Year: 2011
Type: article
Abstract: The century thereafter saw huge changes take place in our nation -in politics, in social norms, and in every other sphere of life.It also saw huge change in infrastructure engineering and science -and in the delivery of that infrastructure.As we make ourselves 'comfortable' utilising a flush toilet, before we pocket our cellphones, climb into our cars, switch on the radio or a CD, and head through sets of traffic lights, on a tarred road via a multi-level interchange giving access to the freeway to the airport, to catch an aircraft flight that we had booked on the Internet and paid for electronically with a credit card, do we reflect on the technology and the engineering infrastructure that we so much take for granted -but which was not available to our forebears in 1910?My father grew up in a home with a bucket toilet in the uithuisie at the end of the garden -I remember him telling me about the 'night soil' cart.My mother's home had a 'long drop'.Both of these were in urban areas, by the way.Neither family had a bathroom inside the house -my father's family bathed in a tub in the kitchen.I myself spent my earliest years in a house in Green Point, Cape Town, which had a sanitary lane at the back.Whereas the house by then had a flush toilet, when it was built in the 1930s it was served by a bucket toilet system, hence the sanitary lane.Neither of my parents had a telephone in their homes until they were thirty-something.
Source: South African Journal of Science
Author: Kevin Wall
Language: English
Subfield: Civil and Structural Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2106764549