BrainStuff Classics: What's the History (and Future) of Toilets?

fascinating device if you think about it. This giant porcelain chair is installed into every modern American bathroom, using up gallons of precious drinking water every day to whisk your urine feces into oblivion. Better known as the municipal wastewater treatment plant nearest you every time you flush. But have you ever considered what else we could be doing with

our poop and pea? You probably don't really want to think about it, and neither does pretty much anybody else, which is why the flush toilet we twenty first century humans use hasn't changed much since it was first patented in seventeen seventy five by a Scottish watchmaker named Alexander Cumming. Cummings toilet was a slightly altered version of the commode designed for Queen Elizabeth the first by her godson, Sir

John Harrington in fifteen ninety two. Cummings had an S shaped pipe, two trap bad odors, while Harrington's had not, of course, self flushing toilets. Heated seats in those vacuum boddies like you see on airplanes and tour buses came later. But our one and done attitude towards commode innovation probably comes from the fact that we simply don't want to

think about poop that much. We spoke with Deanna McDonough, a professor of industrial design in the Beckmann Institute of Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She said, within the American culture, there is still a resistance and reluctance to discuss body waste. The toilet has remained relatively unexplored, I think because we're failing to realize that, to quote a British saying, where there

is muck, there's brass. We are failing to see the potential opportunity our modest toilet is offering us because the notion of immersing yourself in such a product makes us all feel so uncomfort But going to the bathroom isn't something we've always been squeamish about long ago. It was just another experience, an opportunity for relaxation and hanging out. The ancient Romans used toilet time as a time to

catch up with their friends. In the year three hundred and fifteen BCE, Rome had one hundred and forty four bustling public toilets lined with stone benches with keyhole shaped cutouts situated all along them, where people would sit together and do their business and maybe some gossiping too. Later in medieval England, you could be walking down the street and someone might throw the contents of their chamber pot

out the window onto you. Oops. They might say sorry about it, but it would kind of be on you for walking too close to their house. Fancier medieval people used a garter robe, a little closet stuck onto the side of a castle with a hole in the floor that emptied into a moat or cesspit. Clothes were also kept in the garter robe because it was thought stench of human waste would keep the fleas and moths out

of the garments. Public guard robes in London emptied directly into the Thames, which was an unbelievably poor our public health move As the population of Europe grew over the course of the eighteen hundreds, up to one hundred people would share the same public garderobe, and the waste just washed into the rivers, tainting the drinking water supply, which explains why so many outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, and other

waterborne diseases bedeviled nineteenth century Europeans, resulting in more than half the working class population dying before the age of five. It was a mess as a result of a particularly hot summer in London in eighteen fifty eight, when the smell of rotting sewage made living in the city completely unbearable, Parliament commissioned the construction of the London Sewer, which was

finished in eighteen sixty five. Deaths resulting from waterborne diseases plummeted, and cities all over the world followed suit and constructed

their own sanitary sewers. The toilet patented by Coming eventually became standard in houses in wealthy countries all over the world, along with slight variations patented by others like Thomas Crapper yes that's his real name, whose contributions to the overall design of the toilet were minimal, but whose legacy indoors because he made sure his name was on all of his products. And hey, it's great that fewer people are dying due to poor sanitation in these places anymore. But

the toilet is due for an upgrade. So what do we need our new toilets to do? MacDonough said, toilets offer a relatively unexplored territory that offers significant potential in respect to healthy living and healthy aging. As individuals are taking more responsibility for their health, eating habits, and well being, the bathroom offers a somewhat blank canvas for us to

integrate intuitive technology to support the individual. Imagine a toilet that could tell you how hydrated you were, whether you were deficient in particular vitamins, warn you of blood in your stools, and changes in your hormones. We literally flush all that information away each day in the form of waste matter, so we could find out a lot about

our own health from our toilets. But according to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which launched there reinvent the toilet Challenge back in twenty eleven, the next generation of toilets will also be able to kill pathogens, compost human waste, and keep up with the fast urbanization of the twenty four century, and all that without sewer infrastructure, electricity, or

a water source. They might even be able to mine our waste for valuable elements like phosphorus, nitrogen, and potassium, and separate solid and liquid waste in order to use them to make things like building supplies. But will the new toilets look very much different from the one in your bathroom now or the one Sir John Harrington made for Queen Elizabeth in the sixteenth century. Probably not much, unless you've got any bright ideas. Today's episode is based

on the article who Invented the Toilet? A Brief History of the flush on how stuffworks dot com, written by Katherine Whitbourne and Jesslynshields. Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how stuffworks dot Com. It is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.