Waterworks engineers across the U.S. have been puzzled by capricious rises and falls in the volume of water used in the early evening. Like clockwork on the hour and the half hour, the demand shoots violently upward—sometimes as much as 30% during a five-minute period. As puzzled as any of his colleagues, Water Commissioner George J. Van Dorp of Toledo, Ohio studied his charts, maps and figures and set out to find the culprit.
In the trade journal Public Works, Van Dorp named the villain: television. The violent fluctuations in water use, says Van Dorp, were caused by televiewers who, "having their...
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