How could los tres amigos have avoided this predicament? Before I get a chance to write it, I imagine you all standing on your chairs, bending at your hips, clenching your fists, spraying beads of foamy spit onto your glowing computer screen as you shout, "With a modern water distribution system!"
I always find it incredible how much we think alike.
What is more modern than gravity? Electricity. What single invention provides water reliably to entire neighborhoods AND incorporates two opposite things like "the new" and "the old" better than Dairy Queen combines Hot and Cold? I won't even answer this question because it is so obvious. I will just transition abruptly into the middle of a sentence at the end of a 600 word essay that assumes you know the answer...because I ASSUME that you do.
...and that is how Isaac Newton discovered the emerging and lucrative industry of Water Towers.
What I will not assume is that you know how a water tower works. I am not ashamed to admit that I didn't know how they worked before I began a thorough investigation of free online encyclopedias including Wikipedia and HowStuffWorks. It is actually pretty clever and surprisingly straight-forward:
Water towers are tall. That's what makes them towers. What happens if you put water in a BIG tank on top of a tower and then poke a hole in that tank? Well gosh darn it, that water is gonna go down to the ground. The ground from whence it came. But how on earth did it get up there in the first place? Electricity and pumps. For this it helps to see a diagram (from HowStuffWorks.com):
Here: A is the water coming from the water treatment plant, B is the electric pump that pushes water up the water tower or into the municipal water system, D is the water tower, and C is the water outlet towards the sinks and showers of town.
But why would ANYBODY want to put water up in a big tank and waste all that electricity putting it up there? Well the answer is: to SAVE electricity. As you can imagine, there are some times of the day when the demand for water is quite high...these are times when most people shower, water golf courses, use slip'n'slides etc. If electric pumps had to pump all the water during these peaks in demand, they might not be able to keep up, that's why people use water towers. If you give gravity the chance to back up its friend electricity, the two of them are essentially unstoppable.
Except when one of them stops...and the one that stops is typically electricity...as gravity is FAIRLY reliable, in my experience. And this is another case in which it is desirable to have a water tower: power outages. If electricity gets tired - and it sometimes does during windstorms and other times when electricity fails - gravity is there to provide the force to push water down from the water tower through the pipes and onto your slip'n'slide.
When the electricity comes back on, or the demand for water decreases, the pumps that normally provide water to the city, can refill the water tower in preparation for the next windstorm or the next time somebody builds a water park in the middle of the desert. Some of the comments about this water park are pretty funny.
The higher the water tower, the more pressure you get out at the bottom. According to wikipedia...and the universe...every 30 meters of elevation in a water tower can generate a water pressure of 43.5 psi down on the ground where you and I need it. Municipal water supplies typically run at a pressure of 50-100 psi, and household appliances require pressures of 20-30 psi.
In addition to their functional value, water towers are essentially billboards filled with water. Typically they advertise the town in which they are built. Sometimes people paint silly things on them. For example here or here or maybe my favorite here. Other water towers look like spaceships.
Having realized that water towers aren't boring tanks of water in the sky, but active members of their communities, I have become more aware and appreciative of their existence. And that is how Isaac Newton discovered the emerging and lucrative industry of Water Towers.
