Toilet, Part 1

potties for a given event. And at the same time, like I've definitely I've been to events where people care more for the porta potties, Like there's more of a communal effort to like, let's let's look after these porta potties. Let's even go in there and clean the porta potties right to ensure that things don't get too vile too fast.

Like if there's if it's a multi day event, people might be more respectful of the fact that people will need to continue to use these over a period of time than if it's just like a it's you know, this is going on for a few hours, let's just

go total war on these facilities. Uh. I've been to a one time went to a beer tasting festival in North Carolina where they did not get nearly enough porta potties, and I remember feeling like, this is the closest thing I've ever felt to like a Mad Max type scenario in real life. People were losing their minds, Like when when you don't have a place you've been drinking beer and then you don't have a place where you can legally and uh in uh in a in a polite way,

go to the bathroom, things start to get dire really fast. Yeah, and I'm guessing there's probably a lot of indiscriminate aiming from male urinators at this these particular events. Yeah, there was also a you could tell just like this all over the place, frantic search like ants foraging about looking for other places they could go apart from really far too few porta potties that were swarmed by people waiting.

But you start doing some very odd math if you're in a situation like that, or even if you're not, even if it's not that bad you're just waiting in line to use a porta potty at least I find I do. And one of the questions that I think you inevitably start pondering is how much exactly do people poop in a lifetime? Like how much do I poop in a year? How much do does does my whole household poop in? You know, in twenty years? Yeah, though these are not necessarily factors that are going to help

you out for you know, weekend music festival. No, no, but I mean you have to imagine that there's some kind of rough math along those lines going in. I guess it's less for the festival. It's probably less thinking about the total mass of poop and more about like, I don't know how many people and how often they'll need to go, because it's not like the things are going to be filled up and overflowing at least hopefully not.

But yeah, that is the thing that you can start wondering about, and it's a weird question once you actually get the answer. I I found an article that addresses this. It was a article on Live Science by Mindy Weisberger addressing exactly this question full on with an interview with

a like health professional who had the dirt. So it's impossible to answer this question exactly how much you poop in a lifetime, because of course everybody's different, there's different average fecal mass production, there's different lifespan and all that. But it's actually fairly easy to get some average figures. So the article sites Kim Barrett, a professor of medicine at you See San Diego, and Barrett says, on average, men and women have roughly one bowel movement per day.

Though if you have more than that or less than that, don't panic. There's a normal range that's more and less. It's okay. But the daily average amount of feces produced by mass by a person an adult is usually about fourteen to seventeen ounces or about four hundred to five hundred grams. And from there, Weisberger does some simple math.

Quote starting with an average daily amount of about fourteen ounces or four hundred grams, the total poop production in a week's time would be about six pounds or two point eight kill grams. In a year, a single person would yield about three hundred and twenty pounds or a hundreds of poop, just a little more than an adult panda. Ways, al right, so when when one here's the sort of drill sergeant cliche of like I've I've craped bigger than you.

That's probably true. If you're looking at a like a year's worth of defecation, Well, that starts to call to mind this thing that it got me thinking about. It makes it got me thinking about how as people get older, often their bodies shrink. Right, you know, after adulthood your body can actually physically shrink. You don't continue getting bigger

and bigger as life goes on. And yet there's this invisible phantom of biomass following every person around throughout the years, and no matter what, it's always getting larger and larger the older you get. It is the phantom mountain of combined mass of all the feces you've ever produced. Like like a big poop golem following you around, you have an invisible phantom poop golem that follows you everywhere and

only gets bigger with age. So so this means that, like if you live to the age of seventy six, Weisberger does the math, on average, you'll produce like twenty four thousand, three hundred and twenty pounds or eleven thousand and thirty kilograms of poop in your lifetime. If you live to eighty one, it's more like, it's close to

twenty six thousand pounds, are close to twelve thousand kilograms. Quote, So a lifetime of a woman's poop, because of the average female lifespan is about eighty one years in the United States. Uh, the average lifetime of a woman's poop weighs as much as three adult male hippos. But if you follow the same averages we've mentioned a minute ago, think about those people who lived like a hundred and twenty,

you know, the super supercentenarians. Uh. One of these people who lives to like a hundred and twenty has created, by the end of their life a phantom poop mountain or one of these poop golems of thirty eight thousand, four hundred pounds or about seventeen thousand, four hundred and twenty kilograms. I was trying to find an object to compare this to. It's close to the weight of a number of lighter combat vehicles like the M twenty four Chafe light tank first used by the Americans in World

War Two. Just imagine this. If you live to a hundred and twenty, over the course of your life, you can, on average poop a tank. All right. Well, Uh, let's think about these poop golems. Um, obviously they cannot live with us. They might live elsewhere. And that's why that's where we get to the subject of today's episode and the episode to follow this, because this is gonna be a two parter and we think you'll love this one, but episode number two is going to be real doozy. Yes.

