So that's what those were called. We had one of those in our house when I was growing up. My mother scared the crap out of me one time when she told me it had to be handled carefully so it wouldn't explode. Needless to say, I stopped hanging out in the kitchen... and maybe that was her goal.
Also, you'd want to make sure you're upstream from any beaver dams. So-called beaver fever is a severe type of diarrhea and can be fatal.
Yes, our house had one too, but the range was long gone when I was a kid, so it just hid, sad and unused, behind the fireplace. It was all torn out when my parents did some major renovations about fifteen years ago. There's probably still lots of them in situ in older houses, but people don't realise they're there.
I'm sure that's the case with the house I grew up in, too. But at the time, it was right out in the open, standing in the corner of the kitchen.
Ours was hidden behind a concrete fireback inside the fireplace, but pre-dated it, originally it was heated by a Ray-Burn wood/coal range, which the farm cottage up from us still had at the time. Looking around online, it seems they're still actually a thing, you can have one installed behind a modern range. Probably a pretty useful backup if you live in the Sticks and are prone to power cuts.
The Minoan civilization had flushing toilets in 1800BC. After them, the Romans also has fair sophisticated indoor plumbing.
My parents had a Baxi back boiler...which was behind the living-room fire...in a house built c.1961. To the OP, have a look at the gardens of Versailles for what you could do with fountains before electricity, or, even earlier, Raglan castle where, around 1663, "Edward, Lord Herbert became famous for building a "water commanding machine" in the Great Tower, which used steam to pump a huge spout of water high into the air from the moat". This machine could "raise to the height of forty feet, by the strength of one man and in the space of one minute of time, four large buckets of water."
