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Wednesday 10 April 2019

Water

Water is a liquid without taste or odor.

Pure water has a slight blue color that becomes a deeper green as the thickness of the observed sample increases. The blue hue of the water is an intrinsic property and is caused by selective absorption and scattering of white light.

Its chemical formula is H2O, meaning that each of its molecules contains one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms, connected by covalent bonds.


HISTORY OF DRINKING WATER

The Ancient Greeks discovered a distillation process whereby pure water was made by the evaporation of seawater.

In 0AD All the world's villages and towns were established close to a suitable water source such as lakes, rivers or wells. However in the large cities, the local natural water supply did not always suffice and local rivers were becoming polluted. To resolve this canals were built and wells became deeper.

In 1270 Louis IX of France sailed from Cagliari in Sicily to take part in the Eighth Crusade and landed on the African coast in July, a very unfavourable season for landing. Much of the army became sick due to poor drinking water, and on August 25th Louis himself died from a "flux in the stomach".

Beginning in 1619, piped water was supplied to houses in London.

Peter the Great built Russia's first spa in Karelia in 1718 based on the water-purifying qualities of shungite.

Henry Cavendish showed that water was composed of oxygen and hydrogen in 1781.

The Secchi disk, created in 1865 by Pietro Angelo Secchi SJ, is a circular disk used to measure water transparency in oceans and lakes. The disc is mounted on a pole or line, and lowered slowly down in the water. The depth at which the pattern on the disk is no longer visible is taken as a measure of the transparency of the water. This measure is known as the Secchi depth and is related to water turbidity.

Secchi disk YouTube.com

In 1900, the average American used just five gallons (19 litres) of water a day. Only 15 percent of households had flushing toilets, and even fewer had bath tubs. People often had no conception of what it was like to be wet all over. People on farms have to dig wells by hand and carry water to the house. They required 50 gallons (189 litres) of it for one load of laundry.

In 1908 chlorine was used in the United States for the first time to sterilize city water.

The "drink 8 glasses of water a day" is based on a 1945 recommendation that had no medical basis. The current recommendation is "drink when you are thirsty, unless you are outside on a hot day or are elderly- then drink a bit more."

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Fluoridation is the act of adjusting fluoride levels in water, with the goal of reducing tooth decay. In 1945, Grand Rapids, Michigan was the first city in the world to do it. In 1999, the CDC declared that water fluoridation was one of the ten great public health achievements of the 20th century.

By 1990 as a result of the hard work of the United Nations and various aid agencies it was estimated over one billion people have been provided with portable water over the previous decade. Unfortunately, many hundreds of millions especially in Africa still did not have access to safe drinking water.

Between 1900 and 2000, water consumption increased by 600% and, with natural sources of water becoming an increasingly valuable commodity the United Nations was anxious that rivers crossing national boundaries, would soon become a source of conflict.

Some studies suggest that by 2025 more than half the people around the world will not have enough fresh water.


WATER CONSUMPTION

70 percent of the Earth is covered by water. Only about .003 percent of it can be drunk by humans.

There are roughly 326 million cubic miles of water on Earth, according to a study by the U.S. Geological Survey.

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The average American uses 100 gallons (379 litres) of water per day. But according to the United Nations, the bare minimum we need is 13 gallons (49 litres).

Three-fourths of household water is used to flush the toilet and take baths and showers.

New York City is one of four major cities in the United States whose drinking water is pure enough not to require purification by water treatment plants. The city is supplied with drinking water by the protected Catskill Mountains watershed.

Iceland's natural water is so pure it is piped into homes without treatment.

FUN WATER FACTS

Studies show that children who drink a glass of water prior to an exam can improve their results by up to a third.

A buyer on eBay paid $455 for some water left in a plastic cup that Elvis Presley had drunk from at a concert in North Carolina in 1977. Fan Wade Jones, who was 13, saw Presley drink from it and a guard gave it to him as a souvenir. He kept the water in a freezer until 1985, then a sealed vial. Wade sold the water but still has the cup.

The rapper 50 Cent made most of his money not from his music, but from an investment in Vitamin Water - He made ten  times more than he ever made rapping.

The world's purest fresh water can be found on the southern tip of Chile, in a town called Puerto Williams. The water has been found to have only two chemical parts per million, hence making it the world's cleanest.

Water makes different pouring sounds depending on its temperature and 96% of people can tell the difference between hot and cold water by the sound it makes being poured. One reason is that hot water generally has more bubbles, so produces a higher frequency sound.


Water splashes when it hits something because a tiny layer of air trapped between liquid and surface prevents the drop from spreading.

You can make your own water by mixing hydrogen and oxygen in a container and adding a spark.

Water itself does not conduct electricity, but the impurities found in water do.

The "triple point" at which water becomes a solid, liquid, and vapor simultaneously occurs at exactly 273.16 K (0.01 °C; 32.02 °F)

At sea level, water boils at a temperature of 212 degrees Fahrenheit or 100 degrees celsius. However, in a plane at 10,000ft, it boils at around 194f or 90c, due to a change in atmospheric pressure.

65 percent of your body is water.

Sheep prefer to drink running water.

A seagull can drink salt water because it has special glands that filter out the salt.

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A 2021 study showed that Oceans are the largest reservoir of water on Earth (at 1.3 billion km^3) followed by groundwater (at 43.9 million km^3). Glaciers are a distant third at 158,000 km^3.

There is a water reservoir floating in space that is equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in the Earth's oceans.

Source Compton's Encyclopedia

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