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headache if you were balancing the water jug on your head. The Indus Valley Civilization created the earliest public water supply system only about 4,000 years ago. Water was piped directly into houses – that is, into the houses of Indus Valley Civilization bigwigs. If you were an Indus Valley Civilization civilian, at least you had the town pump. Appreciating innovations that go unnoticed in daily life is something I’m sure older readers of American Consequences can relate to. I’m old myself. Being old gives us a lens into the past and makes us thankful that the past is past. We’ve used outhouses. For younger readers unaccustomed to the privy, bog, dunny, or “house of ease,” imagine a port-a-potty that hasn’t been emptied in years, where the roof leaks, and you sit on a splintery wooden board with a couple of holes cut in it, and the Charmin is a corn cob. My parents were old, too. My father would be 110 if he were alive. His father was born in 1877. My mother’s mother was born in 1887. According to a Department of Energy study, as late as 1920 only 1% of American houses had indoor plumbing and electricity. (Back when being part of “The 1%” really meant something.) There was, maybe, a cold tap from a cistern on the remote farms where my grandparents grew up. You reached these remote farms by way of long roads that were in turn muddy, dusty, and buried in snowdrifts.
But at least they had roads. We complain about our roads all the time – traffic is horrible, potholes are huge. But we don’t stop to think (well, we do stop, but we don’t think) about what an incredible innovation it is to have roads at all. My grandmother used to tell stories about her family’s innocent hayseed hired girl who was shocked by the idea of a bathtub. The hired girl said, “But a ‘lady’ never gets all the way undressed! She pulls up her skirt and washes her legs and pulls down her shirtfront and washes her neck.” I asked my grandmother, “Where’d the hired girl come from?” Grandma said, “Way out in the country.” I said, “I’ve been to the farm. It is way out in the country.” Grandma said, “No, I mean way out in the country past the roads.” And this was in Illinois, not frontier Oklahoma. The Persian Empire under Darius the Great had great roads. (His nickname wasn’t mere flattery.) Roman
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Appreciating innovations that go unnoticed in daily life is something I'm sure older readers of American Consequences can relate to.
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