released August 3, 2017

A stool is one of the earliest forms of seat furniture. It bears many similarities to a chair. It consists of a single seat, for one person, without back or armrests (in early stools), on a base of either three or four legs. A stool is generally distinguished from chairs by their lack of arms and a back. Variants exist with one, two or five legs and these various stools are referred to by some people as "backless chairs". Some modern stools have backs.

A water well is an excavation or structure created in the ground by digging, driving, boring, or drilling to access groundwater in underground aquifers. The well water is drawn by a pump, or using containers, such as buckets, that are raised mechanically or by hand. Wells were first constructed at least eight thousand years ago and historically vary in construction from a simple scoop in the sediment of a dry watercourse to the stepwells of India, the qanats of Iran, and the shadoofs and sakiehs of India. Placing a lining in the well shaft helps create stability and linings of wood or wickerwork date back at least as far as the Iron Age.

The origins of stools are lost in tim] although they are known to be one of the earliest forms of wooden furniture. Percy Macquoid claims that the turned stool was introduced from Byzantium by the Varangian Guard, and thus through Norse culture into Europe, reaching England via the Normans.


Table and stools from Bulgaria

Milking stool
In the medieval period, seating consisted of benches, stools and the very rare examples of throne-like chairs as an indication of status. These stools were of two forms, the boarded or Gothic stool, a short bench with two board-like feet at the ends and also the simple turned stool. Turned stools were the progenitor of both the turned chair and the Windsor chair. The simplest stool was like the Windsor chair: a solid plank seat had three legs set into it with round mortice and tenon joints. These simple stools probably used the green woodworking technique of setting already-dried legs into a still-green seat. As the seat dries and shrinks, the joints are held tight. These legs were originally formed by shaving down from a simple branch or pole, later examples developed turned shapes.

Artefacts of the three-legged stools are extant from the 17th century, as is an illustration of an early turned stool of this period. One of the uses for three-legged stools is for farm workers in milking cows.

Later developments in the 17th century produced the joined stool, using the developing techniques of joinery to produce a larger box-like stool from the minimum of timber, by joining long thin spindles and rails together at right angles.

Wells have been traditionally sunk by hand digging as is the case in rural developing areas. These wells are inexpensive and low-tech as they use mostly manual labour and the structure can be lined with brick or stone as the excavation proceeds. A more modern method called caissoning uses pre-cast reinforced concrete well rings that are lowered into the hole. Driven wells can be created in unconsolidated material with a well hole structure, which consists of a hardened drive point and a screen of perforated pipe, after which a pump is installed to collect the water. Deeper wells can be excavated by hand drilling methods or machine drilling, using a bit in a borehole. Drilled wells are usually cased with a factory-made pipe composed of steel or plastic. Drilled wells can access water at much greater depths than dug wells.

Two broad classes of well are shallow or unconfined wells completed within the uppermost saturated aquifer at that location, and deep or confined wells, sunk through an impermeable stratum into an aquifer beneath. A collector well can be constructed adjacent to a freshwater lake or stream with water percolating through the intervening material. The site of a well can be selected by a hydrogeologist, or groundwater surveyor. Water may be pumped or hand drawn. Impurities from the surface can easily reach shallow sources and contamination of the supply by pathogens or chemical contaminants needs to be avoided. Well water typically contains more minerals in solution than surface water and may require treatment before being potable. Soil salination can occur as the water table falls and the surrounding soil begins to dry out. Another environmental problem is the potential for methane to seep into the water.

Until recent centuries, all artificial wells were pumpless hand-dug wells of varying degrees of sophistication, and they remain a very important source of potable water in some rural developing areas where they are routinely dug and used today. Their indispensability has produced a number of literary references, literal and figurative, to them, including the reference to the incident of Jesus meeting a woman at Jacob's well (John 4:6) in the bible and the "Ding Dong Bell" nursery rhyme about a cat in a well.

Hand-dug wells are excavations with diameters large enough to accommodate one or more people with shovels digging down to below the water table. The excavation is braced horizontally to avoid landslide or erosion endangering the people digging. They can be lined with laid stones or brick; extending this lining upwards above the ground surface to form a wall around the well serves to reduce both contamination and injuries by falling into the well. A more modern method called caissoning uses reinforced concrete or plain concrete pre-cast well rings that are lowered into the hole. A well-digging team digs under a cutting ring and the well column slowly sinks into the aquifer, whilst protecting the team from collapse of the well bore.

Several kingdoms and chiefdoms in Africa had and still have traditions of using stools in the place of chairs as thrones. One of the most famous of them, the Golden Stool of the Asantehene in Ghana, was the cause of one of the most famous events in the history of colonized Africa, the so-called War of the Golden Stool between the British and the Ashanti.