to a series of pipes that were funnelling the waste for an entire city. Although it was healthier, the problem of smells coming out of these pipes and into people’s homes was now a real issue.
Luckily, a solution was available. The S-bend, developed by Alexander Cummings, stopped gasses getting out of the sewer and into a home. The way it worked was by keeping just enough water in a dip in the pipe to seal it up. This meant that the gasses and smells could get up the pipe, but when they got to the water they stopped. Unfortunately, the S-bend had some problems. Sometimes the water would be pulled out by a vacuum formed further down the pipe, meaning the seal wasn’t in place. It could also overflow, or even dry out. Whenever this happened, it was completely ineffective.
It wasn’t until 105 years later that these problems were solved with the invention of the U-bend. The U-bend’s shape, and the way it fitted neatly into the piping system, meant that the drying out and overflow problems were no longer an issue. The problems of plumbing were solved, all by the brilliance of the U-bend.
