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I'm your toilet enthusiast, Hunter Hoover, and then I love bathrooms. So a couple of things to tell you about how we're going to get to where we're going this week. Last week we heard from a friend of the pod and we had a little Privy chat, you know, and we heard his story of terror. in his mother-in-law's house and no plunger on the scene. ah It's a hard thing to conceive of, having that situation and having all that to deal with and just no plunger yet. It's challenging out there.
Also, I had the astute pleasure of getting to plunge a toilet at work this week. You know it's a good week when at 7 a.m. you're plunging a toilet. uh That was real great. And the thing is, is I got to tell you, like, it wasn't even that hard of a plunge. It was really like a two pump situation and it was dealt with. So it wasn't necessarily that it was a robust thing. It was a classic instance of way too much TP folded up. And, you know, if that's how much you need, that's totally fine.
I'm not here to tell you how much toilet paper to use. Although I think I am on record saying three sheets is or three squares is what you need per wipe. And so just by looking at the sheer volume of paper in the toilet bowl, I would say we were looking at a 42 square situation, if I had to guess. But yeah, tried the flush, water started to rise, and you're usually good for one. That's usually how it works. So you get that one flush and that's usually totally fine.
But if you go for flush number two, you know that you're usually going to get into danger zone there. So plunged it. It was a two plunger situation. Not too bad. But with these two things in mind, this week on privy, we're talking all things plungers. Where did they come from? How did they get in my bathroom? Mine's right here. It's got a nice little holder. Thanks, Target. You sold me a cool little holder for it.
Why do sores sell plungers that aren't designed for toilets, but they tell you they're designed for toilets? What the heck's up with that? They're not designed for toilets. We're going to talk about that today. What do I do if there is no plunger? Shout out to last week. What do I do in the event of the last 10 minutes? Have necessitated having one like where do you go? What do you turn to?
So the topic of this week, the toilet plunger has a myriad of assumed uses and associations over the years. And the thing is this, it's kind of entered pop culture. I'm Larry Boy's ear attachment and the little suction cup climbing a wall like Spider-Man. You got plunger darts. I know there's a video online of dudes throwing plungers as trick shots and getting them to stick. It's pretty cool. And these sticky buds have come a long way.
But as we're going to find out, the plunger has really come much, much farther than we would maybe have expected. And so before we look at the plunger and in all of its glory, we need to talk about where did this little guy come from? What is the history of the plunger? So, little bit of plunger history here. Yeah, plunger history. The plunger's origins, they're somewhat contested.
Some say it didn't arrive in bathrooms until the 1900s and others say that it rises in using wood and rubber to design products in the 1800s and that they would suggest that the rise in those two things in manufacturing materials would suggest that it came from there. What's interesting though is that both of those like timeframes, 1800s and 1900s, are both technically right. So here's what's going on.
The first patent for a plunger was taken out by Mr. John Hawley in Staten Island, New York in 1874. upon hearing this information, it could be easy to assume that Mr. Hawley worked around or near or possibly on toilets. And that would be a fair assumption because that's kind of what plungers are for. But Perhaps he was a plunger manufacturer or perhaps he sold toilets or probably didn't because you anyway, maybe he was a climber looking for a new interesting way to get up a wall.
No, John Holly grew up in a farming family. so Mr. Holly grows up in a farming family, but he left the family farm at the age of 21 and he left the farm to go. sell jewelry and other fancy goods with his brother in Texas. Dude rolls up on 21 years old, he heads out west, he's going to Texas, he's leaving the big city, he's heading out to Texas to sell jewelry and fancy goods. Fancy goods. That seems like something that they were looking for back then in Texas.
But when the Civil War was on the verge, Holly ran away from Texas to Mexico. He had some union leanings, and Texas at the time was a moderately Confederate area. And so he fled to Mexico. ah Well, he fled Texas by way of Mexico, escaped the country, and then came north where he settled in Nevada and worked as a clerk for a mining company. And while he worked at the mining company, he would move on from that gig to become a lumber dealer. So the dude sold wood.
