Toilet, Part 2

this one. That's where we get all into the history of toilets and ancient civilizations, into latrine tech, into the Kloaca maximum, the maximum sewer of ancient But today we're going to get more into directly into the invention of the flush toilet. And I think we got to start off today by dispelling a common myth. That myth and I've actually I've heard this like repeated in movies and stuff. It seems to be a thing people actually do think, is that the flush toilet was invented by a Mr.

Thomas Crapper. Now Crapper does play a role in history of the toilet, but he is not its inventor by any means whatsoever. This is not even close. And now, first of all, we can debate about what it means to have a flush toilet. If we're going to be discussing the idea of its invention, I'd say by some definitions, since waste was like washed away by water, you could argue that some people's of like ancient Rome and the ancient Indus Valley had flush toilets. But that's not usually

what we mean when we say a flush toilet. We we usually mean a device that automatically removes waste with a simple mechanism. It's not like a hole over a drain pipe in which you can pour water. It's not something that constantly has water running running underneath it. It's a machine with a mechanical flushing action that doesn't need to be situated over like a flowing ditch or anything

like that. And so there are a number of technologies that really need to be in place for this to come together, Like your your plumbing technology has to has has to reach the appropriate level of advancement before you can attach a toilet as we model and flushing toilet to the scenario and to and make it practical. Yeah, and this is gonna be a big problem with the earliest models of the flush toilet. So to see one

of the probably uh the first real flush toilet. And since we mean but an impractical early model, we need to meet a poet. Uh, and I think that it is appropriate that the first real flush toilet was created by a poet. We mentioned him in the last episode. Inter Sir John Harrington. So, Sir John Harrington was an English courtier and an author who lived from fifteen sixty or fifteen sixty one to sixteen twelve. Is uh in his life stories that his father had repeatedly sort of

married up into royal circles. First his dad married one of Henry the eighth illegitimate daughters, and then later his father married a woman who served Queen Elizabeth the First before she was queen. And this seems to be what led to Elizabeth Queen Elizabeth becoming John Harrington's godmother. The apparent Lee Little John Harrington was a troublesome godson. He was prone to writing on embarrassing and morally impure subjects

that repeatedly got him in trouble with the crown. He wrote insulting stuff about other kind of you know, pompous court people. As for his literary works, he was probably best known for his translation of the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto's epic Orlando Furioso. Uh and UH we can come back and mention that in a minute. But that's like that doesn't know Orlando Furioso. It's got like a big dragon slaying thing in it. Trying to remember, I know

I came across it when I was in school. That sounds familiar and I feel I feel like I read it in school as well, but I don't recall much about it. But at any right, this Harrington guys that sounds a little bit like he was kind of a brat. Yeah, a little bit. Well, I mean, so he he wrote these poems and epigrams and who boy, you know you can find these online. I don't know, maybe something's lost in the mix here, but if this guy can say dared himself a poet, first, I really hope his toilets

were good. Uh So the poems are full of like really obvious, grown inducing turns of phrase, and then all these kind of caddy burns on other courtiers who he gives these like classical influenced nick nicknames like Sextus and itis Um. It also seems, it seems to me, at least like Harrington was sort of kind of a fan of himself, like he he thought he was pretty cool Robert. Do you feel like reading a couple of his short

little poems here? Oh? Sure? Why not? Okay? So this is uh, this is one he wrote called U a comparison of a book with cheese. Old Haywood writes and proves in some degrees that one may well compare a book with cheese. Every market some by cheese to feed on at every marked. Some men buy books to read on all sorts seat cheese. But how there is the question the poor for food, the rich for good digestion.

All sorts read books. But why will you discern the fool to laugh, the wiser sort to learn the site taste scent of cheese two some is hateful, the site taste sense of books two sums ungrateful. No cheese there was that ever pleased all feeders. No book there is that ever liked all readers. Yeah, I already hate this guy. You're about to like even better. Here. This one's just a short four line epigram. Here it's called against writers that carpet other men's books. This sounds like there's a

little venom. And yeah, um, the readers and the hearers like my books, but yet some writers cannot them digest but what care I for? When I make a feast, I would my guests should praise it, not the cooks. Okay, so it's an A B, B A rhyme scheme there. But I think he's saying like, hey, I don't write for the critics, I write for the fans. Man. I

don't know. I mean, maybe this is all just like if we think of the like the literary uh scene at the time as being like kind of you know, kind of like a like a few driven hip hop culture, than you know, that's probably the place for all of this. Well, there's some of that. I mean, I get the feeling that he was sort of he was sort of like a you know, a man about the court. He was like within the scene. Um, he was he had all these relationships. His poems are very like gossipy, and they're

full of all these burns and stuff. You get the sense they were sort of written written not for a wide audience, but for a select audience who would get the you know who he is anonymously sending his burns at. I also noticed how a lot of his work is about how his poetry is good, how his critics are dumb, and about food and comparing things to food is kind of kind of weird, Alice. I was really thrown back by the idea that the poor eat cheese for food,

