The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast
The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast, where we take a deep dive into geek culture, tech evolution, and the impact of the past on today’s digital world.
The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast
S2E20 - The Royal Flush
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Quick note - sorry about Marc's audio. With recording three people, the mic setup wasn't optimal for Marc and his daughter. We'll do better next time. But Marc's audio isn't the important bits of the episode anyway. Enjoy!
The flushing toilet is the most important machine in your house and the one you think about least. We use one six to eight times a day for our whole lives without a second thought, which, when you flush it through, is a remarkable engineering achievement.
Rome had running-water toilets two thousand years ago, watched the idea swirl down the drain when the empire fell, and didn't pick it back up until the 1590's, when Queen Elizabeth's "saucy godson" Sir John Harington invented the first proper flush toilet. Things start to flow after a Scottish watchmaker invents the S-bend in 1775, a Victorian plumber called Thomas Crapper builds his name into a coincidence too perfect to waste, and the Great Stink of 1858 finally drives Parliament to build the sewers that become the single biggest reason most of us are alive. Then we wash up in Japan, where TOTO treats the toilet as serious technology, and we close on the billions of people who still do not have a safe toilet at all.
Special guest: a twelve-year-old history buff, a genuine Tudor expert, who carries the Harington section of our story.
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I want to start with a number. You will use a toilet today.
Speaker1:You will use one tomorrow.
Speaker0:The average person uses one somewhere between six and eight times a day, every day, for their whole life, and almost none of those times will involve a single conscious thought about the machine you are sitting on. It is one of the most important pieces of technology in human history, and it is the one we think about the least. Today, we fix that.
Speaker1:Okay, Renee, it's no double-entry booking fee,
Speaker0:Right? Oh, right. I get it, yeah.
Speaker1:But it's still important. But today we've got some help. We have a special guest. She's 12, and she knows more about the Teter period than anyone I know, including a couple of adults who teach it for a living. And she is my daughter. That is true. All right. She's here because, it turns out, the history of the flushing toilet runs straight through the court of Queen Elizabeth I, which happens to be her specialist's subject. So when we get there, she'll drive it.
Speaker0:No pressure.
Speaker2:I'm ready. I have been ready since before for you to start doing this podcast.
Speaker1:Okay, so here's where we're going.
Speaker0:We start before the toilet, in the ancient world where some very clever people solved this problem and then humanity mostly forgot about it for a thousand years. It sounds just like us. We land in the Tudor court for the first proper flushing toilet. We follow it through the people who actually made it work, into the sewers that saved millions of lives, and out the other side, into the strangest, most high-tech toilets on earth, which are of course Japanese. And we are honest about what the flush cost us because it costs us more than you would think.
Speaker1:All right, so let's begin where everyone begins, sitting down. So to understand why the flushing toilet matters, you have to understand what it replaced. And for most of human history, the answer is actually not much. For most people, most of the time, the toilet was a hole. I feel a river. But not always.
Speaker0:And this is the part that surprises people. The flushing toilet is not some modern thing the ancient world lacked. The ancient world had it.
Speaker1:And then they lost it. The Minoans had one.
Speaker2:On Crete, on the island of Nossos, around 1700 BC, so nearly 4,000 years ago, there was a toilet with a wooden seat, and water washed the waste away down a drain. It was in the Queen's part of the palace.
Speaker0:And the Romans took that idea and scaled it up enormously. Roman cities had public latrines, you know, long benches with holes in them, with water running constantly in a channel underneath, carrying everything away to the sewers. The great Roman sewer, the Colaca Maxima, is still partly in use in Rome today. Wait, wait, there's a giant bench with holes in it? Or just that aquifer is there? Like, tell me more. What? What?
Speaker1:The sewer itself. Oh, I got you. Not the benches. you can see the benches in Palm but yeah the sewers still the Roman stuff is all used to all of this aqueducts, the plumbing yeah all that stuff so everyone says the toilet was invented in the 1500s, 2000 years later basically 1800 and here's why it's the whole key to the episode here. The Roman system ran on continuous water, so like, continuous flush. There's this stream running under the seats all the time, day and night, carrying waste away. Nobody flushed anything. The water never stopped.
Speaker0:So the flush was not an event, it was just happening.
