Public water supplies remain a critical factor in improving the health and well-being of urban populations and are instrumental to reducing illness and mortality rates. Every civilization has had public water supplies, which encompass a wide range of activities including individual consumers gathering water from a nearby lake, river, spring or well, deliveries of water to consumers by a public or private entity, and distribution of water through artificial channels such as aqueducts, canals, or pipelines.
The major reference for the history of American water-works is the four-volume Manual of American Water-works edited by Moses Nelson Baker and published by Engineering News between 1888 and 1897. This invaluable work expanded on earlier work by John James Robertson Croes and contains an enormous amount of information about individual water-works systems that Baker, Croes, and others had collected. The final 1897 volume was nearly 700 pages long and excluded a lot of historical material that had been inclu
Baker provided summaries of water-works systems operating at the end of each decade starting in 1888 , 1890 , and 1891 , with his latest numbers shown in the following table along with the number of systems that have been found in the current study. The number of works proposed but not built are shown in parentheses: