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Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,

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Speaker 1: Lauren voel Bomb here with a classic episode of the podcast.

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Speaker 1: This one gets down and dirty into the history and

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Speaker 1: future of waste technologies because the basic design for toilets

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Speaker 1: hasn't changed in about three hundred years. Hey brain Stuff,

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Speaker 1: Lauren vogel Bomb here. Consider the flush toilet. It's a

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Speaker 1: fascinating device if you think about it. This giant porcelain

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Speaker 1: chair is installed into every modern American bathroom, using up

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Speaker 1: gallons of precious drinking water every day to whisk your

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Speaker 1: urine feces into oblivion. Better known as the municipal wastewater

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Speaker 1: treatment plant nearest you every time you flush. But have

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Speaker 1: you ever considered what else we could be doing with

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Speaker 1: our poop and pea? You probably don't really want to

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Speaker 1: think about it, and neither does pretty much anybody else,

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Speaker 1: which is why the flush toilet we twenty first century

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Speaker 1: humans use hasn't changed much since it was first patented

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Speaker 1: in seventeen seventy five by a Scottish watchmaker named Alexander Cumming.

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Speaker 1: Cummings toilet was a slightly altered version of the commode

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Speaker 1: designed for Queen Elizabeth the first by her godson, Sir

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Speaker 1: John Harrington in fifteen ninety two. Cummings had an S

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Speaker 1: shaped pipe, two trap bad odors, while Harrington's had not,

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Speaker 1: of course, self flushing toilets. Heated seats in those vacuum

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Speaker 1: boddies like you see on airplanes and tour buses came later.

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Speaker 1: But our one and done attitude towards commode innovation probably

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Speaker 1: comes from the fact that we simply don't want to

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Speaker 1: think about poop that much. We spoke with Deanna McDonough,

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Speaker 1: a professor of industrial design in the Beckmann Institute of

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Speaker 1: Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at

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Speaker 1: Urbana Champaign. She said, within the American culture, there is

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Speaker 1: still a resistance and reluctance to discuss body waste. The

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Speaker 1: toilet has remained relatively unexplored, I think because we're failing

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Speaker 1: to realize that, to quote a British saying, where there

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Speaker 1: is muck, there's brass. We are failing to see the

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Speaker 1: potential opportunity our modest toilet is offering us because the

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Speaker 1: notion of immersing yourself in such a product makes us

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Speaker 1: all feel so uncomfort But going to the bathroom isn't

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Speaker 1: something we've always been squeamish about long ago. It was

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Speaker 1: just another experience, an opportunity for relaxation and hanging out.

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Speaker 1: The ancient Romans used toilet time as a time to

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Speaker 1: catch up with their friends. In the year three hundred

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Speaker 1: and fifteen BCE, Rome had one hundred and forty four

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Speaker 1: bustling public toilets lined with stone benches with keyhole shaped

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Speaker 1: cutouts situated all along them, where people would sit together

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Speaker 1: and do their business and maybe some gossiping too. Later

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Speaker 1: in medieval England, you could be walking down the street

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Speaker 1: and someone might throw the contents of their chamber pot

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Speaker 1: out the window onto you. Oops. They might say sorry

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Speaker 1: about it, but it would kind of be on you

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Speaker 1: for walking too close to their house. Fancier medieval people

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Speaker 1: used a garter robe, a little closet stuck onto the

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Speaker 1: side of a castle with a hole in the floor

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Speaker 1: that emptied into a moat or cesspit. Clothes were also

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Speaker 1: kept in the garter robe because it was thought stench

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Speaker 1: of human waste would keep the fleas and moths out

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Speaker 1: of the garments. Public guard robes in London emptied directly

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Speaker 1: into the Thames, which was an unbelievably poor our public

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Speaker 1: health move As the population of Europe grew over the

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Speaker 1: course of the eighteen hundreds, up to one hundred people

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Speaker 1: would share the same public garderobe, and the waste just

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Speaker 1: washed into the rivers, tainting the drinking water supply, which

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Speaker 1: explains why so many outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, and other

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Speaker 1: waterborne diseases bedeviled nineteenth century Europeans, resulting in more than

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Speaker 1: half the working class population dying before the age of five.

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Speaker 1: It was a mess as a result of a particularly

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Speaker 1: hot summer in London in eighteen fifty eight, when the

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Speaker 1: smell of rotting sewage made living in the city completely unbearable,

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Speaker 1: Parliament commissioned the construction of the London Sewer, which was

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Speaker 1: finished in eighteen sixty five. Deaths resulting from waterborne diseases plummeted,

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Speaker 1: and cities all over the world followed suit and constructed

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Speaker 1: their own sanitary sewers. The toilet patented by Coming eventually

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Speaker 1: became standard in houses in wealthy countries all over the world,

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Speaker 1: along with slight variations patented by others like Thomas Crapper

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Speaker 1: yes that's his real name, whose contributions to the overall

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Speaker 1: design of the toilet were minimal, but whose legacy indoors

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Speaker 1: because he made sure his name was on all of

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Speaker 1: his products. And hey, it's great that fewer people are

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Speaker 1: dying due to poor sanitation in these places anymore. But

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Speaker 1: the toilet is due for an upgrade. So what do

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Speaker 1: we need our new toilets to do? MacDonough said, toilets

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Speaker 1: offer a relatively unexplored territory that offers significant potential in

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Speaker 1: respect to healthy living and healthy aging. As individuals are

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Speaker 1: taking more responsibility for their health, eating habits, and well being,

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Speaker 1: the bathroom offers a somewhat blank canvas for us to

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Speaker 1: integrate intuitive technology to support the individual. Imagine a toilet

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Speaker 1: that could tell you how hydrated you were, whether you

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Speaker 1: were deficient in particular vitamins, warn you of blood in

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Speaker 1: your stools, and changes in your hormones. We literally flush

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Speaker 1: all that information away each day in the form of

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Speaker 1: waste matter, so we could find out a lot about

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Speaker 1: our own health from our toilets. But according to the

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Speaker 1: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which launched there reinvent the

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Speaker 1: toilet Challenge back in twenty eleven, the next generation of

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Speaker 1: toilets will also be able to kill pathogens, compost human waste,

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Speaker 1: and keep up with the fast urbanization of the twenty

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Speaker 1: four century, and all that without sewer infrastructure, electricity, or

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Speaker 1: a water source. They might even be able to mine

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Speaker 1: our waste for valuable elements like phosphorus, nitrogen, and potassium,

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Speaker 1: and separate solid and liquid waste in order to use

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Speaker 1: them to make things like building supplies. But will the

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Speaker 1: new toilets look very much different from the one in

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Speaker 1: your bathroom now or the one Sir John Harrington made

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Speaker 1: for Queen Elizabeth in the sixteenth century. Probably not much,

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Speaker 1: unless you've got any bright ideas. Today's episode is based

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Speaker 1: on the article who Invented the Toilet? A Brief History

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Speaker 1: of the flush on how stuffworks dot com, written by

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Speaker 1: Katherine Whitbourne and Jesslynshields. Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio

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Speaker 1: in partnership with how stuffworks dot Com. It is produced

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Speaker 1: by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit

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