Speaker1:Yeah, exactly. The water was always on. What nobody had yet was the flush you could pull, so an on-demand flush itself. Stored water was held and was released on demand into your bowl when you want it. That idea itself, the flush is the thing you trigger, is the leak. The Romans had the plumbing. They didn't have the button or the ticket, the handle, whatever. And then it mostly disappears.
Speaker2:When the Roman Empire falls apart in the West, the big public sanitation falls
Speaker1:Apart with it.
Speaker2:By the medieval period in Europe, you are back to chamber pots and cesspits.
Speaker0:Okay, tell me about the medieval toilet, because I honestly, this is your area, not mine. I want to hear about it.
Speaker2:So in a castle, you had a guarda rope. It was basically a stone seat built into the thickness of the wall, sticking out over the side, and everything dropped down the shaft. Either into
Speaker1:The moat or
Speaker2:Into a pit at the bottom. And the guarda rope actually means guarding the road, because people hung their clothes in there. They thought the smell the ammonia kept lost out of the wall.
Speaker1:Wow. Dope.
Speaker0:Oh, it's disgusting.
Speaker1:So the toilet was also the wardrobe. Oh, come on. The toilet was also the wardrobe.
Speaker2:In the towns where there was no shaft and no moat, you had a chamber pot, and you emptied it out of the window into the street. In Edinburgh, they shouted a warning first, Gardeloup. It is from the French Gardeloup. Watch out for the water, except it was not water.
Speaker0:It was never water.
Speaker2:It was never water.
Speaker1:Ha, ha, ha. Okay, so there's a fact about the Romans I want to flag you a quick one, because it's everywhere and it might not be true. People love to say that the Romans cleaned themselves with a shared sponge on a stick, passed down the row of the public latrine, and that sponge thing is called the tersorium. Oh.
Speaker2:And historians actually argue about that one. There are a couple of old Roman writers who mention a sponge on a stick, but nobody actually describes a person using it on themselves. Some historians think it was used for cleaning the toilet like a toilet bath, not the person. And when archaeologists dug up a real Roman sewer at Herculaneum, they found bits of cloth which suggested people wiped with cloth or mopped or even broken pottery.
Speaker1:Broken pottery? Ouch. Ouch!
Speaker0:My gosh, if I don't have the quilted kind, I'm angry. So the famous gross fact is?
Speaker1:Possibly not even true,
Speaker2:Or at least not the way everyone tells it, which is honestly the most interesting thing about it.
Speaker1:Good. We like to say we're an accurate house. Right.
Speaker0:All right. So this is the one we've been waiting for. Actually, I've been waiting for this one. This is going to be fun. The first proper flushing toilet shows up in the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Thank you very much. So take it away. Who invented it?
Speaker2:His name was Sir John Harrington, and he was Queen Elizabeth's godson. She actually called him her saucy godson because he was cheeky and kept getting into trouble. He was a courtier and a writer, and in 1596, he invented a flushing toilet.
Speaker1:All right, so tell us what did he call it.
Speaker2:He called it the Ajax, which is a joke because Ajax was the same word for a toilet back then. And so the Ajax...
Speaker0:He named the first flush toilet after a pun.
Speaker1:He wrote a whole
Speaker2:Book about it in 1596, and the book is also a pun. It is called A New Discourse Upon a Stale Subject, the Metamorphosis of Ajax, a stale subject, because you know. And the book got him in trouble because it had jokes about powerful people hidden inside it. So he got sent away from court for a while.
Speaker1:So how did the Ajax actually work? What made it different from the Roman thing we just talked about? It had a
Speaker2:Tank of water up above a cistern. And you pulled a handle and a valve opened and let the water rush down into the bowl and wash everything away into a pit below. So it is the flush you can pull. The water is stored and you release it when you want it. That was the new breath. The Romans had running water. Harrington had the flush.
Speaker0:And he built one for the queen?
Speaker2:He built the first one at his own house in Somerset.
Speaker1:And then he had one put in for the queen
Speaker2:At Richmond Palace around 1592. So the Queen of England had a flushing toilet.
Speaker1:All right, so here's my question. As Ian invented it in 1590-whatever, and even the Queen had one, why did everyone not get it? Why does the flushing toilet basically vanish again for 200 years or so?
Speaker2:Two reasons. The first is there were no sewers. So the Ajax just flushed into a
Speaker1:Pit underneath the
Speaker2:House, and the pit still had to be emptied by hand. But people called gong farmers, which was a real job and a horrible one, so it did not really save you much.
