Fountain Drinks | Hacker News Reader

Fountain Drinks

99percentinvisible.org

75 pointsjanvdberg29 comments

Finally I get to dispense this random piece of information I researched when I wondered why there were so many water fountains in US buildings but not in european buildings!

The law requires at least 1 fountain per 1000 capacity (usually 1-100), with no more than 50% substituted by bottled water. I wonder how UCF got around this for their stadium.

If you ever wonder why water fountains aren't in bathrooms, I found this gem:

410.2 Prohibited location. Drinking fountains, water coolers and bottled water dispensers shall not be installed in public restrooms.

http://i.imgur.com/WDgxl7H.jpg looks really suspicious -- wonder what country it's located in

This is a really fantastic show, if you're just finding it. Started out as a five-minute slot on NPR, but now often runs 30-40 minutes as a podcast. I just finished listening to the back catalog yesterday, and I heartily recommend it.

(It's crazy how interesting it is to listen to a radio show about design, oftentimes visual design... and not feel like you're missing out on something. A real testament to the sound design, I think.)

While visiting London today, I stopped by the location of the pump from Snow's Cholera map:

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5133626,-0.1366315,3a,75y,...

There's a pub there named after John Snow, but the area seems otherwise unremarkable.

His contributions are discussed in the first episode of How We Got to Now, which is a pretty good documentary available on Netflix:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_We_Got_to_Now

Steven Johnson's book The Ghost Map was about Snow's map and the process that went into creating it. A good read if you have the opportunity.

> but the area seems otherwise unremarkable

You should have continued to look around, you were in soho. There are so many great pubs, restaurants, coffee places within a few streets of the John Snow - it's one of my favourite areas of London to wander around in and try new places.

If you're talking unremarkable in terms of history, I'll defer to your judgement on that because I'm no expert! Certainly it's no modern glass-and-concrete jungle in soho though - the architecture's very interesting, Victorian in places, and I know for sure there's at least plenty of post-war historical sites of interest around those streets.

As someone who grew up in italy, I was always puzzled that the simple "nasone"[0] design is not used more commonly abroad, at least in open areas.

I.e. water goes down instead of up and the sink is level to the ground, so it's easy to fill a bottle or bucket with it. The pipe has a hole on top if you want to drink from it more easily, as by obstructing the bottom the water sprinkles up as in the US drinking fountains. They do not prevent the "kissing" of the pipe though.

I guess it might be related to the availability of water, which Rome and most of Italy have plenty of.

[0] https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasone#/media/File:Nasona_a_vi... [1] https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasone italian, sorry

I've seen several of this kind of fountains in France and Spain, so maybe it spreaded at least in Europa.

Also our beloved nasone was introduced in 1874, while common cups were banned in the US in 1912!

the simple B&W photo of drinking fountains in the Jim Crow South is particularly striking.

I had the same reaction to the South photo.

I often wonder how much of what I see today as "normal" will be perceived as horrible / offensive / wrong in 50 years time.

Gay marriage is an obvious one, (Australian) treatment of refugees, anything else?

Our use of non-renewable energy sources, or just even the use of gasoline/diesel in personal automobiles.

It wasn't that long ago that leaded gasoline was a thing.

Ignorance regarding energy and lead can stem from lack of scientific advance. When there's only a little bit of evidence suggesting lead is neurotoxic, compared to a mountain of it, it seems like less of a threat.

By contrast, there's really no ethical excuse for why anyone in any time period would seek to ban gay marriage or racial integration.

I mean, that's cool. The question I was answering was,

> I often wonder how much of what I see today as "normal" > will be perceived as horrible / offensive / wrong in 50 > years time.

And technologies that are polluting our environment for selfish gains fits!

I'm sure we could dig [0], and find a majority who thought ethnic groups were somehow not actually 100% human and thus, OK to treat as such, and only with scientific evidence, that was overturned - perhaps that was the #1 excuse for abuse of ethnic groups, and I'm talking genocidal proportions.

There are people who now still don't believe being gay isn't anything but a choice someone makes. Which I'm sure you and I know understand as a bat-shit crazy stance.

I mean, you tell me - how long ago was it that the majority around you thought along similar lines when it came to trans-folk? A few months? Do you think scientific evidence is going to help, or hurt these people live much better lives?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untermensch

The other way around is even more interesting to me: what taboos now aren't absolutely necessary? What will be allowed in the future which is virtually unthinkable today? I hope there's a lot more of that than the opposite.

More drugs getting legalized? Incest no longer being taboo? Polygamy?

"Gay marriage is an obvious one, (Australian) treatment of refugees, anything else?"

I'm pretty sure gay marriage will be seen as just as normal and wholesome in 50 years as it is today or even more so. Though there will be fewer gay people if the theory that homosexuality is genetic proves out unless we have a boom in surrogacy.

The German and EU treatment of supposed refugees will be seen as a tragic moment, probably. Australia's current policy will be the one that any rich liberal nations that persist in being rich and liberal in fifty years will have chosen. Look at the UN population projections. It's clear that indiscriminate migration will overwhelm nations with lower than sustainable birth rates. Those that import many millions of people from backwards nations with extra high birth rates will see their founding populations reduced to tiny minorities and their countries newly backwards.

Prohibition is the obvious choice.

> Though there will be fewer gay people if the theory that homosexuality is genetic proves out unless we have a boom in surrogacy.

Or unless homosexuality correlates with some combination of genetic traits carried by heterosexuals --- if that turned out to be the case, then we'd expect gay people to continue to be born from time to time, due purely to the mix-and-match reproduction of heterosexuals, even if no gay person ever had children.

Notice how the white drinking fountain appears to have had a chiller; not so the "colored" one.

Perfect representation of why "separate but equal" was almost never actually the case.

Here in Hamilton Ontario we had a distinct variation on the "hygenic fountain", the Shorty Green (named after a local NHL player 100 years ago).

It was a cup-sized continuously-overflowing cauldron that would flow into a surrounding catch-basin. I assume it was quite inefficient since it was always flowing, and didn't seem hygenic. They were still around when I was a kid in the '80s, and I remember loving how freezing cold and voluminously-flowing the water was.

There's something similar here in Portland - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benson_Bubbler

The first water fountain I've seen anywhere here in Mexico was just installed last year. It's in Chapultepec Park on the walk up to the Castle. The water comes out very cold. Outside that one, even airports and public offices don't have any.

It's quite a contrast to the USA. Bottled water, on the other hand, is very cheap in Mexico compared to El Norte.

So some modern nations have never adopted the water fountain fad. It's too bad -- they're pretty nice.

The greatest water fountain in the US has to be the Lithia Water fountains in Ashland, Oregon.

It's an experience you will never forget!

https://www.google.com/search?q=lithia+water+fountain+ashlan...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithia_water

The city of Saratoga New York has old-style fountains: http://www.saratoga.com/waters-of-saratoga/

Notice in the map of cholera deaths that there is a brewery, but with no deaths. Supposedly this is because the workers were free to drink the product.

A simpler explanation for that is that people with cholera do not go to work. I looked up the event and the Wikipedia article on it [0] made mention of a monastery in addition to the brewery that went untouched by the outbreak. Unfortunately I could not find it on the outbreak map [1], nor do I have access to the source material. This is similar to how children outside of the Broad Street area who attended school near Broad Street were not recorded as having died at the school but instead in their homes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outb...

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Snow-cho...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_D._Cogswell#Philanthropy

Herpes dispensers. That's all I see.

I was going to down-vote you, then I saw the wonderful caption: "A so-called Sanitary Drinking Fountain" with the kid's face right in the mix.

So I'm assuming your comment is circa 1950.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com