History of the Toilet

In this engaging episode, we take a surprisingly fun journey through the history of the toilet—from chamber pots and royal inventions to modern low-flush and smart technology. We explore the innovations, myths, and public health milestones that shaped how waste is managed today. Along the way, we connect toilets to sanitation, infrastructure, and water stewardship, highlighting why this often-overlooked invention plays such a critical role in protecting health and the environment.

If you have comments or questions about our podcast, you can reach us through this link. To discuss a project or talk to one of our engineers, call 800-348-9843.

Transcript

00:08

Hello and welcome to Make It Clear, a conversational podcast about all things related to water and wastewater. I'm your host, Angela Bounds, and I'm joined by my co-host, Shawn Rapp. In each episode, we'll tackle a relevant topic with facts and expert opinions and make things clear. 

Angela: Hello and thank you for joining us again. Today, it's just Shawn and I. And we had so much fun

00:38

just talking about the history of wastewater, like the history of it. (Shawn: Yeah.) Right? It was like a history lesson. 

Shawn: Yeah. It was so much fun. 

Angela: It's like we're back in school, sitting there sophomore year, learning all about toilet wars.  

Shawn: Although I'm not sure when I was in school, I was learning about that particularly. (Angela: No.) But it was fun. 

Angela: No, but it definitely had that feel to it. (Shawn: Yes, it did. Yes.) And so we kind of wanted to continue on that vein.  And we wanted to talk about the toilet.

01:09

Shawn: Of all the things in history to talk about.  

Angela: Of all the things in all the history books to talk about. We really wanted to take a step back and talk about the conveyor of waste.  Right? So where'd the toilet come from, dispel any myths. So we had a discussion in the office the other day where people were guessing.  Or not… I shouldn't even say guessing because it wasn't a guess. They thought it was an educated guess. (Shawn: Yeah.) They thought they knew

01:39

where the toilet came from, who invented the toilet, et cetera, et cetera. And even within these walls, they were incorrect.  So Shawn is going to lead us through a history lesson on the toilet.  

Shawn: It's so much fun.  If you remember from, if you listened to the history of wastewater that we did just not too long ago, we talked a lot about where things were previous to the Middle Ages, but

02:06

everything up to the middle ages basically comes to the chamber pot.  That's where this story really starts out is at the chamber pot, the precursor to the toilet.  And I think it's one of those things that just kind of fascinates me because here you have a whole society that is for lack of a better term, glued to this idea of using a big mug. It looks like mug

02:35

with a lid on it. And the one thing you had to do in society was be wary because as you're walking through town, the people in the country didn't have to worry about this so much. But if you're in town, you had to watch out and listen for somebody yelling that they were emptying their chamber pot out the window. And you had to watch out to make sure you didn't get hit by this stuff as it's flying out. 

Angela: Could you even imagine? 

Shawn: It sort of, yeah, it baffles because we can't imagine that today for anything.

03:05

Angela: So I'm actually thinking about, you know, when we go to vintage stores and stuff like that, I'm going to think twice before touching any old pottery.

03:25

Shawn: So this story, we're going to start out in 1596. This is where things sort of take a very interesting start. Enter John Harrington. John Harrington was a poet. He was also the godson of Queen Elizabeth I. And he loved to gossip with the people in the court. But he also liked to tinker. And so you can imagine that building a toilet would be a very interesting side job for somebody or a side project.

03:54

Angela: So he's out in the courtyard talking to people, listening to their complaints, things they don't like, things they like, and he's like, hey, I could maybe help with this.  

Shawn: He was kind of a prankster though. It's really funny. In the days of Queen Elizabeth I, they used to refer to either the garderobes or the chamber pots as a jakes.  And that's A...

04:23

space, J-A-K-E-S. It was kind of a slang term they used for basically what we would refer to as the toilet.  And so he invented this new thing and he called it the Ajax, which was a play on that term, a jakes. (Angela: A jakes, yep.) It was the very first, what they considered true water flush toilet. If you remember back from the discussions we had in… about wastewater history, they actually used to use water to flush away toilets

04:52

even as far back as Mohenjo Daro. But this was the first one that had some kind of a vessel attached to it that would allow water to flush out what was in the bowl.  And the cistern was overhead like you happen to see a lot of pictures from toilets from a long time ago that had like a pull chain with a tank above and so on. So this had the cistern above. It also had a bowl that was sealed with pitch, wax, and resin.

05:22

Kind of interesting, and a manual lever that sent that water from that cistern into the bowl and flushed everything away.  Yep.  And he gave one to Queen Elizabeth, his godmother. He had one in his own house. (Angela: Of course.) But being a new thing, it was kind of a novelty.  And it was really funny because they talk in history books that discuss this about how Harrington wrote this long satirical poem

05:51

about how the toilet worked, which of course was shocking to everybody in the court because, you know, and he compared flushing it to purging the court of bad behavior.  