And you you're hearing this story as I'm telling this so far. It's like, a little farm boy heads out. Farm boy in New York, first of all, it's not your normal what you think of. But again, this is like 150 years ago. So it's a long time. And he heads out to Texas to sell fancy goods, escapes Texas because of the Civil War. settles in Nevada, working for a mining company, running a logging company, or I guess a lumber company. He might not have been doing the logging himself.
But, Hawley returned to New York in 1870, and again, nothing in this is screaming plunger yet. Nothing. But he returns to New York in 1870, and he joined the Wallace & Company confectionery as a junior partner. Now, for the layman, a confectionary is a person who is just a regular Willy Wonka. They're just producing goodies and sweets and delicious treats. So that is who Holly goes and joins up with. He's a confectioner. He's making chocolates and yum yums. And he's working as a candy man.
And during this time, John Holly designed what he called the cleaner. And it was modified years later and called the Elastic Force Cup, which is a wonderful name and possibly a name that I think we should return to, the Elastic Force Cup. So it's believed that he designed his force cup to cut down on plumbing costs.
So the candy company, you know, they've got sugar and sweets and all sorts of stuff and their plumbing probably wasn't as good back then and they're rinsing it down and they're getting clogs and they had to like, redo the plumbing and do all this stuff. And so Holly comes up with this elastic force cup and to save on having to redo the plumbing or having to call a plumber.
If they can grab this suction cup wand and plunge the chocolate bits, mean, real actual chocolate bits this time, not like euphemism for poopy bits, actual chocolate bits. From the pipes at the confectionary, The situation is de-escalated and it's much less expensive. So he filed his patent for this elastic force cup in 1874 and he made gangbusters on it.
And from there, you know, the dude's got a sweet patent, people are buying and buying these things, they gotta get their hand on the elastic force cup. You would think, From there, he would go on to be dealing in plungers, but that is not the case because Mr. Hawley liked being a candy man because the candy man can. And he used the money he made off his fancy new patent, Force Cup, to go back into the chocolate business.
He went into business with Herman Hoops to form one of the most successful candy companies of its time, Hawley and Hoops Candy Company. It's suggested they took out a patent. to form and make chocolate candy cigars, which you have to imagine that kind of looks like a turd. I mean, you have a chocolate brown cigar, long tubular shape that has to look like a poopy. Just saying. We wouldn't be privy if we didn't say something looked like poop.
So, Holly and Hoops Candy Company, and technically, Holly and Hoops is still in business, technically, because they were purchased by Mars Candy Company in 1952 and they merged into the company as a whole over time. Hawley's legacy in the Hawley and Hoops Candy Company lives on because he was remembered primarily as being an honest, fair-dealing businessman. He advocated for the removal of harmful and unnecessary unnecessary fillers in chocolate and candy.
He donated a large sum of his money to build a boys school in New York, donated to build one of the first churches of Christian science, which could stand as an unfortunate legacy. And he got involved with what I'd like to call cuckoo Healy people. But Popeyesnerfic, like the guy, the guy cared enough about his product to make it better. And he was producing good candy so much so that the Morris Company purchased them outright in order to, I think, adopt some of these candy production ideals.
I'm gonna focus on the important parts that talk about how this man got us a plunger. One of his chocolate factories, though, was repurposed and renovated in 2007 to become the Mulberry Street branch of the New York Public Library. So if you're in New York, Mulberry branch of the Public Library, I've never been there. If you're hearing this and you're in New York, shout at us, privy cast, tell us what's up. But that used to be one of his chocolate factories.
The dude was like a weird religious Willy Wonka who loved chocolate, was into some kind of weird science, fake science stuff. And he looked for ways to give back and make change. And that gets a thumbs up in my book. But what about the plunger? That's why we're here, Hunter. Like we all love candy, but you promised to tell us about the plunger. So why don't you do it? History has almost forgotten that Holly invented the elastic force cup.
And it seems that Holly was perfectly comfortable with allowing his ties to the suction device to fall by the wayside because the dude is a candy man. He's trying to do the Willy Wonka thing. He does not want to be the one who is like known for the device that pushes crud through your pipes. So it's fine if he was cool with not being remembered, but as they dig up old patents and find the history of this stuff, it is found that he invented this thing.