So yeah, that's that's the subject of our episodes. It brings us to the technology of the toilet and ultimately the concept of the flush toilet. Um. So, I think in today's episode we're gonna be focusing primarily on sort of the history of toilet technology, what we what we were dealing with, like the problems faced by disposal of human waste and and toilets before the flush toilet was invented, right, And then in the next episode we'll meet the power

of the flush. But so, I think one of the things to think about is that the problem of what to do with human waste only really becomes a huge issue once you have sedentary lifestyles and civilization, Like once you get a lot of people living in roughly the same place and not constantly moving right absolutely, Uh, you know, I was looking back at one of my favorite books on hygiene clean a History of Personal Hygiene Impurity by Virginia Smith, and she points out that making sure that

your poop is somewhere other than your immediate living environment has always been just a universal human behavior. It's just part of of our our species and certainly see this in any number of species as well. Um, I mean, you see like dogs would rather go poop somewhere far away from where they live, you know, they don't want to poop in their den right, and they're they're even

you know, we've talked about coprophagia. There even like some ideas and science about like when a dog ends up pooping in its house this may come from like an instinct to the fact that sometimes dogs will then eat it, which seems gross to us, is actually something to like prevent possible parasite eggs from hatching in it, because there can be a health risk from poop staying around in your living areas. Yeah, and if you want to hear more about this stuff, Toble your mind has an entire

episode about animals eating poop. That's right. We're not going to be focusing on eating poop today, except in the sense the toilet eats poop if you will, Yeah, you can. You can look at it that way for sure. So you know, back when we were just nomadic creatures, we didn't have to worry about this is so much. You you poop where you had to poop, You did whatever you needed to do to to hide the feces. But

then you're going to be moving on. You're not going to stay in that immediate area, and you're probably there aren't that many of you anyway, like any given group of human nomads. Uh, it's not going to be the size of of a of a village or the stuff certainly the size of a large metropolitan area. Now, that doesn't mean there are no dangers associated with defecation at

this stage. Even though you're not gonna have nearly as much of a problem with what to do with the excrement, you are still like when you when you go to go to the bathroom, you're putting yourself in a vulnerable state. Absolutely. I mean, poop itself opens up vulnerabilities. And you see this in any number of animals that have various methods for hiding their own poops. Sometimes it's essentially self hiding,

such as the way a goats poop will rolled away. Goats, you know, often would favor hilly environment so that the poop rolls away hides itself. Cats, on the other hand, of course, or are known for their uh their their skillet bearing their poop uh and thus hiding it from from larger predators, because that's the fear, right, is that your fecal matter is h is a signal. Uh, it's an it's a it's an odor that is letting anyone with a nose to smell it know where you are

and perhaps what degree of healthier in as well. Yeah, if you are a prey animal, it shows you where a predator can come get a meal. If you're a predator, it can scare off prey animals. Uh. There's a paper that looked into into some of this. It's a two paper called the Control of Defecation in Humans and Evolutionary Advantage. The question mark part of it there by Italian bowel experts G. Bessatti and V. Villainacci. And they did something

interesting here. They ran a human fecal sample. Uh. They well, they use both a modern and an ancient example through complex gas uh chromatographic mass spec spectrometric analysis, and they discovered that quote, human feces are rich in volatile compounds likely to be identified by potential predators. And so they went on to argue that the high predation risk for ancient hominids by large carnivores suggests something rather amazing about

our pooping powers. Quote. We hypothesize that the voluntary control defecation by our ancestors, together with greater brain volume or rex stature, opposable thumbs, and other changes, may have contributed to the successful march of hominids along the road of evolution.

In fact, by deciding when, how and where to defecate may have several advantages in the complex prey predator relationship, because spores are left in places undetectable by predators, or there are no fecal tracks who sent maybe easily individualated

by prey. So they propose that choosing carefully where to poop maybe an important part of what kind of animal we are exactly so, But but even from an early point um, as a Virginia Smith points out, Neolithic people's they made use of midden piles, so you would have an area in which you're living and if you need to to poop you're either pooping beyond the area in which you're living, or you're taking your poop and dumping

it out there in in the midden pile. And there are you know, a few different systems that that one can use here, one of course, is the dry sewer system and UH and this is this will remind probably a lot of people of a cat box, because they a cat's litter box is a dry sewer system. UH. That this would have been an indoor bucket of sand, ash or dirt that one would defecate into. And then you could take that dirt, sand or ash outside, take it to the mid and bile dump it out and

you're done. Or you could do it in the inverse. I mean this is actually still a common method and dry pit latrines around the world. Like if you've got

an outhouse and it's just a pit latrine. UM, a common thing to do to help prevent smells and and help keep things from getting too nasty is after you do your business in the pit, you've got a bucket of like old coal ash or something like that, or lime or something in the uh in the outhouse, and you scatter that on top and that helps contain smells and so forth. Now, of course, the wet sewer system.

