Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamb and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two of
Speaker 1: our discussion of the history of toilet technology. In the
Speaker 1: last episode, you should probably go back if you haven't
Speaker 1: and listened to that episode first before you listen to
Speaker 1: this one. That's where we get all into the history
Speaker 1: of toilets and ancient civilizations, into latrine tech, into the
Speaker 1: Kloaca maximum, the maximum sewer of ancient But today we're
Speaker 1: going to get more into directly into the invention of
Speaker 1: the flush toilet. And I think we got to start
Speaker 1: off today by dispelling a common myth. That myth and
Speaker 1: I've actually I've heard this like repeated in movies and stuff.
Speaker 1: It seems to be a thing people actually do think,
Speaker 1: is that the flush toilet was invented by a Mr.
Speaker 1: Thomas Crapper. Now Crapper does play a role in history
Speaker 1: of the toilet, but he is not its inventor by
Speaker 1: any means whatsoever. This is not even close. And now,
Speaker 1: first of all, we can debate about what it means
Speaker 1: to have a flush toilet. If we're going to be
Speaker 1: discussing the idea of its invention, I'd say by some definitions,
Speaker 1: since waste was like washed away by water, you could
Speaker 1: argue that some people's of like ancient Rome and the
Speaker 1: ancient Indus Valley had flush toilets. But that's not usually
Speaker 1: what we mean when we say a flush toilet. We
Speaker 1: we usually mean a device that automatically removes waste with
Speaker 1: a simple mechanism. It's not like a hole over a
Speaker 1: drain pipe in which you can pour water. It's not
Speaker 1: something that constantly has water running running underneath it. It's
Speaker 1: a machine with a mechanical flushing action that doesn't need
Speaker 1: to be situated over like a flowing ditch or anything
Speaker 1: like that. And so there are a number of technologies
Speaker 1: that really need to be in place for this to
Speaker 1: come together, Like your your plumbing technology has to has
Speaker 1: has to reach the appropriate level of advancement before you
Speaker 1: can attach a toilet as we model and flushing toilet
Speaker 1: to the scenario and to and make it practical. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this is gonna be a big problem with the
Speaker 1: earliest models of the flush toilet. So to see one
Speaker 1: of the probably uh the first real flush toilet. And
Speaker 1: since we mean but an impractical early model, we need
Speaker 1: to meet a poet. Uh, and I think that it
Speaker 1: is appropriate that the first real flush toilet was created
Speaker 1: by a poet. We mentioned him in the last episode.
Speaker 1: Inter Sir John Harrington. So, Sir John Harrington was an
Speaker 1: English courtier and an author who lived from fifteen sixty
Speaker 1: or fifteen sixty one to sixteen twelve. Is uh in
Speaker 1: his life stories that his father had repeatedly sort of
Speaker 1: married up into royal circles. First his dad married one
Speaker 1: of Henry the eighth illegitimate daughters, and then later his
Speaker 1: father married a woman who served Queen Elizabeth the First
Speaker 1: before she was queen. And this seems to be what
Speaker 1: led to Elizabeth Queen Elizabeth becoming John Harrington's godmother. The
Speaker 1: apparent Lee Little John Harrington was a troublesome godson. He
Speaker 1: was prone to writing on embarrassing and morally impure subjects
Speaker 1: that repeatedly got him in trouble with the crown. He
Speaker 1: wrote insulting stuff about other kind of you know, pompous
Speaker 1: court people. As for his literary works, he was probably
Speaker 1: best known for his translation of the Italian poet Ludovico
Speaker 1: Ariosto's epic Orlando Furioso. Uh and UH we can come
Speaker 1: back and mention that in a minute. But that's like
Speaker 1: that doesn't know Orlando Furioso. It's got like a big
Speaker 1: dragon slaying thing in it. Trying to remember, I know
Speaker 1: I came across it when I was in school. That
Speaker 1: sounds familiar and I feel I feel like I read
Speaker 1: it in school as well, but I don't recall much
Speaker 1: about it. But at any right, this Harrington guys that
Speaker 1: sounds a little bit like he was kind of a brat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a little bit. Well, I mean, so he he wrote
Speaker 1: these poems and epigrams and who boy, you know you
Speaker 1: can find these online. I don't know, maybe something's lost
Speaker 1: in the mix here, but if this guy can say
Speaker 1: dared himself a poet, first, I really hope his toilets
Speaker 1: were good. Uh So the poems are full of like
Speaker 1: really obvious, grown inducing turns of phrase, and then all
Speaker 1: these kind of caddy burns on other courtiers who he
Speaker 1: gives these like classical influenced nick nicknames like Sextus and
Speaker 1: itis Um. It also seems, it seems to me, at
Speaker 1: least like Harrington was sort of kind of a fan
Speaker 1: of himself, like he he thought he was pretty cool Robert.
