In early recorded history, the Egyptians and Arabian’s discussed the use of mineral waters for healing the ill.
In ancient Rome, there were23 springs, which initially supplied water throughout the city, while at the height of the Roman Empire 11 long aqueduct delivered spring water to the city from distances ranging from 16 to 91 km.
The term spa is derived from the town of Spa, now in Belgium, which is about 26 km southwest of Liege, this in turn comes from a Walloon word espa meaning a fountain.
Over time, the word spa came to be used in a generic sense, to mean a mineral spring considered to have health-giving properties or a place or resort with such a spring.
In Babylon, the Assyrian King Sanherib, son of Sargon II, constructed an intake on the Khanis spring systems and one of the first aqueducts to deliver water to the city walls.
The practice of bottling water in the United States began about 1820 when an enterprising preacher named Rev. Dr. Darius Griswold began to bottle the naturally effervescent spring water of Saratoga Springs, New York.
Europeans had travelled to ‘take the waters’ at Saratoga Springs, since even before the American Revolutions.
At first, Dr Darius sparkling water seems to have been used primarily as a cure for upset stomachs. As glass bottles became cheaper and more widely available in the middles 1800s, bottle spring waters came to be more as sources of relatively clean drinking water.
Labeled Saratoga Mineral Water, the product was the first commercially successful bottled water in the United States.
The Romans may have initiated the uses of mineral waters, but the French are traditionally the modern developers and promoters of bottled waters, Evian was exported to the United Stated as early as 1905.
History of spring water