We're gonna get more into that in a bit, but that, of course is ultimately what we have today in much of the world, where you certainly a flush toy it as an example of this, right, and that simply derives from sort of the the ingenious mechanical action of water flow. Right, if you have to if you want to, say, poop in a chamber pot or in a bucket or something like that, you've got to physically remove it yourself from

where you are. If you are to poop into moving water, then the moving water can remove your waste for you, and you don't have to do that, right, Or I guess one could poop into a container of water that is not moving and then you remove that yourself. That's also a possibility, I guess it is. Now the other there are all kinds of things you can poop into, and I imagine people have tried all of them at

one point or another. Now, beyond this dry wet distinction, there's another important one that Smith points out, and she says that toilet culture divides sharply into wiper and washer culture. Yeah, and this is of course is just how one cleans one's bum. Toilet deification. Yeah, like toilet paper versus like b day or wet wipes or something like that. Yeah. Now, most ancient culture, she points out that they were wipers, so they would have used certainly paper if it was available.

Of course, for the longest paper was Um, it was a rarity. So you're gonna probably depend on things like grass, leaves, sticks, corn cobs, mud balls, and of course stones I've commonly seen sided. I'm trying to imagine this. I just see it pop up in like articles about ancient toilets that people would use bits of broken pottery to clean themselves. That I see that sited. But I'm just trying to picture it, and it will not picture it. But you know it, it seems it seems a little little risky.

Well it it drives down just the ridiculousness I think of any wiping culture, because I feel like ultimately washing culture has the stronger argument. Um, and washing culture is, of course, instead of using even paper, what have you simply depended more or exclusively on running water or spraying water or water poured from an apparatus. That the the sort of lubricant power of water. It's taking the principle

of the flush toilet to your own skin, right. And you know, this is the standard in many parts of the world, you know, particularly say in Islamic and Hindu cultures. Um, I mean you will even find this. Uh, if you've ever traveled abroad, you may have encountered this. But I have also I know people who like purchased a house in the Atlanta area and they're like, I don't know why, but there's a vegetable sprayer installed next to my toilet. Well,

that is it's a bid day sprayer. That's the that's the simply a means of of washing one's bum after one has defecated, and it's a rather elegant solution. I would, in my opinion, hard to argue there. I mean, yeah, water gets things cleaner than than without water. I mean it's not a perfect analogy, but imagine if I gave you the option of would you rather be able to take showers or just wipe yourself down with some paper

towels to clean your body? Absolutely, I think most of us would probably choose the running water if it is an an option. Uh. That being said, for many of these cultures, running water is not an option. You know that, then that's one of the main reasons that you're seeing the wiping method as the primary method in these in among ancient peoples. Now, for the most part, this this worked, right, they were able to sort of roll with very simple

um sewage systems. Just simply get up and move on because you're nomadic, or if you're living in a small area, just keep it on the outside of your your living environment. But the thing about humans is that we inevitably did a number of things. We overcame all of our predators. We we conquered the natural world and innovented to agriculture, and then we started more move and then we started

building cities. We started building just increasingly large, cramped complex um just accretions of human population, which of course is one of the reasons we have have so many wonderful things in our culture. But also it created a lot of problems. Yeah, of course the city comes with many wonders for good and ill, and it just I mean, obviously, how to deal with human waste is a major one of the ills, right, is one of the biggest problems that you immediately face as soon as you decide to

create crowded, sedentary civilization. Cramming a bunch of people close together and having them all live there and not leave and what to do with human waste has long been I think one of the single most important and consequential problems in the design of human civilizations. Like think about okay, if we go with those numbers earlier, like the you know, fourteen ounces or whatever average a day, a household of five people is producing on average like thirty pounds of

feces a week. An apartment building of fifty people produces like three hundred pounds a week. Obviously, people don't want that stuff hanging around. So where does it go and how does it get there? If you okay, so if you're in a city, you can't walk outside the outskirts of the city every time you need to go to the bathroom and go to like a midden pile outs you know, where nobody is I mean will come back