Speaker 1: Do you feel like reading a couple of his short
Speaker 1: little poems here? Oh? Sure? Why not? Okay? So this
Speaker 1: is uh, this is one he wrote called U a
Speaker 1: comparison of a book with cheese. Old Haywood writes and
Speaker 1: proves in some degrees that one may well compare a
Speaker 1: book with cheese. Every market some by cheese to feed
Speaker 1: on at every marked. Some men buy books to read
Speaker 1: on all sorts seat cheese. But how there is the
Speaker 1: question the poor for food, the rich for good digestion.
Speaker 1: All sorts read books. But why will you discern the
Speaker 1: fool to laugh, the wiser sort to learn the site
Speaker 1: taste scent of cheese two some is hateful, the site
Speaker 1: taste sense of books two sums ungrateful. No cheese there
Speaker 1: was that ever pleased all feeders. No book there is
Speaker 1: that ever liked all readers. Yeah, I already hate this guy.
Speaker 1: You're about to like even better. Here. This one's just
Speaker 1: a short four line epigram. Here it's called against writers
Speaker 1: that carpet other men's books. This sounds like there's a
Speaker 1: little venom. And yeah, um, the readers and the hearers
Speaker 1: like my books, but yet some writers cannot them digest
Speaker 1: but what care I for? When I make a feast,
Speaker 1: I would my guests should praise it, not the cooks. Okay,
Speaker 1: so it's an A B, B A rhyme scheme there.
Speaker 1: But I think he's saying like, hey, I don't write
Speaker 1: for the critics, I write for the fans. Man. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I mean, maybe this is all just like
Speaker 1: if we think of the like the literary uh scene
Speaker 1: at the time as being like kind of you know,
Speaker 1: kind of like a like a few driven hip hop culture,
Speaker 1: than you know, that's probably the place for all of this. Well,
Speaker 1: there's some of that. I mean, I get the feeling
Speaker 1: that he was sort of he was sort of like
Speaker 1: a you know, a man about the court. He was
Speaker 1: like within the scene. Um, he was he had all
Speaker 1: these relationships. His poems are very like gossipy, and they're
Speaker 1: full of all these burns and stuff. You get the
Speaker 1: sense they were sort of written written not for a
Speaker 1: wide audience, but for a select audience who would get
Speaker 1: the you know who he is anonymously sending his burns at.
Speaker 1: I also noticed how a lot of his work is
Speaker 1: about how his poetry is good, how his critics are dumb,
Speaker 1: and about food and comparing things to food is kind
Speaker 1: of kind of weird, Alice. I was really thrown back
Speaker 1: by the idea that the poor eat cheese for food,
Speaker 1: but the rich only eat cheese for digestion. That's just
Speaker 1: I'm I'm missing something there. Yeah, it's like the rich
Speaker 1: don't need food. What it seems like it reveals some
Speaker 1: kind of attitude I can't quite put my finger on. Plus,
Speaker 1: eating nothing but cheese sounds exactly like the kind of
Speaker 1: thing that some you know, upper class royal would do
Speaker 1: and then be you know, gouty for it. Didn't Henry
Speaker 1: the Eighth die of a surfeit of cheese. But so anyway,
Speaker 1: So John Harrington, little little godson of Queen Elizabeth the first,
Speaker 1: John Harrington, he's busy at court. He's trying not to
Speaker 1: get caught up in political rat traps. And there's a
Speaker 1: lot of those going on right now, you know, they're
Speaker 1: they're all these plots and stuff. Uh. He gets in
Speaker 1: trouble anyway, he writes some terrible poetry, at least in
Speaker 1: my opinion. I should point out that around the same time,
Speaker 1: this is around the same time that Shakespeare is writing
Speaker 1: his plays, and Christopher Marlowe and At one point, Harrington
Speaker 1: addresses some of his little barbs and epigrams to somebody
Speaker 1: named Faustus. I have to wonder if Christopher Marlowe is
Speaker 1: the target solid Burn referring to to him as the
Speaker 1: as this great work that he would forever be remembered for. Right,
Speaker 1: and yet we don't. We didn't even name the toilet
Speaker 1: after Harrington's. So I decree all the toilets in the
Speaker 1: land will be named Harrington's. Alright, So how does he
Speaker 1: get around to inventing the toy? It sounds like he
Speaker 1: has a pretty full plate with all of this, Uh,
Speaker 1: these promos that he's cutting on other literary figures, Well,
Speaker 1: he's getting in. So he he gets in and out
Speaker 1: of trouble. Like apparently one of the I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: the thing he's most famous for historically is this translation
Speaker 1: of Orlando Furios. So apparently the way the story goes
Speaker 1: is that he had translated one particularly racy passage and
Speaker 1: he was sharing it around with ladies of the court,
Speaker 1: and Queen Elizabeth was not amused, and as punishment for
Speaker 1: his body behavior and his corruption of good ladies, she
Speaker 1: told him he would be banished from the court and
Speaker 1: that he shouldn't bother returning unless he had finished translating
Speaker 1: the entire epic poem. So he did, he finished the translation,
Speaker 1: and he came back, only to get banished again some
Speaker 1: years later for insults and toilet humor. So sometime in
Speaker 1: this whole mix, it was in like the fifteen nineties,
Speaker 1: it seems, I think maybe around fIF so he actually
Speaker 1: invented the flush toilet. He put together the plan for one,
Speaker 1: and he installed one in his home, and then later
Speaker 1: he actually installed one for Queen Elizabeth herself at her
Speaker 1: home at Richmond Palace in what was then Surrey. And
Speaker 1: we have some details on this because in fift Harrington
Speaker 1: publishes his notes on the invention of the flush toilet
Speaker 1: in a very strange book length text called a new
Speaker 1: Discourse on a stale subject called the Metamorphosis of Ajax.
