A brief treatment of aqueducts follows. For full treatment, see environmental works.

Although the Romans are considered the greatest aqueduct builders of the ancient world, qanāt systems were in use in ancient Persia, India, Egypt, and other Middle Eastern countries hundreds of years earlier. These systems utilized tunnels tapped into hillsides that brought water for irrigation to the plains below. Somewhat closer in appearance to the classic Roman structure was a limestone aqueduct built by the Assyrians around 691 BC to bring fresh water to the city of Nineveh. Approximately 2,000,000 large blocks were used to make a water channel 30 feet (10 metres) high and 900 feet long across a valley.

The elaborate system that served the capital of the Roman Empire (ancient Rome), however, remains a major engineering achievement. Over a period of 500 years—from 312 BC to AD 226—11 aqueducts were built to bring water to Rome from as far away as 57 miles (92 kilometres). Some of these aqueducts are still in use. Only a portion of Rome's aqueduct system actually crossed over valleys on stone arches (30 mi out of a total of about 260 mi); the rest consisted of underground conduits made mostly of stone and terra cotta pipe but also of wood, leather, lead, and bronze. Water flowed to the city by the force of gravity alone and usually went through a series of distribution tanks within the city. Generally water was not stored, and the excess was used to flush out sewers. Rome's famous fountains were also supplied in this way.

Roman aqueducts were built throughout the empire, and their arches may still be seen in Greece, Italy, France, Spain, North Africa, and Asia Minor. As central authority fell apart in the 4th and 5th centuries, the systems also deteriorated. For most of the Middle Ages aqueducts were not used in western Europe, and people returned to getting their water from wells and local rivers. Modest systems sprang up around monasteries, and, by the 14th century, Bruges, with a large population for the time (40,000), had developed a system utilizing one large collecting cistern from which water was pumped, using a wheel with buckets on a chain, through underground conduits to public sites.

Major advances in public-water systems since the Renaissance have involved the refinement of pumps and of pipe materials. By the late 16th century London had a system that used five waterwheel pumps fastened under the London Bridge to supply the city, and Paris had a similar device at Pont Neuf that was capable of delivering 120 gallons (454 litres) per minute. Both cities were compelled to bring water from greater distances in the next century. A private company built an aqueduct to London from the river Chadwell, some 38 mi distant, that utilized more than 200 small bridges built of timber. A French counterpart combined pumps and aqueducts to bring water from Marly over a ridge and into an aqueduct some 525 ft above the Seine.

One of the major innovations during the 18th and 19th centuries was the introduction of steam pumps (pump) and the improvement of pressurized systems. One benefit of pumping water under pressure was that a system could be built that followed the contours of the land; the earlier free-flowing systems had had to maintain certain gradients over varied terrain. Pressurization also created the need for better pipe material. Wood pipes banded with metal and protected with asphalt coating were patented in the United States in 1855 and could withstand pressures up to 172 pounds per square inch (12 kilograms per square centimetre). Before long, however, wood was replaced first by cast iron and then by steel. For large siphons (conduits that draw water from elevated sources under the pressure of siphoning), reinforced concrete became the preferred construction material early in the 20th century.

Modern aqueducts, although lacking the arched grandeur of those built by the Romans, greatly surpass the earlier ones in length and in the amount of water that they can carry. Aqueduct systems hundreds of miles long have been built to supply growing urban areas and crop-irrigation projects. The water supply of New York City comes from three main aqueduct systems that can deliver from 1,800,000,000 gal of water a day from sources up to 120 mi away. The aqueduct system in the state of California, however, is by far the largest in the world. One major project, which has been under construction since 1960, will eventually bring water from the northern part of the state some 600 mi south to the Mexican border and is designed to yield 4,230,000 acre-feet (one acre-foot equals 325,851 gallons) per year.