Speaker1:I mean, the cesspit still kind of worked, I guess. Alright, so give us the second.
Speaker2:The second reason is it smelled. There was nothing stopping the smell from the pet coming straight back up the pipe into the room. Harrington's Toilet did not have the part that fixes that yet. So a lot of people decided it was not worth the bother and kept using their chamber pots.
Speaker0:I, oh, okay. We're going to come back to that missing part because it turns out to be the most important little bend in the history of plumbing. But first, I want to stay in the Tudor court because there's a job here that I cannot believe is real.
Speaker2:The groom of the stool.
Speaker0:The groom of the stool. Explain it, because when my co-host told me about this, I did not believe him. Like, who would want that job? Like, what is that?
Speaker2:Yeah, I wouldn't want that. That's disgusting. Right. So the king had a special toilet called a closed stool. It was like a padded box with a chamber inside. And it was actually really fancy, covered in velvet and gold. All sorts of stuff. There was a person whose whole job was to help the king use it. To be there and to clean up afterwards.
Speaker0:Dude, that was a job.
Speaker2:Yeah, that was a job. And here's the weird part, surprisingly. It was one of the best jobs in the entire court, because you were with the king at his most private moment every single day, and nobody else was allowed in.
Speaker1:So he would talk to you,
Speaker2:He would tell you things, he trusted you. So the Grim of the Stool ended up being one of the most powerful people in the country. Some of them basically ran the king's money.
Speaker1:So the man who loved the king on the toilet was the most popular thing. Oh, wow.
Speaker2:I know. That's so weird.
Speaker0:It's so weird.
Speaker2:And it's because being in the room was the power. Under Henry VIII, one of them, was Sir William Compton, and he was incredibly rich. Another one, Henry Norris, was executed in 1536 when Anne Boleyn fell because he was that close to the royal family.
Speaker0:I mean You know Henry Norris Like that's terrible I can't imagine him Standing there with the pot And the Like saying yes sir Like Yes your highness Like Oh god Okay go ahead Yeah Norris.
Speaker1:Was like A big deal Yes
Speaker0:He was He was a very big deal He just aligned himself With the wrong people But yes Right Okay go ahead So.
Speaker1:Maybe he had You know Been waking up after He wouldn't have gotten You know
Speaker0:There you go Or did a better job of it He might have been more valuable Yeah maybe I don't know Yeah Alright All right.
Speaker1:So there's a local connection here that I kind of like. And we check that carefully because the story people tell here locally is not quite right. There's a moated manor house here where we live called Ida Moat.
Speaker2:It's so gorgeous, and it has a moat the whole way around it.
Speaker1:It's a really cool house. And the man who owned it in the Tudor period, Sir Richard Clement, is sometimes described locally as the king's toilet attendant. So like, if you go there and you go into the Great Hall, you talk to him about it, that's the story, don't tell you. He was the green student. But when we looked into it, that's not exactly true. He was not the green student.
Speaker0:You checked the docent.
Speaker1:Yeah, we did. We checked the docent. He was the groom of the privy chamber, which is kind of the next thing along here.
Speaker2:The privy chamber was the king's private rooms. The grooms of the privy chamber were the people allowed into the king's private space to look after him. So Clement really was one of the king's personal servants, just not the actual stool one. That one was Compton.
Speaker0:And here's a word thing that ties the whole room together. Privy. The privy chamber. Like, why is it called that?
Speaker1:Yeah, so privy just means private. It comes from the Latin for private through an old French word, privé. To be a privy to the sacred means you're in on something private. The privy council is the king's private council. The privy chamber is private rooms, and the toilet, the privy, is the private place. It's all the same word.
Speaker2:So, the privy chamber and the outhouse are literally the same work, and the Tudor court is the one place where both meetings are sitting right next to each other, the king's private rooms and the king's private business looked after by the same small group of people.
Speaker1:That's a perfect piece of history,
Speaker0:Right? The private room, the private place, the same.
Speaker1:Word in the
Speaker0:Same place. You know, that's comforting, I guess.
Speaker1:You know, what was really fascinating to me is that we knew who the guy was that cleaned up anybody's business.
Speaker0:Right? That he's like part of history. Yeah. Yeah, good point.
Speaker1:Not just part of history. The dude was rich, and he got rich because he was doing it.
Speaker2:Yeah, but that's pretty disgusting.