Speaker 1: So this book is part description of an invention and
Speaker 1: part like satire, and then part meditation on excrement and
Speaker 1: related subjects, uh and a lot of Like it seems
Speaker 1: like a big part of it is just like a
Speaker 1: defense of him publishing the book that you're currently read ing.
Speaker 1: I was trying to understand, like what the real vibe
Speaker 1: of this work is and it just seems extremely odd.
Speaker 1: The title is kind of interesting. What's the deal with
Speaker 1: the metamorphosis of Ajax? Harrington apparently referred to the flush
Speaker 1: toilet he had he had invented as Ajax is in
Speaker 1: like a j a X the character in the Iliad
Speaker 1: right now, the great Greek warrior. Uh. And so apparently
Speaker 1: this is a pun on the word Jake's, which was
Speaker 1: already at the time a slang word for a toilet.
Speaker 1: Obviously wouldn't be a flush toilet, but for like, you know,
Speaker 1: normal types of like pit toilets and stuff. It would
Speaker 1: be like going to the Jake's or you know, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna go sit on the Jake's. It's kind of like
Speaker 1: I need to use the john all right, So now
Speaker 1: we have the clever nature of the titles revealed, but
Speaker 1: it's still weird. It's still makes me wonder what stages
Speaker 1: syphilis was was that at the time. Well, maybe we
Speaker 1: should take a quick break and then when we come back,
Speaker 1: we will discuss, uh, we'll discuss the details of Harrington's
Speaker 1: invention this this flush toilet model. Alright, we're back. So
Speaker 1: we have a brady, privileged court poet who has managed
Speaker 1: to invent, well ahead of its time, a flushing toilet. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and wrote a book about it. He calls it
Speaker 1: a jax. I do like that name. I mean, even
Speaker 1: though it's kind of a grown inducing pun. A lot
Speaker 1: of what he seems to be doing is like grown
Speaker 1: inducing humor. Nevertheless, I like the idea of the toilet
Speaker 1: being a jax. It's this a keyan hero. Uh so
Speaker 1: he's he's working on his water closet device. We should
Speaker 1: say that the water closet device that he made, the ajax,
Speaker 1: it no longer exists. There aren't any like models you
Speaker 1: can find. I like to imagine it was dismantled and
Speaker 1: its parts used to make gifts for the French royal family.
Speaker 1: There there aren't any today, but there are like replicas
Speaker 1: based on the description. And if you see one of these.
Speaker 1: It's like a huge two level wooden box that looks
Speaker 1: sort of like an upper piano, and the box hides
Speaker 1: its inner workings inside these wood panels. Basically has two
Speaker 1: major parts. It's got a bowl that you do your
Speaker 1: stuff in, you know, you poop in the bowl, and
Speaker 1: then it's got a hole in the bottom of the
Speaker 1: bowl leading to a drainage pipe and the strainage pipe
Speaker 1: could go wherever. At the time, of course, there was
Speaker 1: not like a organized plumbing and sewage system, so it
Speaker 1: would probably be going into like a pit, you know,
Speaker 1: like a cess pit. And then above that you've got
Speaker 1: a cistern that stores water, just like on the back
Speaker 1: of not exactly, but much like on the back of
Speaker 1: like a modern western toilet, you've got a cistern where
Speaker 1: the flushing water is stored. The bowl itself was waterproofed
Speaker 1: with pitch and wax and resin, and so when you
Speaker 1: want to use the toilet, what you do is you
Speaker 1: lift a handle to release the stopper on the cistern above.
Speaker 1: So the cistern's got water on it, You release the
Speaker 1: stopper and this floods the bowl with water from the cistern.