Angela: Oh my goodness. 

Shawn: Queen Elizabeth actually sort of hated the whole courtier thing. She didn't like the people of the court necessarily. So she laughed. (Angela: Right.) She thought it was hilarious that he was making fun of them. They didn't laugh so much.

06:17

Angela: I'm sure that you didn't, you know, back then… (Shawn: Right.) These are not things that people speak of. 

Shawn: Exactly. (Angela: Yeah.) Exactly. And so his toilet actually was kind of advanced, although it used seven and a half gallons per flush. That's a lot. Even thinking back to the 1980s and 1990s when they started using low flush fixtures and so on, even then they were looking at, you know, like two gallons a flush or so.

06:46

So yeah, this was an awful lot. Plus it didn't have any way of keeping the sewer gases from coming back up the toilet trap. So, imagine… well, yeah. And imagine if you were using one of these as somebody back then and you could smell this, the sewer gases coming back through and you didn't understand chemistry, you didn't understand anything about why things smell or cause smells like that.

07:11

You can imagine that they attributed it to all kinds of things. (Angela: All kinds. Yes.) Demons and imps and... (Angela: Oh, yes.) Yeah. Crazy things. 

Angela: This is before all of that education. (Shawn: Yep.) Yeah. like we talked about in the last podcast. 

Shawn: Yeah. But Harrington and his inventions sort of fade from memory for almost 200 years because it was, it was a novelty. People thought it was interesting, but yeah.

07:38

Angela: Didn't catch on. 

Shawn: Didn't catch on. And of course, there would have not have been any infrastructure for that either. (Angela: Right.) So enter the 1700s, almost 200 years when we come across something new. And these people obviously knew about Harrington and his invention and there had to have been some kind of modicum of acceptance for it in some places because people were still working on the idea. So in 1775, Alexander Cumming,

08:07

who is a Scottish watchmaker and a part-time inventor of things, receives the first patent for a flush toilet design.  And his big contribution to the whole toilet idea was that he invented the S-trap. (Angela: Okay.) So that's how we kept the water from coming, or the odors kept from coming back up the drain and basically offending everybody. (Angela: Okay.) So he is best known for the S-trap. (Angela: Okay.)

08:37

Then in 1778, just a couple of years after that, we get a cabinet maker by the name of Joseph Brahma, who took that idea even further, not necessarily S-trap, but the idea of improving the toilet even further.  And he's the one who came up with the idea of the flap.  Now we have the flap that's in the tank. Their flap was basically in the bottom of the bowl that kept things from coming back up. Oddly enough, it caught on great with the Navy because

09:07

It kept the water from pushing back up through the drainpipe into the toilet. (Angela: Yeah.)  So having that flap there was a very big success for the idea of the toilet.  But even at that, they still did not have all of the infrastructure that we would consider to make having a toilet in your home widely accepted. So there were very few of them. They were just, they were there. It was something that was still a novelty.

09:37

People still used, you know, outhouses and so on as their primary means of relieving themselves.  So not too long after that, the 1800s comes back into focus. And so if you remember from our history of wastewater, we talked about one thing that led to the push of government to actually get moving on the idea of treating wastewater.  Remember the big stink?  

Angela: Oh yeah.

10:05

Shawn: The big stink or the great stink of 1858. So again, just to kind of refresh people's memories, if they didn't listen to that episode, the great stink was, or it came about because the people in London had cesspits that would overflow and then that would flow into the Thames. So you have a bunch of raw wastewater flowing through the Thames. It was a hot summer in 1858 and that caused a lot of

10:35

bad odors coming from the river.  Parliament was not located very far from that river.  And so when it was very hot, they would get fumes from the river that were very unpleasant.  So, interesting reading through some of the history of this. The newspapers reported that the river gave off a smell that was quote unquote, from which all living things were coiled.  

Angela: That would mean it's foul.

11:04

Shawn: Yes.  They drenched the curtains that were in the parliament chambers in a mixture of chloride and lime to keep people from fainting in the chambers.  Sort of absorbed some of the odor, I suppose. (Angela: Wow.)  Historian Peter Ackroyd wrote that the windows of parliament were nailed shut and members fled from the stench.  So you can imagine that this was

11:31

sort of a turning point for the members of parliament to say, this can't go on, we have to do something.

11:39

And so we mentioned this gentleman as well in that episode about wastewater history, Joseph Bazalgette.  And he was tasked with building out the sewers for London. Matter of fact, he actually overbuilt them, which was great because London grew in population, of course. (Angela: Yeah.) So, he's sort of the unsung hero from the whole debacle of...