to it. To a certain extent, you can, but that's only going to scale for so long, right, Like residents of New York City cannot go to New Jersey to poop. It's just you can't leave. If you have to leave Manhattan to poop, then I mean, why you can't really live in Manhattan. And even then that's not a good idea, especially when you've got lots of people crowded around open defecation, even if it's in in a place separated from you, if it's often a midden pile or something like that,

that can lead to negative health outcomes. And we'll talk about that in a bit um. But so, yeah, so you don't want all that stuff hanging around. And it's not just because we don't esthetically like the idea of feces piling up in the streets and alleys around our homes because it's gross. It can actually be dangerous to be exposed to untreated human waste, like untreated sewage. Getting

into water sources is especially dangerous. This can spread water borne diseases like diarrhea, which you know is one of the biggest killers of children around the world. And in terms of infectious disease, and then like a cholera, I mean, cholera has been just one of the most awful diseases in human history and it's still kills tens of thousands of people every single year, I mean even today. And this generally is it's the fecal oral route of disease transmission.

It's kind of gross to talk about, is but it's when sewage contaminates sources that end up going into people's mouths, like drinking water, like soil that you know that ends up in food um. And so for this reason, like you know, I was reading this the thing by the United Nations about the sort of their toilet initiatives trying to get toilets and clean sewage sewage disposal systems to people around the world, and and they say, bluntly, toilets

save lives. We should think about that because obviously, the toilet is a nice thing to have. It's a good convenience that makes life more esthetically pleasing, but it's also like a life or death question, right, And and it is so easy to take it for granted just because it's this it's this thing that we're we're grateful for it when we have it and when we need it, but we're also very well ing to forget it and and and probably not plan our life around it too

much unless we absolutely have to. Yeah, And and one way to definitely know that you shouldn't take it for granted is to think about all the people who are around the world who are deprived of these amenities. Like according to the World Health Organization and UNI SEF, about sixty percent of the global population either don't have a toilet in their home or they don't have one that's safely removes uh removes human ways. So they might have one, but it doesn't maybe it just goes into a place

where it re enters drinking water areas and stuff. Among the facts they said also is that like almost nine hundred million people worldwide still regularly practice open defecation just out you know, they have to go wherever, like in a latrine field or or something like that. Yeah, it just means somewhere that is not being captured or treated. Like if you had if you had a properly dug pit latrine, that would not count. But so you're going somewhere in the open, like an open pit or something.

And then this was crazy. So they say globally about eighty percent of wastewater generated by human civilization flows back into the ecosystem without being treated. Without being treated. Yeah, um, I mean it's just ramping around the world that this obviously is going to have be having lots of negative environmental consequences, but also negative health outcomes for humans. And then another thing that we shouldn't take for granted is like just the idea of you know, people don't like

the idea of fly is getting into their their stuff. Right, So like if if people have an outhouse or a pit latrine, they tend to want to keep a lid on it. And one thing that does it helps keep flies from getting down in there and buzzing around, and of course that would be an annoyance when people are

trying to use these facilities. But that's also not just an esthetic concern when when human feces are left uncovered their breeding ground for for like the fly um Musca sorbins known as the bizarre fly, which there's some evidence or a disease vector for the bacterium Chlamydia trachomatics, which can cause an infection in the eyes called tracoma, which is a leading cause of blindness around the world. It's it leads to hundreds of thousands of people being blind worldwide.

So again we have we have real life consequences, actual hygiene public health consequences UH to lack of efficient UH toiletry and sewage technology. I can't emphasize this enough. The toilet, and I want to be very clear about this, and not just the toilet in your house, but the toilet paired with a waste disposal and sewer infrastructure. That's really important. Uh. Those things together are not just esthetically nice, they save lives.

This is a life and death issue. Yeah. And but just to bring it back to a joke, uh, this is exactly why the sign at Ikia and the model apartment says, do not use this toilet. It's not cooked up to anything. The toilet in and of itself will do nothing exactly. And we'll revisit this theme throughout these episodes. But so without a flush toy, I guess we should sort of consider the history of toilet technology and in

in consider some broad categories. Right, So, without a flush toilet connected to a safe disposal system like a sewer or a well contained septic tank, what options do you have for disposing of human waste? There are a few main categories, and they pretty much all have some major disadvantages. One of course, as we've discussed, is open defecation. That's just anywhere in the environment. We know now that's that's dangerous, That can lead to disease risks. Um. Another option is

pit latrines. This is like an outhouse, you go in a hole, you know, and uh. These these are better than open defecation because they can be covered up and they can keep stuff separating contained. But also they're outside your home. You lose the convenience and the privacy. If they're inside your home, there can be problems with smells

and exposure to waste. So they might be better from a health perspective than just open defecation or defecation and to say water sources, but they're also that there are problems with them that make people not prefer them generally. Uh. And then you've got like chamber pots and buckets. Historically