Speaker 1: And then when you're done with your business, you lift
Speaker 1: a second handle and that this releases a stopper at
Speaker 1: the bottom of the bowl which allows its contents to
Speaker 1: flow out into the drain pipe. And we should again
Speaker 1: emphasize we talked about this in the last episode that
Speaker 1: while we're focusing on the toilet itself today, like the
Speaker 1: sewer system that supports the toilet is the probably even
Speaker 1: more important invention for public sanitation because that you know
Speaker 1: that's necessary, like a flush toilet that simply drains to
Speaker 1: the outdoors or something like that. It leads to some
Speaker 1: of the same problems as other non flushing methods, like
Speaker 1: just throwing a chamber pot out the window. At the
Speaker 1: time of Harrington's invention, there was obviously not a modern
Speaker 1: sewer system in England, so this may have been an
Speaker 1: improvement of personal convenience, like within your home, but it
Speaker 1: wasn't making the public sanitation issue any better. But as
Speaker 1: popular as like indoor flush toilets are today, you might guess, okay,
Speaker 1: so this was immediately an overnight sensation, right everybody wanted
Speaker 1: these things, And that's simply not the case. No, not
Speaker 1: at all. So we we only have evidence that Harrington
Speaker 1: ever built two of them. He built the one for
Speaker 1: himself and the other one for Queen Elizabeth, and this
Speaker 1: is probably for well. So there are some serious problems
Speaker 1: with its design. Right. First, each flush required a ton
Speaker 1: of water, like it required about seven and a half
Speaker 1: gallons or twenty eight liters of water every single flush,
Speaker 1: and you'd have to find some way because they didn't
Speaker 1: have indoor plumbing at the time. You know, you'd have
Speaker 1: to find some way to constantly refill the cistern with
Speaker 1: water if you wanted to keep flushing, maybe manually with
Speaker 1: buckets or something, I don't know. And then so, of
Speaker 1: course that's troublesome work. And then a workaround, of course
Speaker 1: that Harrington suggested is that, you know, maybe people could
Speaker 1: just keep using the toilet without flushing it until it
Speaker 1: was so piled up that it was absolutely necessary. Kind
Speaker 1: of if it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown,
Speaker 1: flush it down. Yeah, yeah, yeah, except he suggested, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe you might want to let like twenty people poop
Speaker 1: in it before you flush, because because you know, it's
Speaker 1: just so yeah, there's a lot of water. You gotta
Speaker 1: carry that water up to the thing. Um. This obviously
Speaker 1: just wasn't the most beautiful option. I'm sure Queen Elizabeth
Speaker 1: was not a huge fan of just letting the poop
Speaker 1: pile up in there, so it was It was also
Speaker 1: obviously expensive to have one of these things. And if
Speaker 1: you consider it, even though there was a mechanical stopper
Speaker 1: for the bowl drain, it probably would have smelled bad,
Speaker 1: you know, because like, uh, you just get like stuff
Speaker 1: stuck in there and you have smells coming through. It
Speaker 1: just doesn't doesn't seem all that great of a design.
Speaker 1: I'm reminded a lot of the jet pack in a way,
Speaker 1: you know, because today we have jet packs. We've had
Speaker 1: jet packs for for decades. But can everybody have a
Speaker 1: jet pack? Should everyone have a jet pack? Is the
Speaker 1: world properly? Um? Is the world ready for everyone to
Speaker 1: have a jet pack? It's not. And in the same sense, yes,
Speaker 1: flush toilets existed. Here is the example. And yet you
Speaker 1: know clearly this was not scalable, like this was something
Speaker 1: that it was was more of a curiosity than anything. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: Uh it was. It was an extravagant novel curiosity for
Speaker 1: the extremely wealthy. And it wasn't until actually until a
Speaker 1: couple of hundred years afterwards that really anybody else started
Speaker 1: trying to build and use flush toilets. Basically, almost nobody
Speaker 1: else use flush toilets until like the seventeen seventies. So
Speaker 1: let's go to the seventeen seventies then, So around seventeen
Speaker 1: seventy five, a watchmaker named Alexander Cumming or Alexander Cummings
Speaker 1: uh files a patent for a flush toilet, and his
Speaker 1: design introduces a crucial improvement, and I think this is
Speaker 1: a pretty clever one. It introduces the S trap, and
Speaker 1: this is an ingenious solution for preventing the toilet from
Speaker 1: becoming a gate becoming a gateway for the demons of
Speaker 1: odor hell to climb up into your home. Because if
Speaker 1: you've got like a pipe connecting your toilet that's inside
Speaker 1: your house to the pit where all of the poop goes,
Speaker 1: you know, you can imagine that there are going to
Speaker 1: be some smells coming up through it, so you would
Speaker 1: want to find a way to seal it off. In
Speaker 1: Harrington's water closet, the toilet bowl was sealed with this
Speaker 1: mechanical stopper plugging a hole in the bottom of the bowl,
Speaker 1: and after the bowl was flooded with water from the
Speaker 1: cistern above, you could operate a lever to unplug the
Speaker 1: stopper and release the contents into the pipe below. With
Speaker 1: the S trap is different there, the seal between the
Speaker 1: bowl and the sewer pipe is not just a mechanical stopper.