Speaker0:Yeah, you know what, though? Maybe the grossest jobs make the most money. Or at least used to.
Speaker1:What was that TV show like I did? Dirty Jobs. Dirty Jobs, yeah. Dirty Jobs. We fact-check all of this right now. So the Harrington dates, the Grim with a stool, item moat, etymology, because I think one thing that we wanted to make sure on this episode was that we could you know not repeat the gift shop and
Speaker2:It's because we are an accurate household
Speaker1:All right, so let's move on from Harrington's Ajax in 1596 with the two problems. No snoop, no sewer, and the smell coming back at the pipe. The story of the next 300 years is fixing all of those things, and the smell itself gets fixed first by one of the most elegant little inventions you probably don't even think about.
Speaker0:The bend in the pipe.
Speaker1:The bend in the pipe. All right. So in 1775, a Scottish watchmaker, why is it always this guy that's like, you know, they're like watchmaker, you know, they're totally unrelated.
Speaker0:You know why? Because they're sitting there doing a boring job thinking, you know what, that really reeks. I can smell it from here. I wonder how I could fix that.
Speaker1:All right, so this guy, his name's Alexander Covey, and he patented the S-trap. So if you haven't, you don't know what an S-trap is. It's the bend in the pipe below the toilet. And it's not just toilet. It's lots of different sinks.
Speaker0:Sinks, yeah.
Speaker1:It's literally shaped like an sink. It holds a little water in it all the time. The trapped water is the seal. It blocks the gas from the sewer or pit from coming back up at your house while still letting weeds go down. It's just a curve in a pipe holding a couple of water, and it's just things that makes an indoor toilet barrel.
Speaker2:That is why, if you look at the side of the toilet, the pipe curves. That curve is still doing the same drop from 1775.
Speaker1:Every flesh and toilet on Earth still has a version of that. You know, in the old houses we lived in, there was a tub that we didn't use very often. And if the wind blows, the house shifts and stuff, that little bit of water, that seal, it just breaks. And then you're like, wow, why does this bathroom smell so bad?
Speaker0:Oh, I got a good one for you. Is that the one.
Speaker2:That leaked into the kitchen? Yes. Oh.
Speaker0:I have a sink in the laundry room that definitely has a problem with that because when it's windy out, it blows air out of the drain. Oh, no. Yeah. So it's like there's wind coming from that room. You're like, why?
Speaker1:Why is there air
Speaker0:Coming out of this hole? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker1:I don't know.
Speaker0:Still haven't figured it out.
Speaker1:Yeah, the house and shift and stuff, and the water will get jostled around, and then the air will come up, and then all you do is just form them. Three years after the invention of the S-trap here, in 1778, a man called Joseph Brahma improved the valve and the mechanism that started making flush toilets properly, and they slowly caught on with people who could afford them.
Speaker0:And now we have to talk about the most famous name in toilets, because everyone's waiting for it. Say it.
Speaker1:Say it.
Speaker2:Thomas Crapper.
Speaker1:And everyone thinks he invented it.
Speaker0:Yeah, that's mostly wrong. Thomas Crapper was a real person, a real plumber in Victorian London. He was very good at it. He had fancy showrooms. He held some patents. He helped make the flush toilet popular and respectable. But he didn't invent it. That sounds familiar. The toilet existed long before him, and the word crap is older than he is. It's totally a coincidence. You know what, though? it's a very, very good coincidence. Huh?
Speaker2:His name was just Crapper, and he sold toilets. That's it. The universe did that on purpose.
Speaker0:Hey, can I tell you something? I had a dentist named Fang. Kind of the same thing. Dr.
Speaker1:Fang.
Speaker0:She was my dentist. All right, go ahead.
Speaker1:So here's the thing you've had to keep Sarah Craig though. We have the floss, the bed of tights, He was buying toilets, but a toilet or the set is just a fancier way to sell a pit. So when the sewage actually showed up.
Speaker0:With a disaster, because isn't that how it always goes? In the summer of 1858 in London, the River Thames was so full of human sewage that the smell shut the city down. They called it the Great Stink. We talked about this back in Season 2's first episode, the AI thirst trap, when we talked about the industrial uses of water. The great stink was so bad that Parliament, which sits right on the river, soaked its curtains in chemicals. And then they basically gave up and decided they had to fix the river.
Speaker2:They only fixed it because it started to smell bad for the important people.