these are very common. These were often emptied by pouring the contents out of windows into city streets, which is obviously unsanitary, even though it's more convenient like you do your stuff indoors, the impact is sort of the same as like open defecation on city streets and can lead to unsanitary conditions and disease and all that. Ye like,

immediately right outside your your your building. So ideally what you'd want given the limitations of all these things is some kind of appliance that allows you to do your thing inside the privacy and comfort of your own home, and then removes the waste automatically to somewhere that it can be safely stored or treated that doesn't allow unpleasant sights and smells to bother you, and doesn't allow the waste to pollute the surrounding environment or get into drinking

water and soil. Obviously, this is a recipe that a that a flushed toilet could meet very nicely if it's paired with the right kind of like sewer system. But I think maybe we should take a quick break and then come back and discuss some of the solutions that ancient civilizations came up with for for toilets and seward designs. All right, we're back. So we're talking about ancient complex

latrine systems. I was reading about this in a book by Brian Fagan that I've mentioned on the show before, the seventy Great Inventions of the Ancient World, and he points to one of the earliest examples we have of of latrine technology being that of a latrine drainage system

in the Neolithic period. Uh one example being uh Scara bray on the Orkney Islands of Scotland from roughly thirty one hundred to b C. And the site featured six houses, each with a buried duct that drains from small toilet rooms to a single duct that removed waste from the houses. So it's it's simple, but basically in that you have

the roots of modern sewage technology. Yeah, and so we see things kind of like this and other ancient civilizations like for example, one of the great UH ancient civilizations in terms of civic design and UH and technological advancement in the way cities are put together is the Indis River Valley civilization, like including sites like Mahinjo, Daro and Harapa where they had buildings with these sort of toilet holes that rested over an underground brick drainage pipe and

these sewer drains could be washed out with water to carry the waste away to cess pits. Right, this would have been about And another interesting bit about the Mahenjo Darrow site is that there appeared to be channel junctions in the sewage system so that you could it could be easily be cleaned. You could go in there to prevent blockage, so it would seem to be in an

advancement from from earlier designs. Yeah, and another advancement, of course, comes if you have a good source of flowing water, like the ancient Romans made use of their aqueduct supplied water to power a sort of flush toilet. I think it's not quite a flush toilet. I guess it depends on how you define it. But it consisted of in ancient Rome, basically a bench with multiple holes in it.

So this would have been a very communal affair. These holes are just like right next to each other, so you'd go and sit next to a whole bunch of people and I guess just sit around talking while you were pooping. And uh. These holes in the bench were suspended over a drainage ditch with running water, and the flowing water below the toilet bench would remove the waste

and it would also help limit smells. So this is great, Like you don't you know, it doesn't stink in there because stuff is getting well, it might stink a little bit, but it's not as bad as it could be because it's all getting washed away immediately by the running water. Yeah, there's running water, there's there's their their their mosaics and frescoes. There is there's probably live music at some of these. Yeah,

I didn't know that. Yeah, that was a detail I was reading, and I believe it was Smith's book, um pointing out that, yeah, this would have been just kind of a fun place to hang out and have a poop. Yeah, I mean, it does seem like it was a thing that. Uh, it's it's hard to like with modern Western sensibilities about like embarrassment, you know, when you when you have to go to the bathroom. It's just hard to imagine sitting around talking to people while you're all pooping on the

same bench. But when in Rome, you know, poop poop on the bench. But of course this this had some limitations also because it relied on a certain kind of infrastructure, right, it relied on the constant running water supplied by the aqueduct system, and it had to be done at the end of the water supply system or else you would

of course foul the water sources downstream of you. So this sort of had to you know, you wouldn't want to put this toilet side at like the first place the aqueduct water supplied water gets too in the city right now. Now, certainly where we talk some more about Roman toilets here, because just the Roman plumbing situation was fabulous, it was really it was a wonderful creation. They were

really proud of it too. Oh yeah. But at the same time, there's a problem with thinking too much about ancient toilets in light of our you know, our modern concepts, because you know, we're standing at the end of a long journey in which innate uh, you know, sensibilities about cleanliness are confused with concepts of purity, and they're augmenting, augmented to varying but hopefully significant degrees by public health concerns. So like, you know, for a fact that exposure to

human feces can actually be a public health risk. But there's also like this weird kind of primal thing where you think of feces as morally bad or something. Yeah, And that's one of the major trends and in a Smith's book about hygiene is that these two things just become interwoven and it's hard to to to to take them apart. But the ancient understandings of public health we're very unlike our own. We've discussed before on stuff to