Speaker 1: The Cummings model did have a mechanical stopper. It was
Speaker 1: like a slide valve, but it's also a seal made
Speaker 1: of the water itself. So the way it works is
Speaker 1: like this, the drainage pipe where things leave the toilet.
Speaker 1: It has a sideways S shaped bend in it. So
Speaker 1: take a capital S, flip it on its side. I
Speaker 1: guess it could be a lowercase S too, huh. You
Speaker 1: flip it on its side, and then, um, it's always
Speaker 1: going to be filled with water in the lower part
Speaker 1: of the bend, right, So the reservoir of sitting water
Speaker 1: there and the bottom of the sideways S shaped forms
Speaker 1: this perfect natural seal that prevents sewer gas from escaping
Speaker 1: up the pipes into your home. And so s traps
Speaker 1: like this are still used today in in modern drains
Speaker 1: and drains for sinks and toilets. And so here's some
Speaker 1: toilet news you can use. If you have ever noticed
Speaker 1: that there's like an unused drain in your home that
Speaker 1: smells bad, it's likely because the trap, like the water
Speaker 1: in the trap has evaporated and it's no longer forming
Speaker 1: a seal against the sewer gases below. So the easy
Speaker 1: fixes to just run some fresh water down the drain
Speaker 1: to flood the trap again. So I like that S trap.
Speaker 1: It's very, very brilliant, elegant solution to a problem. And
Speaker 1: yet at the same time, the Ajax is still undergoing
Speaker 1: its metamorphosis. Yes, it is not finished yet. The Ajax
Speaker 1: is still a kind of clunky, unwieldy figure, kind of
Speaker 1: like the Ajax. And well, I guess I'm trying to remember.
Speaker 1: I think of Ajax is kind of like big and
Speaker 1: buff and clunky. He was kind of graceful too, I guess,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm not really remembering what a Jax, what
Speaker 1: his main contribution was. Well, he's like a great warrior.
Speaker 1: He's one of these are right of course, but he uh.
Speaker 1: At the end, he gets into the argument with Odysseus
Speaker 1: about the armor and then he I think he loses
Speaker 1: the bait. And then he falls on his sword because
Speaker 1: he does the I think Athena drives him mad or something.
Speaker 1: I don't know, and a tensions were runn pretty high, ivolved.
Speaker 1: I gotta go back and read the Iliot again, I guess.
Speaker 1: But anyway, so talking about the Ajax machine, so there
Speaker 1: were some even even though you've got the S trap,
Speaker 1: there were some kinks incomings design that were worked out
Speaker 1: in later models by other inventors. Like, one problem was
Speaker 1: apparently that it had a sliding valve. So you imagine
Speaker 1: it's got a valve at the bottom of the toilet bowl.
Speaker 1: Um that you know, it's different than most of the
Speaker 1: toilets we see today because it actually had like a
Speaker 1: lid that would close on the bottom, and this was
Speaker 1: like a sliding thing. And this was a problem because
Speaker 1: of course it could get gross and gunky, Like one
Speaker 1: of the most beautiful aspects of the modern toilet is
Speaker 1: that there are no moving parts coming into contact with
Speaker 1: fecal matter. You're using it correctly, exactly. Yes, yes, that's
Speaker 1: that's a very good point. So it could get roast
Speaker 1: and gunky, and it could freeze and that's not good. Um.
Speaker 1: So this was later improved by being replaced with a
Speaker 1: downward opening flap valve, and the patent for this innovation
Speaker 1: went to a water closet installer, an inventor named Joseph Brahma,
Speaker 1: though I think there might be some disagreement about whether
Speaker 1: Brahma himself actually invented this, you know, flap modification, but
Speaker 1: he held the patent for it. And then this model,
Speaker 1: the Brahma model, became popular and basically remained popular for
Speaker 1: those who could afford it until the mid twentieth century. Uh,
Speaker 1: and it's it's spread around like that. This did become
Speaker 1: like a kind of a sensation. Yeah, this was the
Speaker 1: version of the technology. They really spread and became became
Speaker 1: a truly popular way to poop. But as is often
Speaker 1: the case, I mean, part of the problem with the
Speaker 1: history of sanitation development and and like indit access to
Speaker 1: toilet facilities had to do with money, right, It was
Speaker 1: like people who could afford to install these kinds of
Speaker 1: toilet facilities, they would have them, but a lot of
Speaker 1: people couldn't afford that. Yeah, Like it often reminds me
Speaker 1: of the fancy garbage can scenario, you know, like, how
Speaker 1: how much are you willing to pay for the thing
Speaker 1: in which you are going to put trash right when
Speaker 1: a simpler model will will do the job, you know.
