History
Although the term in modern American usage is now associated with sports, traditionally a water boy was a boy employed in traditional farming or industry to provide water for farm workers or machinery. In the cotton plantations, just as the modern manual harvesting or picking, the water carrier is in constant demand. This is documented in the folk song Waterboy "Water boy, where are you hidin'?" which is only the best known of many folk and plantation water-call songs.
Early agricultural machinery also needed a water boy to supply water for cooling. The introduction of steam threshing engines required large amounts of water to produce steam, and steam threshing engine teams would employ water boys to go from farm to farm with the engine team. This probably was behind the name "boy" on Waterloo Boy tractors from 1896, later products of Deere and Company. Waterloo Gasoline engines having recently introduced water pumps to replace the traditional farm water boy.
The railroads also employed water boys.
In India the water boy, pani-wallah or bhisti, was and still is an occupation. The title character in Gunga Din (poem 1892, film 1939) is a water boy.
Read more about this topic: Water Boy
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)