12:08

The great stink. But because of the sewers that he built, flush toilets have basically became a little more mainstream. It's still something people don't talk about in public or in polite conversation, but they actually became a little more mainstream.  Now we get to the guy that became most famous for being related to the toilet, and that's Thomas Crapper.  Thomas Crapper

12:36

came up with a new company or started a new company that was a sanitary ware company. So basically Thomas Crapper opened sanitary showrooms to show off the product that he was building or producing. And these showrooms had galleries, much like you would see like in the big box stores where they have all the fixtures and so on. He did something very similar. It was very crude at the time, but it was something very similar. And he would show off

13:04

baths, sinks, and most notably toilets. I'm not sure how this worked, but he said you could test them.  I didn't go much further into that.  But apparently it was quite scandalous.  (Angela: I bet.) The whole idea of displaying toilets in public was not looked upon greatly.

Angela: Thhings that you don't speak about. 

Shawn: Yes, but he was quite the marketer.  And so he knew that

13:32

toilets that he had sold were sold into or installed into residences of dukes and duchesses and other members of court and so on. So that was his big selling point was, hey, if it's good enough for royalty, it's good enough for you kind of thing. So he actually, throughout the time that he was making these products or his company was making these products, his name was stamped on them. So it said T. Crapper and Company.

14:00

Now, these were produced in second half of the 1800s. And so they would have still existed in the early part of the 1900s. (Angela: Okay.)  Because not much happened innovation-wise in toilets during that time. But remember he's also in Europe where these are being sold and installed.  And in World War I, oddly enough, there would have been a bunch of them that were still around. So American troops who were stationed in England and in

14:29

in Europe would have seen these and they started referring to the whole idea of going to the crapper. 

Angela: Yep. Yep. That, my friends, is how a name is born.  How a nickname is born. Yes.

Shawn: Yes. Also, interestingly enough, and this can't really be substantiated, but there's a thought that the whole slang term of the John goes back to John Harrington as well. But like I said, that can't really be proven or substantiated. It's just thought that that's where that came from.

14:58

So yes, Thomas Crapper becomes immortal for having his name on toilets and... 

Angela: What a thing to have your name immortalized for. (Shawn: Yes.) We should be thankful though. (Shawn: We should.) We're not going in chamber pots. 

Shawn: No, thank goodness. Things are moving forward. (Angela: Yes.) So the 1800s elapse, we get into the 1900s. And this is where things really start moving a little bit faster. So in the early 1900s, they're replacing...

15:28

the wooden and metal bowls of toilets with porcelain bowls.  Porcelain bowls become a thing, which makes them cleaner. It's non-porous. Probably nicer to sit on.  They also integrate the tank into the toilet. So instead of having the tank above the toilet and having it flow with a pull chain as a release mechanism, all that stuff, the integrated tank becomes a thing in the toilet. American building codes

15:56

come into play. We aren't just building things haphazardly. We now have codes that say how we are supposed to build things. And so after 1900, the codes are insisting on indoor plumbing for any new urban housing. Great advancement. And interestingly enough, the Sears catalog actually sold toilets through the Sears catalog. They were accessible to everybody. It wasn't just people who had access to...

16:25

big department stores or hardware stores, somebody in the country could order a toilet from the Sears catalog and have it delivered to their home. (Angela: Yeah.) So early 20th century American cities made indoor toilets a selling point for new neighborhoods as well, which is kind of interesting. They would run ads that would brag about having running water and sanitary conveniences. So you didn't have to have an outhouse anymore. Yeah. 

Angela: I would have bought into that. 

Shawn: Yeah, me too.  And it could also be argued that…

16:54

you know, we've heard it said that cars being cheap or cheaper and available to the masses sort of caused a major shift from the city to suburbs.  I would actually argue that it might have been more related to the fact that there was indoor plumbing and a toilet that allowed people to do that.  

Angela: Ooo, you're opening yourself up for debate.  

Shawn: I know, which  is fine, but...

17:24

Angela: But there's nobody here to argue with you, so... 

Shawn: I might get email later, I don't know. All right. 

Angela: Is this where I plug that if you would like to email us questions, please do so. We would love to read them on air. 

Shawn: That's right, we would. It would be fun to have people participate that way. All right, so we're in the 1900s. We head up to the 1970s. If you think about it though,

17:53

we had troops coming back from World War II in the 1940s and into the 50s that were driving urbanization and that whole urban lifestyle of the white house, the house with white picket fence and 2.4 kids and the car in the driveway, all that stuff. They brought a lot of this stuff with them as well as part of some of these ideas and pushing to have plumbing and toilets and so on in the houses, which really brought things full circle.

18:24

So the 1970s come around, there was, if you're, many of you probably won't remember, but you probably read it in the history books about the droughts in the 70s. And I remember the droughts in the 70s. But there was a push then to start coming up with ways to use less water for flush. So that's sort of where that started. Australia actually led the way with that, which is kind of interesting. And then in the 1990s, US regulations

18:52

standardized low flush toilets.  So the thing about the low flush toilets, the early iterations were not great at getting rid of what was in the bowl. (Angela: Yes.) So since the 1990s and into the 2000s, there've been a lot of engineering innovations in how the low flush toilets work to make them much more efficient.  