Speaker 1: So Yeah, for many people that the idea of a
Speaker 1: flushing toilet was just ludicrous for for a number of reasons,
Speaker 1: most of which were financial. But I think one of
Speaker 1: the big things that helped push toilet technology along was
Speaker 1: the development of sewer infrastructure to support it. That made
Speaker 1: it that made it not just a thing that's nice
Speaker 1: to have, not just a more aesthetically pleasing way to
Speaker 1: have a home, but also a major part of public
Speaker 1: health and so like in the mid nineteenth century in London,
Speaker 1: for example, it's a good example of London is getting
Speaker 1: very crowded. You've got the Industrial Revolution. Crowded London was
Speaker 1: becoming just unbearable, and in many ways because of its
Speaker 1: sewage and sanitation system. So you've got a crowded city.
Speaker 1: Lots of people are using chamber pots and just emptying
Speaker 1: them in the streets or where there are other generally
Speaker 1: uncontained ways of disposing of human waste, for example, water
Speaker 1: closets like the Brahma toilets, not connected to a dedicated
Speaker 1: sewage system for waste. In these methods, you just have
Speaker 1: sewage draining off into simple sewers that were originally designed
Speaker 1: to just accept and channel rainwater um and of course
Speaker 1: then these sewers would later become sources of drinking water
Speaker 1: for other people, or the sewage would just end up
Speaker 1: in the River Thames and other water sources. So in
Speaker 1: this period the city and the river just stank. Supposedly,
Speaker 1: it was awful. Like in the e in eighteen fifty Uh.
Speaker 1: The English magazine Punch published the cartoon I've got here
Speaker 1: of what was supposed to be like a close up
Speaker 1: illustration of what a drop of water from the Thames
Speaker 1: must look like. Basically, it's full of like it's got
Speaker 1: skeletal murder clowns, and it's got this snapping turtle with
Speaker 1: big hug arms, and it's got a hieronymous bosh type
Speaker 1: birdman from Alabolga. It's just like crazy. I wish political
Speaker 1: cartoons were still this creative instead of just being like
Speaker 1: some caricature of you know, like an ugly guy that
Speaker 1: has like taxes written on it. But anyway, the point
Speaker 1: it's making is that, hey, we've got a problem. You know,
Speaker 1: the river that runs through the middle of our city
Speaker 1: is becoming absolutely filthy. And uh. Of course, during the
Speaker 1: first half of the eighteen hundreds there were we've talked
Speaker 1: about on Stuff to Blow your Mind before, frequent collar
Speaker 1: out breaks, I mean all over the place and whenever
Speaker 1: there's like crowded human civilization. But they were frequently going
Speaker 1: on in London. We did the we did an episode
Speaker 1: about uh, the this epidemiological history and UH an episode
Speaker 1: of Stuff to blow your mind on miasthma theory that
Speaker 1: you can go and check out. But the short story
Speaker 1: there is that a surgeon named John Snow in mid
Speaker 1: nineteenth century London eventually showed that the cause of these
Speaker 1: collar outbreaks was the consumption of unclean water which was
Speaker 1: tainted by mixing with sewage. And in the summer of
Speaker 1: eighteen fifty eight, all this septic horror culminated in this
Speaker 1: event that is known in history as the Great Stink
Speaker 1: or the Great Stink of London, when the foul odor
Speaker 1: of the Thames in the city was just overwhelming. A
Speaker 1: commonly cited story about this period is that members of
Speaker 1: Parliament were so like panicked to get rid of the
Speaker 1: stink they doused the curtains of their chamber and chloride
Speaker 1: of lime to try to counteract the smell. It's also like,
Speaker 1: you know, just huff some chlorine and see if that
Speaker 1: wards it away. But pretty soon after this, Parliament authorized
Speaker 1: the construction of a new sewer system, and uh, and
Speaker 1: of course you know that it's like classic politician issues, right,
Speaker 1: like there's a major public problem and then nothing gets
Speaker 1: done about it until it like personally affects them, until
Speaker 1: you're actually dousing your drapes with chlorine. But of course
Speaker 1: the installation of the sewer system was was a great
Speaker 1: thing for England. During the eighteen sixties and seventies, there
Speaker 1: was this engineer named Sir Joseph basil get Uh. He
Speaker 1: had plans for a contained sewer and drainage system and
Speaker 1: during the sixties and seventies these were built. And so
Speaker 1: the main benefit of the sewer system was that it
Speaker 1: would keep sewage separate from the water supply, and this
Speaker 1: of course was this huge revolution in public health. Like
Speaker 1: they they found afterwards that of course well drained areas
Speaker 1: that had this sewer system functioning uh and safely removing
Speaker 1: sewage were kept free from cholera epidemics that broke out
Speaker 1: in other areas in the following years. And I think
Speaker 1: this brings us to a major issue from this era
Speaker 1: that we need to consider about um, about the toilet
Speaker 1: and about sewer systems. While the flush toilet in the
Speaker 1: form of the nineteenth century water closet the ajax was
Speaker 1: a great invention in a way, it did not make
Speaker 1: things better on its own, or at least not in
Speaker 1: a public way, because simply flushing your untreated waste out
Speaker 1: into channels mingled with downstream drinking water actually makes things
Speaker 1: like worse than simply pooping in a pit latrine. In
Speaker 1: order to improve public health and save lives, the flush
Speaker 1: toilet couldn't exist on its own. It had to be
Speaker 1: paired with a safe, dedicated sewage system to deal with
Speaker 1: waste properly. It's only because of public infrastructure that the
Speaker 1: toilet could become all it could be. Absolutely it reminds
Speaker 1: me of our recent discussion of wheels. You know, the
Speaker 1: wheel is great, the wheel card is great, but you've
Speaker 1: got to have roads. You've got to have some sort
Speaker 1: of system, uh that that allows you to maximize this technology.
