Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren voel Bomb here with a classic episode of the podcast.
Speaker 1: This one gets down and dirty into the history and
Speaker 1: future of waste technologies because the basic design for toilets
Speaker 1: hasn't changed in about three hundred years. Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren vogel Bomb here. Consider the flush toilet. It's a
Speaker 1: fascinating device if you think about it. This giant porcelain
Speaker 1: chair is installed into every modern American bathroom, using up
Speaker 1: gallons of precious drinking water every day to whisk your
Speaker 1: urine feces into oblivion. Better known as the municipal wastewater
Speaker 1: treatment plant nearest you every time you flush. But have
Speaker 1: you ever considered what else we could be doing with
Speaker 1: our poop and pea? You probably don't really want to
Speaker 1: think about it, and neither does pretty much anybody else,
Speaker 1: which is why the flush toilet we twenty first century
Speaker 1: humans use hasn't changed much since it was first patented
Speaker 1: in seventeen seventy five by a Scottish watchmaker named Alexander Cumming.
Speaker 1: Cummings toilet was a slightly altered version of the commode
Speaker 1: designed for Queen Elizabeth the first by her godson, Sir
Speaker 1: John Harrington in fifteen ninety two. Cummings had an S
Speaker 1: shaped pipe, two trap bad odors, while Harrington's had not,
Speaker 1: of course, self flushing toilets. Heated seats in those vacuum
Speaker 1: boddies like you see on airplanes and tour buses came later.
Speaker 1: But our one and done attitude towards commode innovation probably
Speaker 1: comes from the fact that we simply don't want to
Speaker 1: think about poop that much. We spoke with Deanna McDonough,
Speaker 1: a professor of industrial design in the Beckmann Institute of
Speaker 1: Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at
Speaker 1: Urbana Champaign. She said, within the American culture, there is
Speaker 1: still a resistance and reluctance to discuss body waste. The
Speaker 1: toilet has remained relatively unexplored, I think because we're failing
Speaker 1: to realize that, to quote a British saying, where there
Speaker 1: is muck, there's brass. We are failing to see the
Speaker 1: potential opportunity our modest toilet is offering us because the
Speaker 1: notion of immersing yourself in such a product makes us
Speaker 1: all feel so uncomfort But going to the bathroom isn't
Speaker 1: something we've always been squeamish about long ago. It was
Speaker 1: just another experience, an opportunity for relaxation and hanging out.
Speaker 1: The ancient Romans used toilet time as a time to
Speaker 1: catch up with their friends. In the year three hundred
Speaker 1: and fifteen BCE, Rome had one hundred and forty four
Speaker 1: bustling public toilets lined with stone benches with keyhole shaped
Speaker 1: cutouts situated all along them, where people would sit together
Speaker 1: and do their business and maybe some gossiping too. Later
Speaker 1: in medieval England, you could be walking down the street
Speaker 1: and someone might throw the contents of their chamber pot
Speaker 1: out the window onto you. Oops. They might say sorry
Speaker 1: about it, but it would kind of be on you
Speaker 1: for walking too close to their house. Fancier medieval people
Speaker 1: used a garter robe, a little closet stuck onto the
Speaker 1: side of a castle with a hole in the floor
Speaker 1: that emptied into a moat or cesspit. Clothes were also
Speaker 1: kept in the garter robe because it was thought stench
Speaker 1: of human waste would keep the fleas and moths out
Speaker 1: of the garments. Public guard robes in London emptied directly
Speaker 1: into the Thames, which was an unbelievably poor our public
Speaker 1: health move As the population of Europe grew over the
Speaker 1: course of the eighteen hundreds, up to one hundred people
Speaker 1: would share the same public garderobe, and the waste just
Speaker 1: washed into the rivers, tainting the drinking water supply, which
Speaker 1: explains why so many outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, and other
Speaker 1: waterborne diseases bedeviled nineteenth century Europeans, resulting in more than
Speaker 1: half the working class population dying before the age of five.
Speaker 1: It was a mess as a result of a particularly
Speaker 1: hot summer in London in eighteen fifty eight, when the
Speaker 1: smell of rotting sewage made living in the city completely unbearable,
Speaker 1: Parliament commissioned the construction of the London Sewer, which was
Speaker 1: finished in eighteen sixty five. Deaths resulting from waterborne diseases plummeted,
Speaker 1: and cities all over the world followed suit and constructed
Speaker 1: their own sanitary sewers. The toilet patented by Coming eventually
Speaker 1: became standard in houses in wealthy countries all over the world,
Speaker 1: along with slight variations patented by others like Thomas Crapper
Speaker 1: yes that's his real name, whose contributions to the overall
Speaker 1: design of the toilet were minimal, but whose legacy indoors
Speaker 1: because he made sure his name was on all of
Speaker 1: his products. And hey, it's great that fewer people are
Speaker 1: dying due to poor sanitation in these places anymore. But
Speaker 1: the toilet is due for an upgrade. So what do
Speaker 1: we need our new toilets to do? MacDonough said, toilets
Speaker 1: offer a relatively unexplored territory that offers significant potential in
Speaker 1: respect to healthy living and healthy aging. As individuals are
Speaker 1: taking more responsibility for their health, eating habits, and well being,
Speaker 1: the bathroom offers a somewhat blank canvas for us to
Speaker 1: integrate intuitive technology to support the individual. Imagine a toilet
Speaker 1: that could tell you how hydrated you were, whether you
Speaker 1: were deficient in particular vitamins, warn you of blood in
Speaker 1: your stools, and changes in your hormones. We literally flush
Speaker 1: all that information away each day in the form of
Speaker 1: waste matter, so we could find out a lot about
Speaker 1: our own health from our toilets. But according to the
Speaker 1: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which launched there reinvent the
Speaker 1: toilet Challenge back in twenty eleven, the next generation of
Speaker 1: toilets will also be able to kill pathogens, compost human waste,
Speaker 1: and keep up with the fast urbanization of the twenty
Speaker 1: four century, and all that without sewer infrastructure, electricity, or
Speaker 1: a water source. They might even be able to mine
Speaker 1: our waste for valuable elements like phosphorus, nitrogen, and potassium,
Speaker 1: and separate solid and liquid waste in order to use
Speaker 1: them to make things like building supplies. But will the
Speaker 1: new toilets look very much different from the one in
Speaker 1: your bathroom now or the one Sir John Harrington made
Speaker 1: for Queen Elizabeth in the sixteenth century. Probably not much,
Speaker 1: unless you've got any bright ideas. Today's episode is based
Speaker 1: on the article who Invented the Toilet? A Brief History
Speaker 1: of the flush on how stuffworks dot com, written by
Speaker 1: Katherine Whitbourne and Jesslynshields. Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio
Speaker 1: in partnership with how stuffworks dot Com. It is produced
Speaker 1: by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
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