History of the water cooler

The humble water cooler is a device which dispenses cooled drinking water and it has come a long way since its earliest beginnings. In 1906 Halsey Willard Taylor and Luther Haws invented the first drinking water fountain. Later in 1911, Luther Haws patented the water faucet. The Halsey Taylor Company and Haws Sanitary Drinking Faucet & Co revolutionized the drinking water process. The main motive behind the invention was to provide purified water. Contaminated drinking water caused typhoid fever in Haws’ father who died as a result. Therefore Haws decided to invent something which would provide safer drinking water.

Halsey Willard Taylor was also sanitary inspector for the city of Berkeley and noticed that school children consuming contaminated water were more likely to be in poor health, so this motivated him to develop the drinking water fountain. The drinking faucet was first invented by Haws and the first drinking faucet was installed in Berkeley school department.

The early drinking fountains provided room temperature drinking water. But demand for chilled drinking water soon led to fountains being further developed so that could provide cooler water. At this stage, these water coolers used large blocks of ice in order to cool the water. But this meant they were large, heavy and extremely cumbersome. A typical water cooler unit of the time could only be moved by several people at once.

The purpose of providing cooled water was to reduce the temperature of water thereby killing the micro-organisms that are responsible for polluting water, but still those early water coolers did not have a specific water treatment method to purify them.

Water coolers evolved further as the years went on, becoming smaller, lighter and more efficient as the technology improved. Water dispenser units soon varied in type, shape and size according to the needs of the market and demand from customers in schools and offices for example.

In more recent years, health and safety became the main priority and the driver for the design and manufacture of watercoolers. Modern water coolers were developed with an inbuilt purifying system, and some included a reverse osmosis system that removes chlorine and disinfects the microbes.

Water coolers are no longer expensive and are easily available. Most schools, offices, and hospitals have now installed water coolers. Coolers are available in sizes ranging from table units for domestic use to large size purifiers for industrial use.

Today there are two main types of water cooler; bottled and bottleless. The bottleless water cooler is connected directly to water supply pipeline and has a filtering process which purifies the water. The major advantage here is that you don’t need to maintain the heavy bottles.

The bottled water coolers are those which get water from outside sources: large bottles of water usually delivered to the customer. These are sometimes called ‘portable water coolers’. Some of these bottled water coolers have built-in filtration system which can be attached to the main water supply pipes. One of the main advantages of bottled water coolers is that it requires less space when compared to the bottle-less system.

They have come a long way from their modest beginnings. Where they go from here is anyone’s guess but water coolers are so commonplace now, part of the furniture quite literally in many cases. It’s hard to imagine what it was like before there were any water coolers around. They remain one of the most important inventions of the last century and have contributed much to the health and wellbeing of the population at large.