Speaker 1: This is a really common theme that's coming up in
Speaker 1: invention history is that people often have this idea of like,
Speaker 1: you know, technological revolutions happening because a lone inventor had
Speaker 1: a brilliant idea and that one idea changed everything. That
Speaker 1: seems like it's it's so rarely that that's the case.
Speaker 1: I mean, major technological revolutions tend very often to depend
Speaker 1: on large investments in public infrastructure to support the new technology.
Speaker 1: That's an excellent point. And on that note, we're gonna
Speaker 1: take one more break, and when we come back, we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about Thomas Crapper, and we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about the I can see of the flush toilet. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're back, so it's time to talk about Thomas Crapper.
Speaker 1: We know now he did not invent the flush toilet?
Speaker 1: But what was the role of Mr Thomas Crapper? And
Speaker 1: I noticed I was doing this when I was like
Speaker 1: making notes for this episode. I don't know why my
Speaker 1: brain keeps doing this, But I don't usually call random
Speaker 1: historical dudes MR when I type their names. But I
Speaker 1: wonder if like talking about toilets and makes me naturally
Speaker 1: tend towards sort of pointless formality, maybe an interesting psychological
Speaker 1: thing to return. Maybe you just feel weird referring to
Speaker 1: him as Crapper, and you feel like you need to
Speaker 1: designate that you're talking about a person and you're not
Speaker 1: using a crude term for a toilet. I'm distinguishing him
Speaker 1: from Dr Thomas Crapper. All right, Well, Thomas Crapper enters
Speaker 1: the picture in the eighteen sixties, and basically what he
Speaker 1: does is he redesigns and supplies high end plumbed in products.
Speaker 1: So we're talking the likes of the cast iron bath
Speaker 1: shower combo, elaborate shower screens, cast iron pedestal wash binds. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, he installed some extra mirrors, hot and cold
Speaker 1: mixture taps. He improved the s Ben plumbing trap uh
Speaker 1: that we talked about in the eighteen eighties and invented
Speaker 1: the U Ben plumbing trap. Uh. And then but you
Speaker 1: know this is all part of all It's not just
Speaker 1: one plumber going around doing all this. He founded Thomas
Speaker 1: Crapper and Company in London, a sanitary equipment company, and
Speaker 1: he held nine patents, three for water closet designs such
Speaker 1: as the floating ballcock inside the toilet tank. But he
Speaker 1: didn't actually patent a toilet. So we have to double
Speaker 1: down on what we said earlier. Not only did he
Speaker 1: not invent the toilet, he didn't even reinvent the toilet,
Speaker 1: but he did improve upon some of the the details
Speaker 1: of the design. Yeah, his major role seems to be
Speaker 1: more case of like owning a business and practicing good
Speaker 1: branding of actual invention. Uh. You know everywhere around the
Speaker 1: world will associate my name with toilets, and appairly this
Speaker 1: happened because like you know, you'd go and look inside
Speaker 1: toilets and in Great Britain and they just say crapper
Speaker 1: in them, And this helped to lead to the two
Speaker 1: people calling the toilet a crapper in a vulgar way.
Speaker 1: Though you're probably now wondering, Thomas Crapper is his name
Speaker 1: and association with the toilet the origin of the term
Speaker 1: crap meaning human excrement. Before I looked this up, I
Speaker 1: was thinking, well, maybe it is. Maybe the term comes
Speaker 1: from his name and his association with the toilet, because
Speaker 1: it would seem a huge coincidence, right that this, this
Speaker 1: guy who made his his his money off of the
Speaker 1: toilet would be named crapper. Actually, it just is a
Speaker 1: huge coincidence his The word crap does not come from
Speaker 1: his name. So the word crap comes in English. It
Speaker 1: comes from originally the Old French crap or crape, from
Speaker 1: the Middle Latin crappa words meaning something like siftings or chaff.