Speaker1:There's a lesson. There you go. That's exactly what it is. The smell reached far away. They hired an engineer named Joseph Bassett, who built London an enormous network of sewers, over a thousand miles of carried away from the city. And he built them so well that a lot of them are still working today, more than 100. And this is the public health part,
Speaker0:And it's hard to overstate. Before the sewers, cities had cholera, which spread through the water, contaminated with sewage. A few years before the Great Stink, a doctor named John Snow had traced a cholera outbreak in London to a single water pump on Broad Street and proved the disease was in the water, not the air. Put those two things together, the proof that sewage in the water kills you, and the sewers take that sewage away. you get one of the largest jumps in human health in human health in all of history like good like better than the black plague good for y'all right yeah.
Speaker1:Well, I just, you read some of the older, you know, renaissances and medieval manuscripts, and every couple of years, there'd be an outbreak of something, and everybody would leave the city and go out and they'd come back and, you know, see ourselves to stop that. And the signs of this is hard to overstate Clean water and sanitation are reckoned to be among the biggest reasons life expectancy Roughly doubled in the developing world over the last century and a half Vaccines, antibiotics matter enormously too But a huge share of it is simply taking the sewage away from the drinking water Children's bathye have diarrhea and almost some bursts of washing toilet connected to sewer is quietly one of the deadliest diseases and worst enemies.
Speaker2:There was a poll in a medical journal where readers voted sanitation the most important medical advance since 1840, ahead of antibiotics and ahead of anesthetics.
Speaker0:Okay, wait a minute. Can I just put this out there? I don't want anyone doing surgery on me while I'm awake. I would put that in a different... I would put that... I would put that different. I'm going to put that out there. I don't want to be awake for surgery Okay.
Speaker1:Go ahead Yeah, true, but You know No,
Speaker0:Like I'd rather die of diarrhea Than bite on a piece of wood While you took something off of me Like no.
Speaker2:No, no, no It's still something that people do Oh,
Speaker0:That's crazy Okay, go ahead, I'm sorry.
Speaker1:All right, so look, the British Medical Journal ran a hole in 2007. So Sanitation One, you know, so much as you want to say, you know, maybe anesthetics, Sanitation One. All right. Doctors.
Speaker0:Okay.
Speaker1:If you look back at Roman sewers, even though they have lead pipes, they still have the benefits of washing from their waste.
Speaker0:So that is the good news, and it is enormous good news. But this is a show that tries to be honest, right? So let's talk about what the flush costs, because it's not free. Start with the water. Every time you flush a modern toilet, you send several liters of clean, treated, drinkable water down the drain. Older toilets use about 13 liters of flush. Newer ones are down to around six or less. But okay, so I just want to say, my toilet, it has two flushy thingies on it. It's on the top, right? It's got two buttons. The one on the left is if you do a number one, and the one on the right is if you do a number two. The number one one sends almost no water down that drain because there's nothing to send down. And the number two one actually sends a lot of water down because it's actually flushing away a lot of stuff. So, yeah, yeah, I'm doing it. All right. We take water clean enough to drink and we use it to move waste. In a lot of the world, that water people can't spare. Oh, Renee, I love how you're so.
Speaker2:Like, environmentally aware about your water.
Speaker0:Thank you. Thank you very much. I have solar panels, too. Thank you. Okay, go ahead.
Speaker2:Love that. Anyway, we drink the same water we flush with. It's just been cleaned in between.
Speaker0:And that is the loop most people never think about.
Speaker1:You know, the second cost is what happens downstream. All that waste has to go somewhere. And when sewer systems get overwhelmed, usually that rain, a lot of cities are still built, so they overflow straight into rivers and sea. Raw sewage, it still happens in wealthy countries today.
Speaker0:Well, yeah, it happens in L.A. today. You know, you can walk past any storm drain and it says all drains lead to the ocean. Like, oh, that's bad. That's bad. You know how much crap we throw in the street? Like, oh, okay. And a third of the cost is the one I think about the most, which is the flush taught us not to think. You press a handle, it's gone, it's someone else's problem. I pay taxes, you.
Speaker1:Deal with it.
Speaker0:Like, that's literally how it works. The whole design of it is to make the waste vanish so completely that you never have to consider where a way actually is.
Speaker1:That's right. That's like flush and forget.