Angela: You can tell the difference. 

Shawn: You can tell the difference.

19:20

You really can. And now they've got the toilets that have the two different flushes depending on what you need to flush. 

Angela: Number one or number two. 

Shawn: Yep. So again, things just keep kind of moving forward. We don't necessarily always notice the innovation, but things are getting better. And then just kind of… interestingly enough, Japan started using smart toilets or started inventing smart toilets.  (Angela: Oh yes.) Yes. And having been to Japan, I can tell you firsthand,

19:51

I like the toilets in Japan.  

Angela: I bet you do.  

Shawn: They have heated seats, bidets. (Angela: Yes.) Music… 

Angela: Yes. I have family members that swear by smart toilets and love them. 

Shawn: Yep. The toilets with music are amazing though. I wish we would do that here.  

Angela: Wait, you sit down and it just starts playing? 

Shawn: No, it doesn't start playing. There's a button.

20:19

The Japanese toilets typically have a control panel that's on the wall next to the toilet. And so you can control the bidet and other things from there. But one of them in a lot of public toilets is a button for music. 

Angela: Does it just have a note on it? 

Shawn: It also says music in both English and typically English and Japanese, but it's got a musical note on it. And if you push that, it starts playing a tune to mask activity. (Angela: sounds.) Yeah.

20:48

Angela: Interesting. 

Shawn: Yeah. So that you don't have to feel embarrassed when you're in a public toilet. 

Angela: So it's loud enough to mask the sound? (Shawn: It is.) Interesting. I wonder if it's playing at... I'm sorry, people, this is where my dad comes out. I was having another conversation today where they were like, and that's your father in you. But I wonder if it plays it at a certain frequency, decibel level. 

Shawn: It certainly a uh certain decibel level, yes, so that it...

21:17

because it plays it loud enough to be able to mask noises. (Angela: Interesting.)  The new innovation in Japanese toilets now is they analyze your urine for health issues.  

Angela: Oh, where they're like, excuse me, sir,  I think you've drank nothing but coffee today.

Shawn:  Something like that. 

Angela: You should probably drink water. (Shawn: Uh-huh. Yep.) The color of the bowl indicates you are dehydrated.

21:46

Oh, that would be funny. We wouldn't need the charts anymore. 

Shawn: No, we wouldn't.  For those of you, we actually have charts in our bathrooms that help you gauge whether or not you need to drink more water. 

Angela: Yes, we have hydration charts, especially in the summer, that show you what could be going on in your body depending on the color of your urine.  

Shawn: I feel like this episode sort of got very specific.

22:12

Oh, heavens.  But looking to the future, there's still a lot that can be done and will be done for toilets. so, you know, looking into that, there's companies that are providing research grant money to come up with new ways to use or provide sanitation in remote areas.  Things like new ways to make composting toilets or incinerating toilets. There's all kinds of things that they're looking into. And then...

22:42

they've come up with ways or looking into new ways to separate solids from liquids that help with nutrient recovery and that kind of thing, which is a really big deal starting, you know, that they're coming… it's now coming into its own nutrient recovery. And it's something that is definitely on the horizon. So toilets seem humble, even funny at times. like to joke about stuff like that, but it has been one of the most important public health inventions

23:12

we've ever known. (Angela: Yeah.) And it plays a huge part in public health. It's certainly underappreciated, I think. But it is essential. 

Angela: It's one of those things we take for granted now. 

Shawn: Yes. It was a part of our infrastructure now that, you know, before hadn't been. 

Angela: It's an assumed. 

Shawn: It's now an assumed thing. At least for us. There are other countries that it's certainly not. And that is something that needs to be fixed, yes. 

Angela: For us. Yeah.

23:41

It's an assumed.  Like most people don't go into a home thinking that they're going to live there and have it not… 

Shawn: Right. Have an outhouse in the back. 

Angela: have a working toilet. Yeah. No, there's no pit in the backyard typically. 

Shawn: Yeah. So that's the history of the toilet. 

Angela: That is the history of the toilet. Thank you so much, Shawn.  The things that we don't know. (Shawn: Right.)  Right? 

Shawn: I learned a lot from doing research for this episode. 

Angela: I've learned a lot

24:10

in the past few historical episodes. I really appreciate it.  Thank you, Shawn, for sharing your knowledge with us and thank you all for listening.  

We want to thank you again for joining us today.  Before you go, don't forget to subscribe where you listen to podcasts so you're notified when new episodes are posted.  Also, you can leave your comments or suggestions through the contact link on our website, www.orenco.com.

24:39

Until next time, have a great day!