Combined hot and cold water faucets : This canuck invention makes cleanup a wash
Having hot and cold running water flowing through our homes is truly one of the modern world’s great achievements. But in the early days homeowners had to turn on two faucets, one hot and one cold, and struggle to find the right temperature mix in the sink basin. It was a Canadian, Thomas Campbell of Saint John, N.B., who first invented a faucet that mixed both together.
Campbell’s key hurdle was overcoming back pressure that would have slowed the flow to a trickle at best. His solution was to make sure that the discharge spout had a larger capacity than the combined flow from the two water sources.
He received the patent for “Campbell’s Double Basin Cock” (number 10,811) in 1880.
