Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff, Lauren Vogel Bomb Here, consider the flush toilet. It's a 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 urinine 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 p 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 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's in two. Cummings had an S shaped pipe to trap bad odors, while Harrington's had not, of course, self flushing toilet, heated seats and those vacuum potties 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 Diana mcdonnaugh, a professor of industrial design in the Beckman 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 uncomfortable. 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 threef B. C Rome had one 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 guard 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 guard robe, but because it was that stench of human waste would keep the fleas and moths out of the garments. Public guarter robes in London emptied directly into the Thames, which was an unbelievably poor
public health move. As the population of Europe grew over the course of the eighteen hundreds, up to a hundred people would share the same public guarter robe, and the waist just washed into the rivers, tainting the drinking water supply, which explains why so many outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, and other water borne 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 in endoors because he made sure his
name was visible 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? McDonough said, toilets offer a relatively unexplored territory that offers signific 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 their Reinvent the Toilet Challenge back in, 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 first 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 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 was written by Jessline Shields and produced by Tyler Clang for I Heeart Media and How Stuff Works. For more on this and lots of other topics, visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.