Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [9]
How did the ancients carry their water around? Well, they probably weren’t as obsessed with portable hydration as we are today, scarcely able to leave the house without a cylinder of water, and they weren’t commuting long distances to work, school, or play. Pottery had been invented in 6000 BCE, but water could have been stored long before in pitch-lined baskets, hollowed-out trees, gourds, large shells, or vessels of woven grass. The Vikings held liquid in buckets made of driftwood, their staves held tight with baleen. Other cultures transported water in bags made of leather, or the stomachs and bladders of animals. I once watched a federal trapper carefully remove the bladder of a coyote he’d just shot. It was filled with urine, which he wanted to use in trapping, and he asked me to hold the softball-size organ while he reloaded his gun. I pinched the top of the thing closed and held it some distance from my leg. Within minutes, the thin, whitish tissue had hardened in the dry Utah air; I could have set the bladder down in a depression without spilling a drop.
As cities grew, it became important to collect more water faster. Engineers raised surface and groundwater using water-wheels and steam engines. As it went in the Old World, so it went in the New. Boston built the first colonial water supply in 1652: it consisted of a twelve-foot-square reservoir, gravity-fed from nearby springs and wells. The first pumped-water supply in America was completed in 1755 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. According to Gerard Koeppel’s Water for Gotham, the ingenious system featured “an undershot wooden waterwheel, iron crankshaft, and three water-powered forcing pumps. The system sucked spring water through a lead and wood pipe to a water tower 320 feet away and ninety feet high, then distributed it by gravity to four cisterns.” New York City was far behind: it would take nearly two hundred years of disease, destructive fires, and bad politics—starting when the Dutch landed in Manhattan—for the city to boast of a reliable source of clean water: the suburbs.
While New World cities built public supplies, rich folks in the Old World pursued private water. Since ancient times, mineral water—which contains dissolved substances such as salts, sulfur compounds, calcium, or magnesium—had been considered therapeutic. With the imprimatur of royal or noble patronage, mineral springs or pools were transformed, in late-eighteenth-century Europe, into fashionable destinations where visitors complaining of everything from kidney stones to constipation would “take the waters.” Sometimes the mineral water was consumed, in which case the destination was called a well; sometimes the mineral water was bathed in, in which case the destination was called a bath. If the visitors did both—drank and bathed—it was called a spa; the word is derived from the Belgian town of Spa, which has offered hot thermal baths since the fourteenth century. It was a short step from offering guests water in situ to sending them home with water in a ceramic or glass container (glass bottles have been around for a long time: the Syrians invented them in 100 BCE).
By the mid-nineteenth century, railways were bringing the middle classes to spas, and technology had advanced to the point where containers could be manufactured and filled by machine. Evian, San Pellegrino, Vittel, Vöslauer, Borsec, and Spa had become brand names: bottled water, at least in the Old World, was now thoroughly commercialized.
And soon, regulated. By this point, it was no longer possible simply to slap a label on a