Speaker0:Flush and forget. Yeah, and the biggest version of that is the one we forgot hardest, which is that for a huge part of the world, this entire conversation is theoretical.
Speaker1:Yeah, billions of people still do not have a safe toilet. Not a fancy one, a safe one. Somewhere that takes the waste away from working to drink. The single most important medical advance since 1840 is the thing that helped double our lifespan. And billions of people still do not have it. That's the real headline.
Speaker2:And the toilet is not old technology that everyone has. It is amazing technology that lots of people are still waiting for.
Speaker0:Which makes the future of the toilet a more interesting question than it sounds. So where is this going? And I understand. We have to talk about the people who are living in the future. Japan. Japan.
Speaker1:I mean, you can't talk about Japan, so we have to talk about Japan, because Japan is the one place under the treats of the toilet as a serious piece of consumer technology. And the company everyone should know is Toto. I was sad. So I worked for a Japanese company years ago. I was in this little town, Atsugi. It's not really a town. It's kind of outside of Tokyo. It's a lady-backed street. And driving around, there's the Toto facility right there. You go in, you take a little tour. It's a little tour.
Speaker0:Wait, did you go take a tour? Because I would go take that tour. Yeah. Yeah, good for you. All right. Wait, what was in the gift shop? What was in the gift shop? Anything good?
Speaker2:Maybe like toilet magnets.
Speaker1:I think there was a little model. You could build like a little model. No way. Yeah. Oh, that's good. I'm pretty sure.
Speaker0:Okay, go ahead.
Speaker1:It's been 20 years.
Speaker0:All right, that's fair enough.
Speaker1:So Toto was founded in 1917, and in 1980, they released the Washlet, which is the toilet seat that does everything. It's a heated seat and warm water that washes you and warm air that dries you, a built-in deodorizer. Some of them even lift the lid for you when you walk in.
Speaker0:My God, Sam would be in heaven.
Speaker2:And when we visit our family, their toilet is a Toto, and the seat is warm, and the first time I used it, I did not know what was happening.
Speaker0:I would have thought someone else was sitting on it right before I got there. Because isn't that what you would think? You'd be like, why is this warm?
Speaker1:Well, I mean, did she know that it's going to be warm?
Speaker2:Yeah, I was like, who's on the toilet? Yeah, like, ew.
Speaker1:Yeah, like, aw. Well, it's not sweaty.
Speaker0:I don't know, but it's warm. That's just, okay, go ahead.
Speaker1:It's a completely different experience. And there's one detail I think is kind of funny. A lot of Japanese toilets have a button that plays a sound, like running water or music, and it exists purely so other people cannot hear you. Shikoto made a device for a guy in the 1980s and called it the otokime, the sound princess, because usually we're embarrassed and we're flushing over and over and over to cover noise, wasting huge amounts of water. So they invented a fake flash sound to say it's real warm.
Speaker0:They invented a noise to save water. That is a beautiful piece of engineering psychology. And the reason Japan is important for the future in what comes next, which is the toilet that looks after your health. Now, I like this idea. The idea that the toilet is the one machine you use every single day that gets a daily read on how your body's doing, and nobody ever thinks to use it for that, right? Your output could be good output. Hmm? So companies and universities are starting to build smart toilets and analyze what goes into them and can spot early warning signs of illness long before you would ever go to a doctor.
Speaker2:A toilet that can tell you you are getting sick before you even feel sick.
Speaker1:I'd say I did, too, but as with all things, as long as it doesn't look like a toilet brought to you by bed-ups.
Speaker0:Well, okay, yeah, or Anthropic or OpenAI. I don't need a Gen AI toilet.
Speaker1:Yeah, I'm with you on that. The Google toilet. The Google toilet.
Speaker0:Oh, that'd be even worse. Yeah, you're right.
Speaker1:Subscription, you know, to tell you.
Speaker0:Oh, my gosh, yeah. It's just a regular toilet until you pay me $14.99 a month to learn if you're going to die or not. You're so right. I'm picking it back. This is a bad idea. What a terrible idea.
Speaker1:Well, I mean, with all things health, I think, hopefully, it would not turn into subscription service. So, Stanford, you know, often tested one of these kind of more advanced toilets a few years ago. The toilet has shown what we're used to. The toilet becomes a health monitor you never have to remember to be used because you're already using it.