able your mind. How Roman civil engineer Attruvious advised against building towns near marshes because of the fear of the miasma, right, which which there's some truth to that, and also just like he's coming upon truth, but at the same time, there's no magical fog that's going to come out and

give you an illness. Well, he was right for the wrong reason, right, Like, so the idea that you might get malaria because there are bad smells and vapors coming off of the marshes is wrong, but it might actually be correct. So that you don't want to be too close to the marshes because the standing water produces disease vectors. The mosquitoes, they're the vector for the malaria. Now, he also advised that latrine should be positioned so that odor

is directed away from public spaces. Sounds reasonable, But as Brian Fagan um at All point out in the seventy Great Inventions of the Ancient World, quote, such purely practical measures need not refle like they generalized concern for public health as we understand it, uh, you know, But for all, for all the Roman feats of plumbing, you know, it all says little about what they necessarily thought about hygiene. For instance, Fagan points out that many private toilets in

Pompeii were positioned right next to the kitchen, right. Yeah. It makes me think about Simpson's episode where they building ad Flanders a new house and the toilet is just in the middle of the kitchen because they're like, you haven't tried lugging a toilet up a flight of stairs. Another fact about how these Roman toilets don't necessarily like completely interlocked with common ideas about hygiene. So you wonder,

what are the ancient Romans used for toilet paper? Right like when when they were sitting around by the dozens for social pooping, Yeah, where they wipers orhere they washers.

There's sort of in between. There were well, I guess you call them washers because there was a water element, So they apparently wiped themselves with a kind of wetted sponge on a stick, which they So you'd be sitting there on the toilet and then in front of you there'd be a separate stream of fresh water washing in um, and then everybody would sort of dip their sponges at the end of their stick in this water to like wet it and wash it off, and then they'd wipe

themselves with that and then dip it in there to wash it off again, and everybody like you would, you know, people would share these things obviously. I mean, imagine an alternate version of our present world in which instead of using toilet paper or any kind of sprayer or what have you, instead it's single use disposable sponges on sticks. You know, like we're very we're hygienic about it, but

we're just so extra wasteful about it. I came across I think, what is a false factoid that I'm I wonder if I should even repeat because I don't want to spread it via the illusory truth effect, But I'll say it anyway. Uh. There there are people out there saying that the phrase getting the wrong end of the stick comes from this Roman experience, but I did not find good evidence that that is true. I do not

think that is the origin of that phrase in English. Yeah, and really, what which at what end is the wrong end? It kind of depends on what you're doing, right, Yeah, I mean if they were like, if it's good enough for your butt, why isn't it good enough for your hand? Um?

All right, we're gonna come back to the Romans. But but real quick, I want to touch base again on some of these these older settlements, um, because we don't want to give the false impression that like from a very early point, from say again onward, people were just all on board with some sort of primitive sewage system, because that's not the case, because there are plenty of other advanced settlements in the ancient world. They just didn't

seem that concerned with the latrine technology. Cattle hook, I believe I'm attempting to pronounce that correctly. Would this have been abrout seven thousand b C in modern Turkey. So they had mud brick houses for thousands of people. And one of the interesting things about this settlement is that most of these buildings were accessible by like sometimes like apertures in the sides of the buildings, but often ceiling holes. They had no proper streets. The rooftops were the streets.

Um so so so so that's fascinating. But but then they also had they had cooking hearts, they had ovens, they had storage rooms. Uh. And yet they seem to have been just content with carrying all of their trash and ratrine latrine waste out to dumping sites, out to

middens beyond the limits of their uh, their their town. Well, I wonder if the fact that the streets were positioned above the dwelling spaces actually would have discouraged them from dumping all of their waste out on the streets as often happened in other cities, because they would quickly and easily run into people's homes. Yeah, it could be another

big example classical Athens may do just open sewers. Fagan adds that although the water supply was taken care of, the fifth century BC drainage system consisted of a single large duct in the marketplace, and everybody else just had to make do. But let's get back to Rome, Okay, So obviously a lot of time, in ergy and money went into the sewage system, into the overall plumbing infrastructure. We've mentioned the aqueducts already, but we haven't mentioned Rome's

great central sewer, the Cloaca maxima. Cloaca maxima, that's like a body part on a Turinosaurus reaxient, but cloaca means sewer, so it's the So it's the maximum sewer, the great sewer. Um I mean, and so the to clarify the cloaca in the uh in the animal world, I think, i'm I think it's basically like a single passage way that serves the function of like a rectum and a urethra

and a birth canal and all that. It's all sort of in one right and so, But but here we're talking about a great central sewer, and accounts vary on when this was built. There's there's a tradition that says that it was built in the sixth century BC, but Fagin stresses that it likely came later and may have remained an open sewer until about second century BC. But but it was a pretty impressive since the system, for instance, our for in plenty the elder was absolutely bonker balls

