History
Though not very popular in North America, another type of water heater developed in Europe predated the storage model. In London, England, in 1868, a painter named Benjamin Waddy Maughan invented the first instantaneous domestic water heater that didn't use solid fuel. Named the geyser after an Icelandic gushing hot spring, Maughan's invention made cold water at the top flow through wires that were heated by hot gases from a burner at the bottom. Hot water then flowed into a sink or tub. The invention was somewhat dangerous because there was no flue to remove heated gases from the bathroom. A water heater is still sometimes called a geyser in the UK. The terms electric water boiler, electric dispensing pot or electric water urn are also commonly used there.
Maughn's invention influenced the work of a Norwegian mechanical engineer named Edwin Ruud. The first automatic, storage tank-type gas water was invented around 1889 by Ruud after he immigrated to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S. The Ruud Manufacturing Company, still in existence today, made many advancements in tank-type and tankless water heater design and operation.
Read more about this topic: Water Heating
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)