Halsey Willard Taylor built the first drinking fountain after his father died of typhoid.
In 1906, Halsey Willard Taylor and Luther Haws independently developed early drinking fountain designs for public and workplace use. Taylor's motivation was personal. His father had died of typhoid fever caused by contaminated drinking water, and Taylor dedicated his career to providing safe drinking water in workplaces and public spaces.1 Haws, a sheet metal worker and plumber in Berkeley, California, was disturbed when he saw schoolchildren drinking from a shared tin cup tied to a faucet, and he built a faucet with an upward-arcing stream.2
Before these designs, workers in offices and factories typically shared a common bucket or barrel with a single dipper. The arrangement spread disease easily. By the 1930s and 1940s, electric water coolers with refrigeration became standard fixtures in American offices, positioned in hallways and break areas where workers gathered throughout the day.3
The "water cooler" became a metaphor for informal workplace conversation well before anyone studied the phenomenon. By the mid-twentieth century, "water cooler talk" described the unscheduled exchanges that happened when employees left their desks for a drink. Management researchers later recognized these encounters as an important channel for information flow, informal decision-making, and social bonding within organizations.4
When remote work expanded after 2020, technology companies marketed virtual equivalents of the water cooler, from random video pairing apps to digital "watercooler channels" on messaging platforms. The object designed to prevent typhoid had become the symbol of something no software could fully replicate.