for it. I want to read a quotation here. This is from the Rackham translation that we've used before on the show. You mean of the natural history. Yes, this is from the natural history quote. But at that time elderly men still admired the vast dimensions of the rampart, the substructures of the capital, and furthermore, the city sewers,

the most noteworthy achievement of all. Seeing that hills were tunneled, and Rome, as we mentioned a little earlier, became a hanging city beneath which men traveled in boats during Marcus Agrippa's term as Edile after his consulship. Through the city there flows seven rivers meeting in one channel. These rushing downwards like mountain torrents, are constrained to sweep away and remove everything in their path, and when they are thrust forward by an additional volume of rain water, they batter

the bottom and sides of the sewer. So yes, in case anyone missed it, there plenty is telling that Marcus Agrippa took a sailing vessel through the sewers. That's how amazing they were. That there's essentially a river uh that runs through Rome and it is the fabulous sewer. So this sort of toilet technology. You find this throughout the Roman Empire. Uh. And yet at the same time they

still had to post warnings against public defication. So I want to touch on some of these, but I'm gonna stress here that apparently in translating these, the word poop is not always sufficient. So I am going to go ahead. We're gonna go ahead and use the stronger S word for excrement. But we're going to come up with the delightful ways to bleep the profanity. This is a show of family values, folks, right, But but it also has

a show about about history. And apparently these these bits of often graffiti cannot be properly translated without using some vulgar terminology. Let's vulgar, alright. So one this was a graffiti on a wall in Pompeii that says, again translated with comfort and good cheer, so long as you don't do it here. So it's a warning, please please don't poop here. Don't poop here. There are places to poop, but not here. There's a kind of beautiful irony about

that being on a house at Pompeii. They want to keep all nice and clean. Yeah. Uh, there's another one. This was on a wall of a Roman amphitheater. Uh that is what is it? Cassatur cave mallum. I think it would be hard season in Latin. I think it would be cocatur cockatur cave mallum, which means roughly translated as to beware the evil eye, which is which is

a delightful thing. I actually I actually saw a website where someone had had taken this thing in Latin and they framed it above their modern toilet in their apartment, which is a nice, a nice, a nice twist. So Christina Kilgrove actually wrote a wonderful article on Forbes about these inscriptions, titled uh, scatological graffiti was the ancient Roman version of Yelp and Twitter, And she points out that you know, even with with latrines, pooping was still something

you were exposed to a lot. Again, they were very communal, these Roman toilets. Now, she points out that these bitsical grew graffiti were generally not found in actual latrine zones. They were found elsewhere in the city. And part of that, of course is warning against inappropriate defecation. Please go usual train, don't do it here. But then she said, there are other such inscriptions that were essentially Yelp reviews, like one that is translated as we pete in the bed, I

confess we have aired innkeeper. If you ask why there was no chamber pot, that's a good excuse, except on why in the bed? Why not somewhere else in the room? Well, I mean yeah, I mean you could just use the corner. I guess It's like it would be the most destructive thing you could do, right, and since you can't, you can't. Actually you leave a Yelp review. You can just say I pet in this bed, but the reason is because

you didn't provide a latrine for me to use. So yes, graffiti artists of Rome had some fun with with defecation in general and with the use of latrines. Um, the whole books have been written on Roman graffiti. It's it's a wonderful topic. But still, at the same time, we stressed that the latrines of ancient Rome, they do represent a major contribution to public health. Uh, you know, even if they didn't have the science down perfectly on everything, and even if there were a few rogues who didn't

appreciate any of it. Okay, I think we need to take one more break and then we will come back to finish up our discussion about toilet history. Alright, we're back. Are we ready to get into some medieval toilet technology here? Joe, Yeah, we've talked about some pit latrines, We've talked about some uh some ancient sewer systems sort of with toilets suspended over them. I wanted to talk about guard robes. So guard robes are a common solution later in like castle

building periods in Europe. And there's a simple principle at work here. Why not let gravity flush for you. Uh So, a garden robe would generally be like a small room with holes that you could sit over, suspended up high, over a pit, or over an exposed area outdoors, so

there could be multiple ways you would do this. But the waste would generally fall down into a pit where it would be stored and then could be removed by workers at some point, or it would fall into a moat this was pretty common for castles, or it would just fall down to the ground along the exterior wall

of the castle or manor house. Uh And because of exposure to like cold winter winds, a sixteenth century poet named John Harrington, who we will revisit in the next episode called this quote sitting on the draft, So you can imagine it was like, you know, there's just a hole that's exposed to outside, and I guess your your stuff falls down along the castle wall, and and you've got the winter winds biting at your butt. Ye, your

