Water is the beginning of everything. Life itself – the first bacteria, fish making the leap to land, seeds growing, the foetus in its mother’s womb. Ca. ⅔ of the human body consists of water, and every individual has to drink about 2 litres a day to stay alive. Water is also necessary for preparing food, personal and public hygiene, fire prevention, agriculture and for many industrial purposes. Ca. ¾ of the earth’s surface is covered in water, but less than 0,01% of this is fresh water that can be utilized by humans. The rest is ocean and ice.
Stable water supply is a prerequisite of all civilization. This may also be said of the treating of soiled water through a sewage system. In Christiania (Oslo) the first drains were laid as early as the beginning of the 17th century. The drains consisted of wooden pipes that were fed from Akerselva. The water had to be carried from either private or public outdoor water pumps. In 1860 the city acquired its first water works with water supplied from Maridalsvannet. It was built with cast iron pipes with a larger diameter and a greater ability to withstand high pressure than the wooden ones. Water could thereby, for the first time, be led in to all houses and up stories in to apartments – which enabled building several stories in height, facilitating the rapid expansion of the city at the end of the 19th century.
The town’s oldest sewage system was uncovered gutters from water pumps and private sewers that were led into open brooks and then on into the fjord. The earliest covered, municipal sewers are from the 1840s and the first purification plants from 1911. The development of the water and sewage systems from ca. 1850 made possible the introduction of modern elements in to the home, such as WC, hot water tanks, central heating, washing machines and showers.