Home showers stayed rare until the nineteen-seventies
A shower rinses a standing body under adjustable spray with a floor drain. Waterfalls and jug pours came first; Greek aqueducts fed communal rooms, then plumbing collapsed with Rome. Mechanical pumps arrived in 1767, yet private home showers only became ordinary after about 1970.
Compared with tub immersion, spray bathing uses water more efficiently, which helps explain its modern hygiene role. Elite Egyptian and Mesopotamian rooms had servants pour water; Greeks pumped lead-pipe systems into shared shower halls at Pergamum, with pottery scenes resembling locker rooms and clothes bars. Roman thermae spread around the Mediterranean into Britain, favoring frequent bathing until post-imperial systems failed. William Feetham of London patented a hand-pumped overhead vessel in 1767, releasing water by chain—but without easy hot supply the wealthy stayed cool on the idea. An anonymous Regency design around 1810 towered over ten feet in bamboo-painted pipes that recycled basin water through a nozzle.
French army barracks adopted modern showers in the 1870s under François Merry Delabost, who had already swapped prisoner tubs for mandatory communal stalls at Rouen’s Bonne Nouvelle prison for economy and hygiene, heating water with a steam engine. Domestic layouts now split stall showers, tub-shower combos with curtains or doors, wet rooms sloping to a drain, and dedicated shower rooms. Athletic sites offer curtained stalls or open wall-and-post spray rooms; pools and beaches demand pre-rinses. Wet-room rules often require residual-current devices because grounded water raises shock risk.
Variants include digital temperature panels, eco flow regulators, electric local heaters, mixer and pumped power units, doorless Roman styles, steam and Vichy spa sprays, and US emergency lab showers that must dump roughly 30–60 gallons per minute for fifteen minutes within ten seconds’ reach. Average American showers run 17.2 gallons over 8.2 minutes at 2.1 gallons per minute—about seventeen percent of indoor residential water, totaling some 1.2 billion gallons yearly—so EPA guidance prefers heads under two gallons per minute. Used spray can feed greywater schemes.
Source: Shower