Speaker0:And then there's the other end of the field. We keep punting this the whole way. There's another end of the future, which connects right back to what we said about the billions of people without one. The whole flush.
Speaker1:And sewer model
Speaker0:Has a hidden requirement. It needs a giant, expensive sewer network and a lot of clean water, and huge parts of the world have neither and may never be able to build them.
Speaker1:Yes, which is why instead of trying to give everyone a Victorian sewer, there's a pushkin toilet that does not need one. The Gates Foundation ran something called the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge. It started in 2011 to build a toilet that processes the waste on the spot with no sewer, no outside water, and it turns it into something simple.
Speaker2:A toilet that cleans up after itself with no pipes going anywhere.
Speaker1:Isn't there a central top something like that? It was like a big giant you know, truck or something.
Speaker0:That was a swimming pool. Remember it was a portable swimming pool? Like it would drive around the neighborhood and pick the kids up? Well, I mean okay, go ahead. Yeah, I don't even know how to answer that.
Speaker1:You know, the toilet's like in the space shuttle and stuff. It still gets you know, it doesn't get processed and add, you know, reduce or anything like that. But I can imagine, you know, usually toilet, right? It's just wasted.
Speaker0:Oh, yeah. Could you imagine just sitting down on something that has plutonium in it or something just being like.
Speaker1:I don't know.
Speaker0:Doesn't seem like a good idea. Hey, maybe like a microwave. You're sort of grabbing into the microwave and then it makes it really small and then really crusty and then it just goes somewhere. And I don't know what you would do with this. I don't know. Hey, I saw these people who were sleeping in a hotel room on the side of a cliff in Chile. I'm not sure, like you had to climb the cliff to get to it.
Speaker1:I don't know who would stay there,
Speaker0:Right? But you would go into, you would use the toilet and you would actually go in a bag and then just drop the bag down a hole and it would just go all the way down the cliff and then land at the bottom somewhere and somebody would pick up that bag and put it in another bag and send it off as waste. Same thing for the urinal. You'd go to the bathroom and that, it would just go all the way down to the bottom of the cliff. It got caught in a big bucket. They would trade that out once a day for, like, everybody who was staying there. It was incredibly gross, but it is exactly what we're talking about, right? It's just that hole in the wall, right? And then it has nowhere to go, and it hits a moat. Like, that's exactly what they were doing at that hotel that you can stay at today. Ew.
Speaker1:Yeah, yeah. That's so gross. That's a different kind of blockbuster, yeah.
Speaker0:Right?
Speaker1:Right? You know, look, it's a toilet that, you know, does somebody's self-explanatory work. It does run to the places that never got sewers. Well, a thousand deaths sewers did to London, but without needing the sewers. That is the future could make a huge difference. Not the large sea, the long part of the Tonia, maybe. The toilet that finally reaches everyone.
Speaker0:Imagine what you could put in your travel van then, right? Like you could have a fully functioning toilet you never had to worry about in your travel van to live your van life dreams. Because right now they also go in a bag. So we started this with a number six to eight times a day. The machine you never think about. Where do we land?
Speaker1:Well, we land on the fact that this thing, the one nobody thinks about, went from a Queen's strange novelty in 1596 to the single biggest reason most of us are alive to be bored by it. The flood, the bend in the pipe, the sewer, the clean water. It's a stack of unambiguous inventions that quietly did more for human life than almost anything we've ever made.
Speaker2:And it started with a man making a pun for the Queen. Right.
Speaker1:It started with a man making fun of the queen. And it's not finished, because the next chapter is partly a warm Japanese scene that tells you you're getting ill, and mostly, hopefully, a toilet sentencing enough to reach millions of people who are still waiting for the thing the rest of us flush without a thought.
Speaker0:Yeah, it's not bad for a stale subject.
Speaker2:That's a Harrington joke. She'd be so proud.
Speaker1:All right thanks for listening to the whole episode about toilets well we regret not
Speaker0:And if you learned that the privy chamber and the privy are the same word tell someone at dinner tonight tell them slowly and quietly it's about anyone ever.
Speaker2:Told you that the romans shared a sponge on a stick you can now say actually historians are not sure about that you're welcome guys
Speaker1:I want to thank our guest today who suggested this topic and is a genuine theater expert who also happens to be my daughter thanks for coming
Speaker2:Thank you for having me
Speaker1:This is the Nostalgia Nerds podcast next week hopefully with the Letdown thanks for listening
