Sprinkling Some History

Welcome to Becoming Sage! My name is Elan Baumgarten. This is the history of a multi-purpose instrument. It has applications in everything from farming to childhood summer fun to keeping people safe. This is the history of the sprinkler. Sprinklers are a form of irrigation that spits water out of a head that’s connected to a pipe or hose. Plants need a reliable source of water to grow. The agricultural revolution, a time when humans shifted from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to that of a species that creates geographically planted civilizations. The biggest factor that allowed for this change is the ability to grow food and create a surplus of staple crops. This excess in food prompted people to stay put so they could store their food. This boom in food production is because of the invention of irrigation, the artificial watering of a piece of land in the aim to boost plant growth. Irrigation is first known to have been practiced in the Jordan Valley. Archeological evidence placed irrigation systems at about 6000 BCE in the Jordan Valley, but it is believed that the Egyptians practiced it at a similar time. The Romans were also famous for their irrigation techniques, perhaps more similar to the modern sprinkler than the practices of the Ancient Egyptians and peoples in the Jordan Valley. The Roman aqueducts are well-known for their ability to carry spring water throughout the city. In-fact, many of the fountains found across the city of Rome are potable and come from a large aqueduct that carries spring water throughout the city.The Natives of North America were also using irrigation techniques, completely independent of the people in the Eastern Hemisphere. Around the year 1200 B.C.E. they used canals to carry water across deserts. Now onto something that will be a bit more recognizable as a sprinkler. The Skinner System. The Skinner System was invented by Charles Skinner, an Ohian Farmer who patented his sprinkler system in 1894. Only a decade later Lewen Russel Nelson started the Nelson and Morrison Manufacturing Company. Their very first patent was for a coupling device that was attached to the end of a hose. A metal fabricator by the name of Ralph H. Pierce filed for a patent in the year 1931. His design was that of a rubber gasket. It increased the seal on portable pipes. Robert Daughery, founded Valley Manufacturing, now Valmont Industries, in 1954. He was a pioneer of the center-pivot industry - which are those long pipes that span entire fields when you drive through the countryside. They help maximize water efficiency. This invention was the very first in the industry of mechanized irrigation. Despite this - he was not the inventor. The intellectual credits belong to a man named Frank Zybach. A member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame for his revolutionary invention - the central pivot system. In 2013 his central-pivot irrigation system was the most used irrigation system in the United States, 33 years after his death. The rights to his device were acquired by Daughery, in 1954. Zybach went through a few different iterations when he was making the central-pivot irrigation system. He started making his device after seeing another farmer going through his field watering his crops. People used to tow a pipe with sprinklers behind a tractor. In 1947, Zybach created the first iteration. It was a pipe, split up into two sections, on top of skids. That slight tangent was the history of the farming sprinkler, and it has pretty much stayed exactly the same since. There are other kinds of sprinklers though, like fire sprinklers. It was 1812 and Sir William Corgreve installed the very first sprinkler system into the Theatre Royal. This system was a pipe, and then a slightly smaller pipe. The smaller pipe had perforated pieces that sprinkled water when it ran through. Perforated pipes were the first step in what we would today consider a fire-safety sprinkler. A sprinkler with the goal of dowsing fires with water to put them out. John Carey, an Englishman, applied for the first patent of this kind of system. This was in 1806, but his design didn’t work. Three years later in 1809 William Corgreve patented an improved system that actually worked. His design used fusible links and an external control valve. There were still some major shortcomings of this design. Oftentimes it didn’t work properly. Water distribution was uneven or debris built up in the perforation and water just didn’t come out. Firefighters worked for decades to fix the design flaws and it started to look a bit less bleak for sprinklers at the end of the 19th Century. Let’s go over how they changed. These fantastic devices were a massive aid to firefighters who could only spray water on the outside of the building using hoses. As previously mentioned, these pipes were known to rust over, causing issues for water currents trying to get through. Tar was plastered to the inside of the pipes which prevented rusting and melted away with heat when flames engulfed the building. The only issue was that in places where the fires were less strong it wasn’t hot enough to melt the tar so water distribution didn’t work well. There were attempts to shift to a metal bulb at the end of a singular long pipe. This metal bulb had small holes in it, which spread the water far - like when you plug a hose with your thumb. They still had not found a solution to their rusting issue. Eventually, the designs started to get a bit more advanced and the automatic sprinkler started to see the light of day. Frederick Grinnell started working on making the first company dedicated to fire sprinklers in the 1850s. He turned the sprinkler system from a pipe with holes in it into the machine that we know today. Experiments through the 1860s saw the invention of the automatic sprinkler In 1972, they received their first patent from Phillip W. Pratt. His creation had valves and cords that controlled them, It had a spinning head that shot water out. In 1874, Henry S. Parlemee improved on previous iterations with wild success. He created patent after patent, year after year. Eventually, in 1878, Grinnell who had just patented a new sprinkler tube design and Parlemee who had just been working on improving the Parmelee sprinkler joined efforts. They made arrangements for Grinnell to produce the Parmelee sprinkler. These fantastic devices continued their developing improvement into the 20th Century. In the 20s the construction material changed to a solder (Saw-der) composition and a quartzoid bulb instead of metal. In the 1940s is when sprinklers started to be required in buildings other than commercial buildings. Thank you for listening to Becoming Sage. My name is Elan Baumgarten. Make sure to tune in next time to hear the ordinary become truly extraordinary!