When designing a bathroom or kitchen, our choice of a faucet is perhaps the most important aesthetic decision we’ll make; the tap is the most prominent symbol of the never-ending supply of running water we’ll use throughout our lives. Not to mention we’ll have ample time to appreciate a beautiful and well-made faucet, interacting with it perhaps dozens of times a day.

It’s worth remembering a time when the most aesthetically amazing part of our water supply was not inside our dwellings, but outside of them, as part of the system that brought water there in the first place: Roman aqueducts. These staggeringly complicated feats of engineering once criss-crossed Europe and northern Africa, constructed over a period of 500 years and painstakingly maintained.


As the ancient Romans didn’t exactly have access to water pumps, aqueducts maintained a grade, or slope, at a consistent 1-to-200 ratio over their entire length, so that gravity could bring the water flow into cities at a predictable rate. Periodically-placed sedimentation tanks helped to slow the flow of water and allow impurities to be deposited, so that water that arrived in the cities’ cisterns was relatively clean.

From the cisterns, water flowed into the dozens of public fountains and baths scattered throughout their destination city, where citizens could access the water for free. The extremely wealthy could pay to have water piped directly into their homes, but as you can imagine, having stonemasons and engineers construct your own private aqueduct was not a cheap affair.

So, next time you turn the tap on inside your house and see that glorious H2O flowing out of it–at a temperature of your choosing–remember that in 300 B.C., you would have been one of the luckiest of the lucky!