Fred A Thomas Patent 1914 – (Sanitary) Horse Drinking Fountain

(photo source - The National Humane Review – April 1917)
original copyright expired

With a lot of Victorian charity for humane treatment of animals, came a lot of buying and installing drinking fountains for horses in the cities of late nineteenth and early twentieth century America. With this came a new hazard, the spread of disease among animals drinking in these fountains. 

A lot of these stone horse troughs were built by monument makers for cemeteries or granite workers and their businesses – some of these same businesses such as John M. Gessler’s Sons of Philadelphia.

“Glanders is a contagious and fatal disease of horses, donkeys, and mules, and is caused by infection from certain bacterium.”

Once the problem was identified, fountains were closed for a couple summers until a new sanitary method of delivering water came into being, with the flow of street pressured water from the bottom up into individual cups for the horses to drink and the overflow traveling out over the ever filling cup reservoirs going back down drains by gravity.

https://www.google.com/patents/US1111507?dq=horse+drinking+fountain+with+individual+cups&hl=en&sa=X&ei=yvpiU56jOsmwyQGduID4AQ&ved=0CDcQ6AEwAA

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