but the rich only eat cheese for digestion. That's just I'm I'm missing something there. Yeah, it's like the rich don't need food. What it seems like it reveals some kind of attitude I can't quite put my finger on. Plus, eating nothing but cheese sounds exactly like the kind of thing that some you know, upper class royal would do and then be you know, gouty for it. Didn't Henry

the Eighth die of a surfeit of cheese. But so anyway, So John Harrington, little little godson of Queen Elizabeth the first, John Harrington, he's busy at court. He's trying not to get caught up in political rat traps. And there's a lot of those going on right now, you know, they're they're all these plots and stuff. Uh. He gets in trouble anyway, he writes some terrible poetry, at least in

my opinion. I should point out that around the same time, this is around the same time that Shakespeare is writing his plays, and Christopher Marlowe and At one point, Harrington addresses some of his little barbs and epigrams to somebody named Faustus. I have to wonder if Christopher Marlowe is the target solid Burn referring to to him as the as this great work that he would forever be remembered for. Right, and yet we don't. We didn't even name the toilet

after Harrington's. So I decree all the toilets in the land will be named Harrington's. Alright, So how does he get around to inventing the toy? It sounds like he has a pretty full plate with all of this, Uh, these promos that he's cutting on other literary figures, Well, he's getting in. So he he gets in and out of trouble. Like apparently one of the I mentioned earlier, the thing he's most famous for historically is this translation

of Orlando Furios. So apparently the way the story goes is that he had translated one particularly racy passage and he was sharing it around with ladies of the court, and Queen Elizabeth was not amused, and as punishment for his body behavior and his corruption of good ladies, she told him he would be banished from the court and that he shouldn't bother returning unless he had finished translating

the entire epic poem. So he did, he finished the translation, and he came back, only to get banished again some years later for insults and toilet humor. So sometime in this whole mix, it was in like the fifteen nineties, it seems, I think maybe around fIF so he actually invented the flush toilet. He put together the plan for one, and he installed one in his home, and then later he actually installed one for Queen Elizabeth herself at her

home at Richmond Palace in what was then Surrey. And we have some details on this because in fift Harrington publishes his notes on the invention of the flush toilet in a very strange book length text called a new Discourse on a stale subject called the Metamorphosis of Ajax.

So this book is part description of an invention and part like satire, and then part meditation on excrement and related subjects, uh and a lot of Like it seems like a big part of it is just like a defense of him publishing the book that you're currently read ing. I was trying to understand, like what the real vibe of this work is and it just seems extremely odd. The title is kind of interesting. What's the deal with

the metamorphosis of Ajax? Harrington apparently referred to the flush toilet he had he had invented as Ajax is in like a j a X the character in the Iliad right now, the great Greek warrior. Uh. And so apparently this is a pun on the word Jake's, which was already at the time a slang word for a toilet. Obviously wouldn't be a flush toilet, but for like, you know, normal types of like pit toilets and stuff. It would be like going to the Jake's or you know, I'm

gonna go sit on the Jake's. It's kind of like I need to use the john all right, So now we have the clever nature of the titles revealed, but it's still weird. It's still makes me wonder what stages syphilis was was that at the time. Well, maybe we should take a quick break and then when we come back, we will discuss, uh, we'll discuss the details of Harrington's invention this this flush toilet model. Alright, we're back. So we have a brady, privileged court poet who has managed

to invent, well ahead of its time, a flushing toilet. Yeah, and and wrote a book about it. He calls it a jax. I do like that name. I mean, even though it's kind of a grown inducing pun. A lot of what he seems to be doing is like grown inducing humor. Nevertheless, I like the idea of the toilet being a jax. It's this a keyan hero. Uh so he's he's working on his water closet device. We should say that the water closet device that he made, the ajax,

it no longer exists. There aren't any like models you can find. I like to imagine it was dismantled and its parts used to make gifts for the French royal family. There there aren't any today, but there are like replicas based on the description. And if you see one of these. It's like a huge two level wooden box that looks sort of like an upper piano, and the box hides its inner workings inside these wood panels. Basically has two

major parts. It's got a bowl that you do your stuff in, you know, you poop in the bowl, and then it's got a hole in the bottom of the bowl leading to a drainage pipe and the strainage pipe could go wherever. At the time, of course, there was not like a organized plumbing and sewage system, so it would probably be going into like a pit, you know,

like a cess pit. And then above that you've got a cistern that stores water, just like on the back of not exactly, but much like on the back of like a modern western toilet, you've got a cistern where the flushing water is stored. The bowl itself was waterproofed with pitch and wax and resin, and so when you want to use the toilet, what you do is you lift a handle to release the stopper on the cistern above.

So the cistern's got water on it, You release the stopper and this floods the bowl with water from the cistern. And then when you're done with your business, you lift a second handle and that this releases a stopper at the bottom of the bowl which allows its contents to

flow out into the drain pipe. And we should again emphasize we talked about this in the last episode that while we're focusing on the toilet itself today, like the sewer system that supports the toilet is the probably even more important invention for public sanitation because that you know that's necessary, like a flush toilet that simply drains to the outdoors or something like that. It leads to some of the same problems as other non flushing methods, like

just throwing a chamber pot out the window. At the time of Harrington's invention, there was obviously not a modern sewer system in England, so this may have been an improvement of personal convenience, like within your home, but it wasn't making the public sanitation issue any better. But as popular as like indoor flush toilets are today, you might guess, okay, so this was immediately an overnight sensation, right everybody wanted these things, And that's simply not the case. No, not

at all. So we we only have evidence that Harrington ever built two of them. He built the one for himself and the other one for Queen Elizabeth, and this is probably for well. So there are some serious problems with its design. Right. First, each flush required a ton of water, like it required about seven and a half gallons or twenty eight liters of water every single flush, and you'd have to find some way because they didn't

have indoor plumbing at the time. You know, you'd have to find some way to constantly refill the cistern with water if you wanted to keep flushing, maybe manually with buckets or something, I don't know. And then so, of course that's troublesome work. And then a workaround, of course that Harrington suggested is that, you know, maybe people could just keep using the toilet without flushing it until it was so piled up that it was absolutely necessary. Kind

of if it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down. Yeah, yeah, yeah, except he suggested, you know, maybe you might want to let like twenty people poop in it before you flush, because because you know, it's just so yeah, there's a lot of water. You gotta carry that water up to the thing. Um. This obviously just wasn't the most beautiful option. I'm sure Queen Elizabeth was not a huge fan of just letting the poop pile up in there, so it was It was also

obviously expensive to have one of these things. And if you consider it, even though there was a mechanical stopper for the bowl drain, it probably would have smelled bad, you know, because like, uh, you just get like stuff stuck in there and you have smells coming through. It just doesn't doesn't seem all that great of a design. I'm reminded a lot of the jet pack in a way, you know, because today we have jet packs. We've had jet packs for for decades. But can everybody have a

jet pack? Should everyone have a jet pack? Is the world properly? Um? Is the world ready for everyone to have a jet pack? It's not. And in the same sense, yes, flush toilets existed. Here is the example. And yet you know clearly this was not scalable, like this was something that it was was more of a curiosity than anything. Yeah, exactly, Uh it was. It was an extravagant novel curiosity for

the extremely wealthy. And it wasn't until actually until a couple of hundred years afterwards that really anybody else started trying to build and use flush toilets. Basically, almost nobody else use flush toilets until like the seventeen seventies. So let's go to the seventeen seventies then, So around seventeen seventy five, a watchmaker named Alexander Cumming or Alexander Cummings uh files a patent for a flush toilet, and his design introduces a crucial improvement, and I think this is

a pretty clever one. It introduces the S trap, and this is an ingenious solution for preventing the toilet from becoming a gate becoming a gateway for the demons of odor hell to climb up into your home. Because if you've got like a pipe connecting your toilet that's inside your house to the pit where all of the poop goes, you know, you can imagine that there are going to be some smells coming up through it, so you would

want to find a way to seal it off. In Harrington's water closet, the toilet bowl was sealed with this mechanical stopper plugging a hole in the bottom of the bowl, and after the bowl was flooded with water from the cistern above, you could operate a lever to unplug the stopper and release the contents into the pipe below. With the S trap is different there, the seal between the bowl and the sewer pipe is not just a mechanical stopper.

The Cummings model did have a mechanical stopper. It was like a slide valve, but it's also a seal made of the water itself. So the way it works is like this, the drainage pipe where things leave the toilet. It has a sideways S shaped bend in it. So take a capital S, flip it on its side. I

guess it could be a lowercase S too, huh. You flip it on its side, and then, um, it's always going to be filled with water in the lower part of the bend, right, So the reservoir of sitting water there and the bottom of the sideways S shaped forms this perfect natural seal that prevents sewer gas from escaping up the pipes into your home. And so s traps like this are still used today in in modern drains and drains for sinks and toilets. And so here's some

toilet news you can use. If you have ever noticed that there's like an unused drain in your home that smells bad, it's likely because the trap, like the water in the trap has evaporated and it's no longer forming a seal against the sewer gases below. So the easy fixes to just run some fresh water down the drain to flood the trap again. So I like that S trap. It's very, very brilliant, elegant solution to a problem. And yet at the same time, the Ajax is still undergoing

its metamorphosis. Yes, it is not finished yet. The Ajax is still a kind of clunky, unwieldy figure, kind of like the Ajax. And well, I guess I'm trying to remember. I think of Ajax is kind of like big and buff and clunky. He was kind of graceful too, I guess, you know, I'm not really remembering what a Jax, what his main contribution was. Well, he's like a great warrior. He's one of these are right of course, but he uh.

At the end, he gets into the argument with Odysseus about the armor and then he I think he loses the bait. And then he falls on his sword because he does the I think Athena drives him mad or something. I don't know, and a tensions were runn pretty high, ivolved. I gotta go back and read the Iliot again, I guess. But anyway, so talking about the Ajax machine, so there were some even even though you've got the S trap, there were some kinks incomings design that were worked out

in later models by other inventors. Like, one problem was apparently that it had a sliding valve. So you imagine it's got a valve at the bottom of the toilet bowl. Um that you know, it's different than most of the toilets we see today because it actually had like a lid that would close on the bottom, and this was

like a sliding thing. And this was a problem because of course it could get gross and gunky, Like one of the most beautiful aspects of the modern toilet is that there are no moving parts coming into contact with fecal matter. You're using it correctly, exactly. Yes, yes, that's that's a very good point. So it could get roast

and gunky, and it could freeze and that's not good. Um. So this was later improved by being replaced with a downward opening flap valve, and the patent for this innovation went to a water closet installer, an inventor named Joseph Brahma, though I think there might be some disagreement about whether Brahma himself actually invented this, you know, flap modification, but he held the patent for it. And then this model, the Brahma model, became popular and basically remained popular for

those who could afford it until the mid twentieth century. Uh, and it's it's spread around like that. This did become like a kind of a sensation. Yeah, this was the version of the technology. They really spread and became became

a truly popular way to poop. But as is often the case, I mean, part of the problem with the history of sanitation development and and like indit access to toilet facilities had to do with money, right, It was like people who could afford to install these kinds of toilet facilities, they would have them, but a lot of

people couldn't afford that. Yeah, Like it often reminds me of the fancy garbage can scenario, you know, like, how how much are you willing to pay for the thing in which you are going to put trash right when a simpler model will will do the job, you know. So Yeah, for many people that the idea of a flushing toilet was just ludicrous for for a number of reasons, most of which were financial. But I think one of the big things that helped push toilet technology along was

the development of sewer infrastructure to support it. That made it that made it not just a thing that's nice to have, not just a more aesthetically pleasing way to have a home, but also a major part of public health and so like in the mid nineteenth century in London, for example, it's a good example of London is getting very crowded. You've got the Industrial Revolution. Crowded London was becoming just unbearable, and in many ways because of its

sewage and sanitation system. So you've got a crowded city. Lots of people are using chamber pots and just emptying them in the streets or where there are other generally uncontained ways of disposing of human waste, for example, water closets like the Brahma toilets, not connected to a dedicated

sewage system for waste. In these methods, you just have sewage draining off into simple sewers that were originally designed to just accept and channel rainwater um and of course then these sewers would later become sources of drinking water for other people, or the sewage would just end up in the River Thames and other water sources. So in this period the city and the river just stank. Supposedly, it was awful. Like in the e in eighteen fifty Uh.

The English magazine Punch published the cartoon I've got here of what was supposed to be like a close up illustration of what a drop of water from the Thames must look like. Basically, it's full of like it's got skeletal murder clowns, and it's got this snapping turtle with big hug arms, and it's got a hieronymous bosh type birdman from Alabolga. It's just like crazy. I wish political cartoons were still this creative instead of just being like some caricature of you know, like an ugly guy that

has like taxes written on it. But anyway, the point it's making is that, hey, we've got a problem. You know, the river that runs through the middle of our city is becoming absolutely filthy. And uh. Of course, during the first half of the eighteen hundreds there were we've talked about on Stuff to Blow your Mind before, frequent collar out breaks, I mean all over the place and whenever there's like crowded human civilization. But they were frequently going

on in London. We did the we did an episode about uh, the this epidemiological history and UH an episode of Stuff to blow your mind on miasthma theory that you can go and check out. But the short story there is that a surgeon named John Snow in mid nineteenth century London eventually showed that the cause of these collar outbreaks was the consumption of unclean water which was

tainted by mixing with sewage. And in the summer of eighteen fifty eight, all this septic horror culminated in this event that is known in history as the Great Stink or the Great Stink of London, when the foul odor of the Thames in the city was just overwhelming. A commonly cited story about this period is that members of Parliament were so like panicked to get rid of the stink they doused the curtains of their chamber and chloride

of lime to try to counteract the smell. It's also like, you know, just huff some chlorine and see if that wards it away. But pretty soon after this, Parliament authorized the construction of a new sewer system, and uh, and of course you know that it's like classic politician issues, right, like there's a major public problem and then nothing gets done about it until it like personally affects them, until

you're actually dousing your drapes with chlorine. But of course the installation of the sewer system was was a great thing for England. During the eighteen sixties and seventies, there was this engineer named Sir Joseph basil get Uh. He had plans for a contained sewer and drainage system and during the sixties and seventies these were built. And so the main benefit of the sewer system was that it would keep sewage separate from the water supply, and this

of course was this huge revolution in public health. Like they they found afterwards that of course well drained areas that had this sewer system functioning uh and safely removing sewage were kept free from cholera epidemics that broke out in other areas in the following years. And I think this brings us to a major issue from this era that we need to consider about um, about the toilet

and about sewer systems. While the flush toilet in the form of the nineteenth century water closet the ajax was a great invention in a way, it did not make things better on its own, or at least not in a public way, because simply flushing your untreated waste out into channels mingled with downstream drinking water actually makes things like worse than simply pooping in a pit latrine. In order to improve public health and save lives, the flush

toilet couldn't exist on its own. It had to be paired with a safe, dedicated sewage system to deal with waste properly. It's only because of public infrastructure that the toilet could become all it could be. Absolutely it reminds me of our recent discussion of wheels. You know, the wheel is great, the wheel card is great, but you've got to have roads. You've got to have some sort of system, uh that that allows you to maximize this technology.

This is a really common theme that's coming up in invention history is that people often have this idea of like, you know, technological revolutions happening because a lone inventor had a brilliant idea and that one idea changed everything. That seems like it's it's so rarely that that's the case. I mean, major technological revolutions tend very often to depend on large investments in public infrastructure to support the new technology.

That's an excellent point. And on that note, we're gonna take one more break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about Thomas Crapper, and we're going to talk about the I can see of the flush toilet. Okay, we're back, so it's time to talk about Thomas Crapper. We know now he did not invent the flush toilet? But what was the role of Mr Thomas Crapper? And I noticed I was doing this when I was like

making notes for this episode. I don't know why my brain keeps doing this, But I don't usually call random historical dudes MR when I type their names. But I wonder if like talking about toilets and makes me naturally tend towards sort of pointless formality, maybe an interesting psychological thing to return. Maybe you just feel weird referring to him as Crapper, and you feel like you need to designate that you're talking about a person and you're not

using a crude term for a toilet. I'm distinguishing him from Dr Thomas Crapper. All right, Well, Thomas Crapper enters the picture in the eighteen sixties, and basically what he does is he redesigns and supplies high end plumbed in products. So we're talking the likes of the cast iron bath shower combo, elaborate shower screens, cast iron pedestal wash binds. Uh. You know, he installed some extra mirrors, hot and cold

mixture taps. He improved the s Ben plumbing trap uh that we talked about in the eighteen eighties and invented the U Ben plumbing trap. Uh. And then but you know this is all part of all It's not just one plumber going around doing all this. He founded Thomas Crapper and Company in London, a sanitary equipment company, and he held nine patents, three for water closet designs such as the floating ballcock inside the toilet tank. But he didn't actually patent a toilet. So we have to double

down on what we said earlier. Not only did he not invent the toilet, he didn't even reinvent the toilet, but he did improve upon some of the the details of the design. Yeah, his major role seems to be more case of like owning a business and practicing good

branding of actual invention. Uh. You know everywhere around the world will associate my name with toilets, and appairly this happened because like you know, you'd go and look inside toilets and in Great Britain and they just say crapper in them, And this helped to lead to the two people calling the toilet a crapper in a vulgar way. Though you're probably now wondering, Thomas Crapper is his name and association with the toilet the origin of the term

crap meaning human excrement. Before I looked this up, I was thinking, well, maybe it is. Maybe the term comes from his name and his association with the toilet, because it would seem a huge coincidence, right that this, this guy who made his his his money off of the toilet would be named crapper. Actually, it just is a huge coincidence his The word crap does not come from

his name. So the word crap comes in English. It comes from originally the Old French crap or crape, from the Middle Latin crappa words meaning something like siftings or chaff. So the original use of the word crap in English refers to things dropped or cast away or discarded. So you can see why this might come to mean excrement, right, It's the thing you throw away or shed. Okay, So when when we're using the word now and we're referring

to our stuff is our crap? Like that is actually more the more authentic use of the word kind of Yeah, it's it's the stuff that could be, you know, it's it's execrable. Yeah, Like I left all my crap at the hotel. Well I've got to go go back for that. That's the authentic use of crap. Well, I don't know, if you really want it back, then maybe it's not crap, though, I guess you're just like being cynical. They're you know, like that's all crap and I could lose it all

it doesn't matter, funny enough. This also seems to be uh very similar to the etymology of another English word, which comes from the Anglo Saxon skitton and turn from the Proto Germanic skit, meaning to cut or shear or split, in other words, to separate from the body. And just because as this sent me down a rabbit trail that I ended up finding interesting, the root of the English

word science is also apparently somewhat related here. So the word science comes from Latin scientia or scientia knowledge and from skierra or to know, which in Latin is probably derived from the proto Indo European, which of course is like the granddaddy language of of many languages around the world.

Uh ski or sky, meaning to cut or separate, because I think the the logic of this word is when you know things, you separate fact from fiction, you separate truth from falsehood, and so knowledge and science is sort of metaphorically a cutting and separating process. Another one of these wonderful examples of abstract words in language with concrete metaphorical roots. But anyway, whether you are crapping or science ng, some part of you is cutting away and separating. All right, Well,

let's get to the modern toilet. Then let's get let's get to the modern western flushing toilet dealing with here now there, of course, there are plenty of different designs for like what you do when it's time to use the toilet, right uh, And we can talk about those as we go on. But one of the features that I think many modern toilets uh can really boast about this really cool, is that they don't bother with solid valves at the bottom of the bowls and do like

like some airplane toilets do. Right, But that's a whole different kettle of fish. We'll have to come back to airline toilets and space toilets in the future, right Instead, in in a lot of these modern toilets, it's all just water and pipe design making use of the physics concept of a siphon. So, Robert, have you ever made a siphon? Oh? Yes, of course, every time I use

the drinking straw. Oh exactly. Yeah, So, like you know, of course, a siphon, Like you can put one bucket up on a counter and another bucket down on the floor, and you can, like if you put a hose between them and you start sucking water up into the hose from the top one and then put the bottom of the hose in the bottom bucket, it'll drain all the way down, even though the water has to go up

into the hose from the top bucket. Yeah. I feel like if you've, if you've ever you know, spend enough time playing with like a you know, one of those those those cheap yard swimming pools and a hose as

a child, you probably did this. Yeah. Um. So in the most common model of like the modern western toilet, there's always water sitting in the bowl and the evacuation pipe where the stuff goes away from the bottom of the bowl, it curves up when it leaves the bowl, it curves up higher than the water level within the toilet before snaking back down under the floor. And this keeps the water sitting in the toilet without draining out

when it's not being flushed. And it also forms a type of s trap to block sewer gases from from escaping into the house. So then when it's time to flush, water from the cistern is released down into the bowl. This raises the water level above the bend in the pipe, which of course causes the water to begin draining down into the lower part of the pipe, which sucks all the contents out of the bowl by a siphon action. And something about me just finds this a really beautiful

and elegant solution. I love the fact that the toilet doesn't need to have a trap door or anything like that in the bottom of it. It's just a correctly shaped pipe. Absolutely, and again we should we should, We should thank the universe every day that that is the case. Yeah, uh yeah. And so another thing, of course, is that

there are other components. Like you you could talk about how the cistern tends to work in a toilet with the sister and the It tends to have components like a float which is designed to measure the right amount of water to allow into the sister, and like one of the things that Thomas Crapper held one of the patents for was the ballcock right, which floats up and it like trips a switch that says, hey, you can stop filling the cistern with water now because the water

level has reached the right level. And there's all that kind of stuff. But the basic principles of the toilet, well, we don't often think about them. Once you see how it works, it's actually very simple. It's very elegant. It's

a beautiful machine. Yeah, I will say that I'm not really a handy person at all, but I I've recently repaired uh, the the machinery and the tank of my toilet when something was off and I was able to look up a video on YouTube, follow the instructions, make the repair of myself, and I just felt like a million bucks afterwards. It's a great feeling, isn't it like fixing the water appliants? Yeah, But then also it's like you can you can see it all working like it all,

It all makes sense. You know, when when you when you when you when you can you can flush the toilet. Watch watch these mechanisms move, Watch the water level change. Uh, you know, it's very it's very you can absorb it very easily. But as we talked about in the last episode, the toilet is not just a beautiful and elegant machine to admire from a design point of view. Of course, it does provide a ton of convenience in our lives, but also, as we said last time, the toilet saves lives.

They said again, toilets save lives. This is a life and death issue. This is a major important technology that that needs that we need to improve access to all around the world. Yeah, I mean yeah, we really have to to stress the sanitation issues here. Um, you know, and it you know, it reminds me of another issue with with with waste and the spread of illnesses and parasites,

especially hookworms. Hookworms being you know, a parasite that can can cause illness in humans and these will typically be acquired in sail, latrine field um and basically a parasites are acquired when bare feet come into contact with infected feces, they enter through the feet and they make their way

into the hosts and testines, resulting and anemia mannutrition. And in the early twentieth century, John D. Rockefeller funded a campaign to decrease huge hookworm infections in the American South, and one of the key methods was to impose latrine pits of at least four feet, as microscopic hookworms can travel up to four feet in soil from a side

of defecation. Yeah, and so this emphasizes again that like if you're not removing sewage to like a treatment facility or something like that, or you know, there are all kinds of variables that come into play about how safe like a pit storage kind of thing can be. You want to keep it closed to prevent like flies and stuff from getting out, but also if it's not sealed off from the ground soil, if it's not dug deep enough, you can encounter problems as well. Now I have to

stress that I do really love my current plumbing situation. Uh, and I really especially after these episodes, I really am thankful for my functional toilet. But I sense a butt coming. You've got beef, I do, I do, and it's twofold. On one hand, there's the there's the just the weirdness of the fact that that when you flush a toilet, you are flushing unless you have a gray water system hooked up in some way, shape or form, and you

are flushing drinking water. You're using perfectly drinkable water, uh to send your urine fecis down into the sewer. It would be great if there was a gray water system for right, and people have worked in some places these are in place. And then of course in some parts of the world you're going to have a toilet that is not using drinkable water to flush, just by virtue of the availability of drinkable water. Okay, so that's one

ridiculous level. But the other is that the western toilets have rebranded defecation is something that should be done from a seated position, uh, you know, the throne, the chair, when naturally the human body evolved to defecate from a squatting position, and plenty of people still do it this way, especially in Asia, Africa, in the Middle East. Squat toilets can still be found all over the place in these areas, utilizing modern flushing aesthetics. In many cases and functionality, but

with the basic concept of squatting still in play. I think squatting toilets are becoming trendy in the West, too, aren't they. Well, not full blown squatting toilets where they where you squat over the floor based apparatus. You'll see more like the squatty potty, which I have a squatty potty. I love it. Uh but it allows you to essentially use a Western thrown toilet, but with more of a

squatting posture, which again is what our bodies evolved to do. Likewise, you can get some toilet seats that have room for your bare feet to uh to to to rest on, so you can squat over that. I've never used one of those, but but but I'm interested because that's that's that's basically how my son likes to use a toilet. Uh so maybe that's what I need to get him

down the line. Now, toilet designs continue to evolve. We were utilizing high tech bells and whistles typified by some of the Japanese toilets that we often see featured in videos. It's almost a cliche at this point, like the high tech Japanese toilet, right, Yeah, various buttons that you can push for. I mean, some of it may it's perfect sense, Like being able to call for help from the toilet is a great idea, especially if you're dealing with with

an elderly population. One thing I've seen that I thought was kind of interesting was a I believe this was Japanese, but I'm not positive, but it was a toilet that has built in sort of like noisemaker. Uh that. So there's of course a common cultural phenomenon of people being embarrassed about the sounds they make when they're on the

toilet in a place where people can hear them. So if you're in a public bathroom, in a stall or something, you're using a toilet, people will often just continuously flush the toilet to cut because it's loud and that covers up the sounds of what they're doing. But that also wastes a lot of water. You don't need to do that. So a way around that is you can you can help accommodate people sense of embarrassment and modesty without wasting all the water by just having a loud flushing sound

play when you press a button. Well, I think the Romans might have been onto something here with having live music in the toilet. Maybe we should go that route. Maybe not live music, but maybe just piped in um like loud rock music. Maybe that will be better for everybody. Just save you'll save money. Uh. I guess two other key innovations here. One that I think is is excellent, and that is various low flush features, which I'll save the amount of water reduced the amount of water that

you're you're doing to flush your business. Another innovation that I absolutely despise is the auto flush toilet, in which a yeah will decide when you need a flush, and it almost at least the ones that I've ever used, almost always decides to flush at the the the absolute wrong time and will end up flushing too many times or just phantom flushing. Uh, you know, with nobody in there. There's a toilet in the building here. One time that I encountered that was just forever flushing. It was stuck

in eternal flush. It never stopped. Like I I seriously, I end up wasting extra toylet paper because my first step is to mask the sensor with toilet paper, to to wrap to give it a blindfold so that it won't scare me and friends, and like, I don't need to feel like a predator is about to attack me while I'm doing my business. And I've done the same one. I've had to take my son to the toilet. It's

like it's gonna scare It's gonna scare him. It's just ridiculous. So, I mean it's a great idea ultimately, but I think the sensor technology is not quite there. Are you the person who keeps vandalizing the auto toilets and our building? There's no need to vandalize them, I want to I want to stress that because people do literally take them apart. Yeah, but there's no need to do that. You can just wrap some toilet paper around their sensor, blindfold the toilet

and it'll be fine. Now. Another interesting bit of difference in cultural toilet design, uh is the the flox spuler plate in older German toilets. Did you did you ever encounter any? I don't think so. So I got to experience some of these when I went on high school trip to Germany back I guess it was like the late nineties. They weren't everywhere, but they were some of

the places, and apparently you don't find as many anymore. Um, Basically, it's it's very much just like any other Western toilet, except there's kind of a raised plate upon which the fecal matter will will fall and then when you flush, it's uh, it's flushed away off of that little plate. And contrary to what you might have heard, these are

not examination plates. That was kind of like the the I don't know, the not not even an urban legend, but it was just like false information where people say, oh, that's so that you can poop, and then you want to look at your poop and it's on a plate for you to see it, you know. Rather, the feature was aimed at preventing you from splashing yourself with toilet

water when you defecated. Yeah, well that's a smart idea, I agree, But apparently they you can you can design a toilet in such a way that maybe there's less splash without having to use the plate, because the drawback to a plate is that sometimes it requires more brushing of the toilet bowl. Now, speaking of toilet bowl innovation, we would be remiss if we didn't mention the infamous masculine toilet. Yes, this has been in the news. Yeah,

championed by former acting United States Attorney General Matt Whittaker. Yeah. What he was representing some business that like, uh they what they claim to sort of like be advocates on behalf of inventions. And one of the inventions that somebody was doing business with them with was this this toilet for how did they put it? What was the polite terminology?

Well endowed men? Yes, the idea being that that, oh, well, these men their penises are longer, and if they sit on the toilet, their penis is going to get in the water of the toilet, and therefore they need more distance between seat and water. Um, which you know. I I would argue that this could be avoided in plenty of other ways, such as you could use a squatty potty. I think that would probably help, or just basic manipulation

and an awareness of one's own genitals. Uh. But I also I can't help but wonder, and maybe this is something that is detailed in the patent information or the literature surrounding the masculine toilet is wouldn't it results in a maximum splashdown It's like a giant deep bowl. Yeah yeah, so it seems like, yeah, okay, you can sit on the toilet and you can feel like, you know, you don't have to worry about your anatomy touching the water until you know the fecal matter drops like five feet

and then splashes up like a torpedo went off. So I don't know. I have a lot of questions about the practicality of the masculine toilet. I think it's only twelve inches, but that seems actually that's like the worst distance, right, Yeah, that that seems like that would be maximum splashdown distance. If it were five feet, Yeah, you'd be fine. You don't have to climb up a ladder to get on your toilet, and then it would make you look like a tiny person on a giant toilet, which probably runs

against like the masculine impulse of the design, right. I'd have to imagin jen if anybody actually bought something like that, it was probably not someone who literally needed it. They just they needed the world to to think they needed it. But maybe we're wrong. Hey, if if anyone listening out there has used a masculine toilet, uh, let us do not email us. Do not. I don't want to hear

about it. That I seriously do want to hear about anybody any kind of toilet we've we've discussed here, any kind of latrine situation if you have insightful um experience with them, be it a various so squat toilet, squatty potties, um dry latrines, wet latrines, washing versus um wiping. I want to hear about all of it. You know we can.

We can withhold the names as necessary. Okay, I gotta finish today with a with a great story about toilet technology and and a flush fiasco from the twentieth century history. Do you want to hear about when a toilet sik a Nazi submarine? Oh? Yes, please? So had you come across this story before? I had not. No, I had

rebly thought much about U boats and toilets. Really, Oh, I mean, yeah, that's inherently a fascinating subject, right, So on April fourteenth, you had a German U boat called You one two oh six that was forced to surface after a German officer screwed up the toilet and caused poison gas to vent into the crew areas. So, unfortunately we know this officer's name, and he will be remembered

in history. The officer was named Captain Lieutenant Carl Adolph Schlit, and the submarine was so it was traveling submerged I think, in the North Sea. It was off the coast of Scotland, and this particular U boat had been fitted with a new model of underwater toilet that was supposed to work at greater depths, I think, and there might be some kind of pressure pressurization issue going on, I'm not sure, but so anyway, for whatever reason, it was a new

model of toilet. And the story goes that Schlit did his business on this new high tech toilet but couldn't

figure out how he was supposed to flush it. Uh So he called in tech support and the engineer who arrived apparently pulled the wrong lever or something, operated the machine incorrectly, and seawater flooded in and it soaked a bunch of electrical batteries underneath the toilet, which in turn started releasing poisonous chlorine gas into the cabin and then the boat was forced to go to the surface to

ventilate with the outside air because the poison gas. But it was in enemy waters off the coast of Scotland, and Allied aircraft quickly attacked it. Then the boat was damaged and the crew was forced to abandon ship somehow. I'm sure this is not the only case in history of critical problems caused by pooping on a submarine. It had to have happened before. But this is the story of car of a Carl Adolf Schlitt. That is interesting. I've never heard that one before. But like, this was

the new model. It was perhaps it was invented because of previous problems, so it was there perhaps a whole string of other U boat just general submarine in bathroom issues. I mean, we've covered on the show before and stuff to blow your mind. Anyway, the history of of toilets in in orbit, toilets in in in microgravity, and like that's that's a whole engineering fiasco into itself. But it's

also amazing. I mean, if you ever wanted to poop into a vacuum cleaner as opposed to just pooping into a bag, which was the earlier option, right, everybody else wanted to poop into a vacuum cleaner. Who hasn't thought about that? All Right, Well, we're gonna leave it there with pooping into the vacuum cleaner, because it does make you wonder, like, what does the future hold for the toilet? To what extent have we we reach peak toilet? I mean we keep we We do see new models, new

innovations coming out every year. There are toilet companies that depend on finding new twists, pushing new designs. So I wonder what humans will be pooping into and say a hundred years, two hundred years. Yeah, one thing I could mention in my re search I came across there was an article that had a quote from a Dutch architect named Rim Kolas, and he said that the toilet, this is where you put it. It's the fundamental zone of interaction,

on the most intimate level between humans and architecture. Okay, I can kind of see that. Yeah, it's almost like where we're built. Because like, you've got other furniture in your house, but you can move that around usually or you don't have such a deeply intimate relationship with it as you do with the toilet, but usually not. Yeah, most people do not have a carnal relationship with their furniture, but everybody has a very intimate relationship with the toilet. Yeah,

so I like thinking about it like that. It's almost like it's the you know you mentioned earlier that like the s pipe is sort of like the century that they were, the trap whatever it is that the water trap that the century that guards the gates and doesn't let demons from odor hell come up into your house. The toilet is also sort of like a diplomat. Uh. It's it's how you interface with the world of infrastructure beyond, most most deeply, and most fundamentally. It's what it's how

you interface your body with the sewer. It's communion with the arteries of civilization and modern sanitation. It does make me wonder, however, how did the toilets on the Starship Enterprise work? Do you think they're like teleporter based? Well, I would guess that they probably just atomize the uh, the stuff and turned it into raw materials to be used in the what's it called the you know the stuff that the what's it called the replicated? Yeah? Okay, yeah,

I mean it's just atoms. Why not? Yeah, no problem with that. I mean, poop is poop is unclean, but atoms aren't unclean. That's right. You reduce everything to its basic atoms. It's it's all good and it only takes the energy of like thirty thousand nuclear bomb. All right, Well, again, we'd love to hear from everyone out there if you have any insight on the the the evolution of the toilet uh toilet technology across the ages, and indeed where

it will go in the future. Perhaps there there is a wonderful treatment of of of science fiction uh toilets out there, and we'd love to hear about that as well. If you want to check out other episodes of Invention, head on over to invention pod dot com. That's where you'll find all the episodes. You'll find links out her very social media accounts. If you want to talk about the show with other listeners and with us, you should

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