WHO INVENTED
THE FLUSH TOILET?
G'day folks,
I'm about to answer a question that has no doubt caused you many sleepless nights.
The centrepiece
of today’s modern bathroom, the flush toilet has equal roots in ancient
sanitation practices, Elizabethan politics and Industrial Revolution know-how.
Primitive latrines that utilized a constant stream of water to carry away waste
date back at least 5,000 years, and early toilet systems were used by the
several ancient civilizations, including the Romans and the Mohenjo-Dara and
Harappa of the Indus Valley.
The first
modern flushable toilet was described in 1596 by Sir John Harington, an English
courtier and the godson of Queen Elizabeth I. Harington’s device called for a
2-foot-deep oval bowl waterproofed with pitch, resin and wax and fed by water
from an upstairs cistern. Flushing Harington’s pot required 7.5 gallons of
water—a veritable torrent in the era before indoor plumbing.
Harington noted
that when water was scarce, up to 20 people could use his commode between
flushes. Harington described his device in a satirical pamphlet entitled ‘A New
Discourse on a Stale Subject, called the Metamorphosis of Ajax”—a pun on the
term “a jakes,” which was a popular slang term for toilets. Although Harington
installed a working model for Queen Elizabeth at Richmond Palace, it took
several centuries—and the Industrial Revolution’s improvements in manufacturing
and waste disposal — for the flush toilet to catch on.
In 1775
English inventor Alexander Cumming was granted the first patent for a flush
toilet. His greatest innovation was the S-shaped pipe below the bowl that used
water to create a seal preventing sewer gas from entering through the toilet.
In the late-19th century, a London plumbing impresario named Thomas Crapper
manufactured one of the first widely successful lines of flush toilets. Crapper
did not invent the toilet, but he did develop the ballcock, an improved
tank-filling mechanism still used in toilets today. Crapper’s name would become
synonymous with the devices he sold (although the English word “crap” predates
him by centuries), thanks in part to American servicemen stationed overseas
during World War I. These doughboys, unfamiliar with the relatively new-fangled
invention, referred to the toilets as “crappers”—due to the Crapper brand’s
ubiquity in England and Franc—and brought the term back home with them after
the war.
Clancy's comment: There ya go, folks. Now you can sleep soundly.
I'm ...
A real Aussie 'dunnie', courtesy of Rob and Kris Elliott,
Thornton, Victoria, Australia
interesting.. i like the photograph so much :)
ReplyDelete