whole is exposed to the outside. This, yeah, exactly, So of course, the waste would either end up in a water source and that's not great, or it would pile up below and have to be removed by workers. And I'm not positive, but I think a guard robe type structure is the central uh architectural feature in a story that I loved about a castle I've actually been to in Slovenia. Uh. So, there's a castle called Prajamski Grod and Slovenia also known as Prajama Castle, and I've got

a picture of it here. It's it's so it's a castle that was built in the thirteenth century in the mouth of a cave. Yeah, and Slovenia just generally has awesome caves and like karst geological features. But here's somebody decided to be super bad and build a castle right on a cliff at the entrance of a cave system. I like the way they think. So, You've got this guy named erasm Luger or Erasmus of Lugue, who is

a so called robber baron. He's a bad dude who owns a castle, though I guess most of the people who own castles are bad. Yeah, it's kind of a red flag. Yeah, Oh, and that's something we'll get to again in a minute. Uh. So. Uh, he's a he's a so called robber baron, and he and his family Arizon Luker. Uh. They take over the Prajama Castle by

the end of the fifth fifteenth century. And at one point Luger gets in trouble because he murders a relative of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick the third, and the Holy Roman Empire comes to collect and they end up laying siege to his castle here at the Cave Mouth. But the siege went on and on because the castle

had a secret weapon for siege survival. It had a tunnel leading into the cave system, which had other openings to the countryside, so it allowed occupants occupants of the castle to secretly sneak out and get supplies while they were under siege. And this of course means a siege can go on for a really long time for all I know. You know, it could go on forever. While the army is waiting outside to starve you out, you're

sneaking off to the snack bar. So apparently somebody within the castle got sick of this after about a year or so, and the insider decided to betray Luger, the master of the castle, and I guess they must have coordinated a plan with the army outside. But however they arrived at this plan. What happened is they waited until Luger himself had to go up to the guard robe. It was this little room overhanging the outside wall of the castle, and then they raised a red flag to

let the army outside know. And the army blasted the garter robe with a cannon and killed Luger in one shot. And that should have been adapted to a Game of Throne scene. Maybe it still will be. That's right, The Game of Thrones did have a death on the toilet scene. They also had the moon door, which was not a toilet, but was. It was very much like what we're describing here. Yeah, a hole that opens up onto the the expanse below the castle along the castle walls. Now, one more note

about medieval toilets. Generally there were two ways do you do your business in the medieval bedroom. There was a jerry which you simply pushed under the bad so this would be just like a standard chamber pot. But then there was also the closed stool, which is like a toilet box, and you'll you'll find some examples in the cushions where it's like satin cushion. It's this fancy little box.

It's like imagine the fanciest um, you know, enclosure for a litter box you can purchase, and it's essentially that for human defecation, you know. I find so you look at a lot of this like medieval royal toilet technology, you know, the stuff that kings and queens of Europe would poop in, and in these times there's an awful

lot of like cloth in the elements involved. It just seems like a bad idea, Like you don't want, you know, when you see people who have like toilet like toilet seat covers that are like fuzzy cloth stuff, and I'm always just like, what are you doing? Toilet should be all like hard surfaces that are easy to clean off, you know, Oh my god, it just seems wrong to like be putting cushions and fabric and all that are all over your toilet. That just seems like a recipe

for disgustingness. Oh yeah. An example of this, my family wants rented a home that had a white carpet in the bathroom all the way up to the toilet is ridiculous. Oh my god, that's horrible. Like brown shag carpet. Fine, but you don't. White carpet is just a terrible idea. I mean, why don't you If you're gonna do that, why not just have like cloth dinner plates and stuff hard non porous surfaces people this, Yeah, you gotta be

able to clean it all. Right, So we're gonna go and close out this episode right here, but we will be back because the next episode we're going to really get into what you probably think of as the modern toilet. We're gonna talk more about the modern flush toilet, where it came from, uh, and what it's it's impact has been. In the meantime, if you want to check out more episodes of Invention, head on over to invention pod dot com. That's our website. That's where we'll find all the episodes,

links out to social media accounts, you name it. And I should really stress if you want to support the show, the best thing you can do is make sure you've subscribed, and then if you have the ability to rate and review the show, uh wherever you get it, uh, please do so because that that helps us out, helps the algorithm, and helps us continue to bring you week after week uh new, amazing, mundane and world changing inventions. That's right, so,

as always, thanks so much to our excellent audio producer, TORR. Harrison. And if you would like to get in touch with us with feedback about this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at invention pod dot com. The reps you can sun with your day