Acknowledgments We would first like to thank Lorraine Whitman the executive director of the Salvadori Center for orga nizing a focus group of teachers to read comment on and make suggestions for improving the book Many of their suggestions were extremely valuable and helped us raise the quality and usefulness of the book We also want to thank teachers Jamil Azim Manette Gampel Ken Harris Francis Osei and Bernard Winter for their efforts and constructive crit icism and thank Julia Goldschmidt for compiling notes of the focus group sessions We also appreci ated the support provided for the focus groups by the Institute for Civil Infrastructure Systems ICIS at New York University’s Robert Wagner Graduate School of Public Service funded by NSF Finally we would like to thank our editor Cynthia Sherry for having
Introduction magine that you lived in a place where there were no pipes to carry water to your faucet and your toi let no pipes to carry away your waste no wires to power your appliances and computers and to light your home no wires to carry your telephone conver sations and your Internet messages no roads on which to drive no railroad tracks to guide trains and no bridges to cross rivers Would that be a place where you would want to live We are certain you answered no and rejected the idea of living without infrastructure You certainly see roads every day and you have seen railroad tracks and perhaps telephone and power wires suspended from wooden poles But much of the infrastructure of the city or town or vil lage in which you live is invisible the pipes and wires are usually buried underground or hidden behind walls The power plant that supplies electricity through your wires is often so far away that it might as well be on another world The reservoirs that col lect the water you need are usually hidden in the hills far from where you live The story of infrastructure teaches us about the history of human development from the time we
lived in caves and first set out to establish villages It also shows us the contribution of science mathemat ics and industry to our built environment As you read this book we hope you begin to appreciate the contribution of the invisible infrastructure to the quality of your life We learned a lot and had fun writing it and hope you enjoy reading
Water Water Every where here would be no life without water As we look up to the heavens and particularly toward our nearest neighbors the planets one of our first questions is usually Is there any water there For centuries the lines crisscrossing the surface of Mars that can be seen through a telescope were thought to be canals perhaps constructed by intelligent beings Sadly this turns out not to be true When a space craft landed on Mars recently and sent back signals that water may exist under the surface of the red planet astrophysicists scientists who study the com position of the universe were wildly excited It was the first evidence that life may exist outside of Earth The first clue that other forms of life exist some where in the universe will most likely be the exis tence of water the building block of life What Is Water Although water is a liquid it is a compound of two gases one part oxygen mixed with two parts hydro
