Philadelphia's early-1800s wooden water pipes | Hacker News Reader

Philadelphia's early-1800s wooden water pipes

washingtonpost.com

40 pointsbookofjoe20 comments

I lived in central Philly for a while. Being largely nocturnal, I'd often be out walking in the early morning.

So one morning, I saw someone walking toward me, wearing a stethoscope-like device, with a tube hanging down, almost touching the sidewalk. At first, I thought "crazy person, take care".

But then, I saw a "Philadelphia Water Department" logo. Basically, he was listening for leaks. His partner was one block away, and they talked via radio. So they could triangulate.

> A Water Department crew working May 3 on the 900 block of Spruce Street

> sections of 10-foot pine logs

That was disappointing.

That's funny. But it took me a full minute to get it.

Similar to Chicago's clay gas lines from the mid-1800s. Crazy to think that some of that infrastructure is still in place.

Stories about wooden water lines come up pretty regularly. In every instance I've read about, they're not in use; they're just still buried, alongside the iron pipes that replaced them long, long ago. That makes sense to me; they would probably lay new iron pipes along the same route, burying them as they went, and only disconnect the wood pipes after the iron pipes were in place. No sense removing the wood as they went.

And then we have the leadpipes still in use. Better check if your house has new pipes or still using the lead pipes.

https://apps.npr.org/find-lead-pipes-in-your-home/en/#pipe-e...

Is this why Philadelphians call water "wooder"?

I believe the proper spelling is wourder

Spoken like a local!

Wood pipes apparently have some surprising advantages. For one thing, the wood doesn't rot when it's immersed constantly in fresh water. The pipes don't corrode as easily, and the water doesn't freeze as easily either:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piping#History

The Water Works is still standing, right behind the Philadelphia Art Museum. I wouldn't want to drink from the Schuylkill nowadays though.

The Schuylkill provides half of Philadelphia's public water supply (the Delaware provides the other half). You're almost certainly drinking it all the time. Of course it's treated now.

https://www.phila.gov/water/wu/Water%20Quality%20Reports/201...

Agreed. At least you don't want to drink unfiltered Schuylkill water. The Water Works is definitely worth a visit:

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

The bike path along the river goes right past it, and you can ride all the way to Valley Forge almost completely on a bike path free of motorized vehicles. (I am not paid by the city; I just like riding along rivers.)

Newport Rhode island has there too, I think some are occasionally found to still be in use.

This reminds me when I was roaming around Annapolis, MD, I spotted one of the many markers around the historic downtown, about how utility workers stumbled upon clay pipes when they were servicing underground water pipes.

The wooden pipes in Edinburgh were recently removed from George’s Square and are on display on the Middle Meadows Walk (though I don’t think they were included into Forza Horizen 4)

https://outline.com/G2Kkbz

I appreciate the article and the fact that it is certainly an example of "today's 10,000"[0]. I don't appreciate the title making it sound like this is a new discovery that we used to have wooden water infrastructure. There's a nice little museum in the historical Philadelphia Waterworks building behind the art museum, and there is a lot of material about the original piping of the city.

[0] https://www.xkcd.com/1053/

In the "meantime", Chinese had bamboo piping systems centuries earlier, and Babylonian ceramic ones as well...

Nice find though.

Dear WaPo: 1) No, I will not be subscribing to your podcasts in order to find out if they're worth listening to. 2) The odds are still low because ... in case you didn't notice ... there are many excellent non-subscription podcasts (to mention just one: 'BackStory with the American History Guys' ; https://audioboom.com/channels/4987698.rss ) ... and most of them appreciate you sending them what you think they're worth.

Oh ... and welcome to the 21st century.

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