But it has not made its way into the bathroom. That should be noted. It's being used to plunge sinks primarily and drains. He probably thought it bad for business. Holly didn't invent. the force cup for use in bathrooms. Likely it was again used in kitchens and sinks and other drains. So how did the force cup get to be associated and essentially stored in the bathroom? Like that's where mine lives.
Well, 20 years after the elastic force cup and VentClear was invented and patented, A modification was made and a new product was put on the market under the name The Plumber's Friend. The term force cup was still being widely used up until the 1920s and it didn't overtake the use of force cup until 1970.
So you had The Plumber's Friend and you had the force cup and these two things are essentially the same but like different starts and The idea of a force cup is used up until the 1920s and it wasn't until the 1970s that the plumber's friend started to be the more common term. And a big reason for this is that the plunger up until this time was what we would call a stopper or a plug. Now this is where we get even wilder. So we were gonna talk about plungers.
Hunter has talked about elastic force cups and plumber's friends. And now he has introduced a new word, that is the word we thought was a word that we knew, but it was actually something that wasn't what we thought we knew it was. So, the plunger was the stopper or plug that you would stick in a drain. They had drain plungers. They plunged into the drain to stop sinks or baths. So, if that's a plunger, then this new tool is now in the same room. They can't call the new tool a plunger as well.
It has to be called something else. Thus, the plumber's friend. So when trying to figure out where the plunger came from, people began to find stoppers and plugs instead of plungers. So for a long time, when you looked up like, history of plunger, it would give you these stoppers, these rubber stoppers that you would stick in your sink or bath to stop the water.
And then it would be like halted because you would get on this weird rabbit trail when It was really Plumber's friend, Elastic Force Cup that you had to like go seek out to figure out where it came from. Another deterrent to the history, to like discovering the history of where the plunger comes from, it took a long time. This plunger closet was this place and then the plunger in the plunger closet was again in 1777.
It's a while ago, was a place where it was this rubber stopper that was in the toilet that kept the leaving from passing through. So this is what's going on. When you flush or plunge, the stopper is removed. So you essentially have this little rubber gasket that you would somehow put down in there and then like, and I guess this is still in play up top in the top zone of your toilet, but it would keep all of the poopy matter from like sliding down into the pipe.
and then like you would add water and then you would pull that and it would like force it all down and through relatively quickly. So the materials are then allowed to pass through when you remove the plunger in the plunger closet, which was like again, another word for privy because of the mechanism that it used to flush plunger closet. So a plunger here is again, still just a stopper and not a plunger.
It took a long time for the word plunger to make its way over to the devices that we use to unstop toilets and drains today. But aren't we glad we did. Plunger's a great name. I would argue though that the Elastic Forest Cup is a better name and maybe we need to return to that. That's kind of the history of the plunger. Thank you Mr. John Hawley for your Candyman success and changing chocolate, but also changing how we unstop our drains. Good on ya.
But we gotta now look at the etiquette of plungers. We know the sweet candy coated beginnings of a plunger. Let's look at the less sweet dookie coated present of them. Before we begin, I want to note a normal flat bottom plunger is not used for toilets. When you roll into Walmart or Shop Mart or Goosemart or whatever mart you're marting at, you mart in, you mart up, and you mart out. You go in, you find the plunger. You're probably gonna find one with flat bottom. I need to tell you something.
That ain't for a toilet. Do... you can use it for a toilet but you will not have as high degrees of success. Rather, those are used for sinks and bathtubs. Those are used for flat drains where you can provide a seal with the cup of the plunge buddy. So, toilet plungers have this like, conal looking shape at the bottom that'll actually allow the end of that cone to stick down into the like, holy part, not holy, like, H-O-L-Y, holy H-O-L-E-Y.
Part of your toilet and actually provide almost like a neck seal inside of... It's just a different thing. Like that little cone, again, goes down in your toilet and it actually provides like a little bit more of a seal as you try to plunge the bits out. It's wild. Another thing that here at Privy... We're passionate about setting straight. What plungers are used for what? So what is the etiquette for plunger use? Right up front, before continuing, let me say this.
