History of Water Supply专业给排水外文翻译.doc

History of Water Supply Man’s search for pure water began in prehistoric times. Much of his earliest activity is subject to speculation. Some individuals might have led water where they wanted it through trenches dug in the earth, a hollow log was perhaps used as the first water pipe. Thousands of years must have passed before our more recent ancestors learned to build cities and enjoy the convenience of water pipes to the home and drains for water-carried wastes. Our earliest archeological records of central water supply and wastewater disposal date back about 5000 years, to Nippur of Sumeria. In the ruins of Nippur there is an arched drain with the stones set in full voussoir position, each stone being a wedge tapering downward into place. Water was drawn from wells and cisterns.An extensive system of drainage conveyed the wastes from the palaces and residential districts of the city. The earliest recorded knowledge of water treatment is in the Sanskrit medical lore and Egyptian Wall inscri ptions. Sanskrit writings dating about 2000 B.C. tell how to purify foul water by boiling in copper vessels,exposing to sunlight, filtering through charcoal, and cooling in an earthen vessel. The earliest known apparatus for clarifying liquids was pictureed on Egyptian walls in the fifteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C. The first picture represents the siphoning of either water of settled wine. A second picture shows the use of wick siphons in an Egyptian kitchen. The first engineering report on water supply and treatment was made in A.D. 98 by Sextus Julius Frontinus, water-commissioner of Rome. He produced two books on the water supply of Rome. In these he described a settling reservoir at the head of one of the aqueducts. His writings were first translated into English by the noted hydraulic engineer Clemens Herschel in 1899. In the eight century A.D. an Arabian alchemist,Geber,wrote a rather specialized treatise on distillation that included various stills for water