If it's clogged, you need to get it unclogged. And this is not to like throw some shade at our friend from last week. Like you went looking. You tried. Good on you. But if you if you've clogged it, you can't leave it. You got to unclog it like And as a janitor, I come into a bathroom again this week with a dang force cup sitting inches away from the toilet that is clogged. The noise is just jam full of turds and paper and other materials. I've plunged all sorts of stuff out of toilets.
The reality is, you clog it, you need to at least try and plunge it out. You need to at least try. If you can't find one, we're gonna get to that in a second. So, first etiquette piece. If there is no plunger, you gotta do one of two things. Ask for a plunger or let someone know that you have clogged the bog. Now, again, that was not something that could always be pursued. And that's what made that.
That's what made our friend's story last week so entertaining was because like he was going through the channels and the channels were not being traveled. It was delightful to hear that catastrophe happen. Someone eventually, though, has to undo what you did. It can't stay in there forever. It's not a black hole. It came from one, but it's not a black hole. So it has to get dealt with.
And I think there is more shame in leaving your stink logs floating for others than admitting that you did it and you gotta plunge that noise. Always, always plunge it. If you got a sink problem, plunge it. A sink plunger will work for a toilet, but a toilet plunger is better for a toilet. That's all there is to it. So we assume you are doing your duty of plunging.
But you're not done because once you have plunged and again here is here is like the the physics of plunging you push the plunger in and you try to create the best seal with it and the surface of the the toilet or sink or whatever you're plunging and then you just kind of pump and I recommend giving it like some some back and forth like suction back and forth because that's going to bust up and move the pieces that are clogged back and forth and help get that free movement going.
Then when it seems like it's done, generally a toilet's water will clear itself and that's how you know you've succeeded. That's when you know that you did a good job. If it doesn't but it seems like the water's going down, reset the seal, go again. Go until it goes down. If it doesn't have any water, you should try flushing because maybe you have just pushed the water down and through and you need to run some water through and it'll be clear. Those little things here, it's not hard.
It's fine, it's plunger, it's not going to eat you. So just use it, it's cool. Assuming you're done your duty, you're not done because you were plunging with poop in the snake. Now you are going to have poopy on the elastic of the elastic force cup. There is enough water in the brown, in the bowl. You're going to want to swirl the end of the plunger around in the toilet and try to get it mostly cleaned off. If not, then I suggest going to the yard and using a hose.
You may want to carry your Wonder Buddy Like, if you've gotta go outside to do this, don't carry your wonder wand soaked with suction fiend across the house to somewhere public. You should put it in the trash to carry it out, or put it in a bag, or just do something so you don't drip like dookie plunger bits all over the house as you walk out. Do something. You don't wanna do that. Wash your plunger off. It's wash your plunger off. That's...
You don't have to go outside of the walls of the privy zone to do that either. You have a bathtub. Use it. You have a sink. Rinse it off. It's fine. But don't return the plunger to the holder. And God forbid we're returning plungers to the bare toilet bare bare surface of the kit of the I can't talk of the bathroom floor. Like holders are ideal. But if you got a wet plunger don't stick it back on the bathroom floor like stick it in the stick it somewhere. That's not just the bare floor.
But don't, yeah, don't return the plunger. There's poo bits all over that. Whatever you do, though, don't try and shove the handle of the plunger down the sink or the toilet. It's wooden. That is going to break some stuff. Don't shove the handle of the plunger, I repeat, don't shove the handle of the plunger down the toilet or sink.
Another note about plunging a sink, if they have an overflow drain, You're gonna wanna plug that business because if you've got a little overflow drain and you start plunging the sink, it's gonna shoot the stuff up and out of the overflow drain and probably soak everything that is in its trajectory. As far as technique goes, again, plunge and kinda pump it. And with all this said, this is gonna take us to a very special, very somewhat dark zone episode of Hunter's Anecdotes to keep us afloats.
Again, I'm a janitor. I see lots of stuff as a janitor. This might be A. The most mysterious and B. The most concerning thing that I have seen regarding a plunger. You know, I've plunged diapers from toilets. I've plunged feminine hygiene products. I've plunged paper towel. I've plunged portion of a t-shirt or sock. It was hard to tell. People flush some weird stuff. That's what you gotta know. But there's only been one mystery plunger that really stands out.
The way that I have my life situated right now is I do my janitorial duties either nuts early in the morning or late at night in the darkness. I turn the lights on. I made that sound like I do janitorial work in the dark. I turn the lights on. But it's dark outside. That's what I meant.
And in this case, in this particular instance, it was an early morning and the early morning ones are always such a flavorful little dynamic because you're kind of still in that like warming up for the day coffee haze and then you're like met with some sort of bathroom disaster that your brain hasn't fully warmed up to engage and deal with. That's how I would word that. it's, you know, it's it's a kind of a blustery morning. We're in Oregon. It's blustery.
I, you know, I'm rolling in and I roll into the bathroom to do my thing and I look down. Toilet, surprise surprise, is perfectly clear. Not a clog one in this situation. You know, I clean the toilet and I'm wiping around like I always do, wiping the back and the sides and whatever. And as I wipe around the side, I catch eye on what I would describe as a uh dookie stick. Now, I'm going to just try to describe this very audio, very visual thing via this audio format.
It was a regular, as you would say, vanilla. That one was for the kids. It was just a regular Joe plunger, you know, red bottom, wooden handle, nothing special to see here. But a top that wouldn't handle It was coated about an inch and a half down on all sides as if it was dipped like a fun dip with human poopy dookie brown. Now here's the thing. It also had some material that I would call injury leftovers. That's how I'll word that.
So that's going to come into play here in a moment when we try to solve the mystery. So I see this plunger and I'm like what in the what in God's great earth is that? And I I'm like trying to figure it out and I'm like well maybe they stuck the end as I just said earlier into the toilet to try to bust up some dookie mess. But here's the thing, there's enough water in the mix where it's not going to do some sticking like this.
So I grab this plunger and I go out and I find our maintenance gentleman and I just tell him, was like hey, I need a second opinion because this is what I think I'm looking at and I just need to know that like, do you also think that this is what you're looking He takes a look at the plunger and he's like, yeah, yeah, you know, I think that's what's going on.
So as he and I, bathroom experts are solving this problem, this is the, you know, the Scooby squad is on the case figuring out what is going on with this plunger. And this is what we've figured out, or at least we tell ourselves that we did. You know, we've ripped the mask off and this is what we see.
Somebody, and again, yeah, we're not going to get into it, but somebody had yoinked this plunger up the backside, thus causing what I would call the injury bits on the end of this plunger, and leaving it coated with human brown mess. The end result is I threw the plunger in the trash and now I keep the plunger locked away in a closet, because we're not going back and exploring that. What a poop mystery plunger mystery to have dealt with at 7 to 8 am.
And this has been another installment of Hunter's Anecdotes to keep you afloats. And this is the end of the episode. I hope you learned a greater appreciation, if not for elastic force cups, for the chocolatey background and foreground that they are involved in. If you have a comment or if you have a plunger story to share with us, pictures of you plunging, videos of you plunging, good things that have to do with plungers, feel free to share those either at our email.
You can reach us at privycast at gmail.com and we're on all the social medias, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, I've probably forgotten one, at privycast. You can use the hashtag elasticforcecups. Let's do that. Leave us a rating or review. If your podcast listener allows you to, the five star option is preferred and we will try to read reviews here on the podcast. Please, please, please do that. It's great.
for people to find the show, learn more about the places they poop, and other various things. So, five star option, share it with a friend. We would love for you to share the show with others, for folks who maybe are a little bathroom ignorant and need something to raise their thankfulness for what they have underneath their cheek. As always, we wanna thank Kevin McCloud for the use of Bar Room Ballet as our intro and outro music.
You can find Kevin's music at incompetech.org and his music is licensed under copyright 4.0. Thanks Kevin. You can also find Podington Bear's music. We'd like to thank Podington Bear for the use of all colors in the world. You can find Podington Bear's music at PodingtonBear.com. Thanks Podington. This has been another episode of Privy. Thank you for joining us and as always. Don't forget to flush. There's a myth a lot of us grow up believing that hair loss is just a part of life. It happens.
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