Speaker 1: So the original use of the word crap in English
Speaker 1: refers to things dropped or cast away or discarded. So
Speaker 1: you can see why this might come to mean excrement, right,
Speaker 1: It's the thing you throw away or shed. Okay, So
Speaker 1: when when we're using the word now and we're referring
Speaker 1: to our stuff is our crap? Like that is actually
Speaker 1: more the more authentic use of the word kind of Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's the stuff that could be, you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's execrable. Yeah, Like I left all my crap at
Speaker 1: the hotel. Well I've got to go go back for that.
Speaker 1: That's the authentic use of crap. Well, I don't know,
Speaker 1: if you really want it back, then maybe it's not crap, though,
Speaker 1: I guess you're just like being cynical. They're you know,
Speaker 1: like that's all crap and I could lose it all
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter, funny enough. This also seems to be
Speaker 1: uh very similar to the etymology of another English word,
Speaker 1: which comes from the Anglo Saxon skitton and turn from
Speaker 1: the Proto Germanic skit, meaning to cut or shear or split,
Speaker 1: in other words, to separate from the body. And just
Speaker 1: because as this sent me down a rabbit trail that
Speaker 1: I ended up finding interesting, the root of the English
Speaker 1: word science is also apparently somewhat related here. So the
Speaker 1: word science comes from Latin scientia or scientia knowledge and
Speaker 1: from skierra or to know, which in Latin is probably
Speaker 1: derived from the proto Indo European, which of course is
Speaker 1: like the granddaddy language of of many languages around the world.
Speaker 1: Uh ski or sky, meaning to cut or separate, because
Speaker 1: I think the the logic of this word is when
Speaker 1: you know things, you separate fact from fiction, you separate
Speaker 1: truth from falsehood, and so knowledge and science is sort
Speaker 1: of metaphorically a cutting and separating process. Another one of
Speaker 1: these wonderful examples of abstract words in language with concrete
Speaker 1: metaphorical roots. But anyway, whether you are crapping or science ng,
Speaker 1: some part of you is cutting away and separating. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: let's get to the modern toilet. Then let's get let's
Speaker 1: get to the modern western flushing toilet dealing with here
Speaker 1: now there, of course, there are plenty of different designs
Speaker 1: for like what you do when it's time to use
Speaker 1: the toilet, right uh, And we can talk about those
Speaker 1: as we go on. But one of the features that
Speaker 1: I think many modern toilets uh can really boast about
Speaker 1: this really cool, is that they don't bother with solid
Speaker 1: valves at the bottom of the bowls and do like
Speaker 1: like some airplane toilets do. Right, But that's a whole
Speaker 1: different kettle of fish. We'll have to come back to
Speaker 1: airline toilets and space toilets in the future, right Instead,
Speaker 1: in in a lot of these modern toilets, it's all
Speaker 1: just water and pipe design making use of the physics
Speaker 1: concept of a siphon. So, Robert, have you ever made
Speaker 1: a siphon? Oh? Yes, of course, every time I use
Speaker 1: the drinking straw. Oh exactly. Yeah, So, like you know,
Speaker 1: of course, a siphon, Like you can put one bucket
Speaker 1: up on a counter and another bucket down on the floor,
Speaker 1: and you can, like if you put a hose between
Speaker 1: them and you start sucking water up into the hose
Speaker 1: from the top one and then put the bottom of
Speaker 1: the hose in the bottom bucket, it'll drain all the
Speaker 1: way down, even though the water has to go up
Speaker 1: into the hose from the top bucket. Yeah. I feel
Speaker 1: like if you've, if you've ever you know, spend enough
Speaker 1: time playing with like a you know, one of those
Speaker 1: those those cheap yard swimming pools and a hose as
Speaker 1: a child, you probably did this. Yeah. Um. So in
Speaker 1: the most common model of like the modern western toilet,
Speaker 1: there's always water sitting in the bowl and the evacuation
Speaker 1: pipe where the stuff goes away from the bottom of
Speaker 1: the bowl, it curves up when it leaves the bowl,
Speaker 1: it curves up higher than the water level within the
Speaker 1: toilet before snaking back down under the floor. And this
Speaker 1: keeps the water sitting in the toilet without draining out
Speaker 1: when it's not being flushed. And it also forms a
Speaker 1: type of s trap to block sewer gases from from
Speaker 1: escaping into the house. So then when it's time to flush,
Speaker 1: water from the cistern is released down into the bowl.
Speaker 1: This raises the water level above the bend in the pipe,
Speaker 1: which of course causes the water to begin draining down
Speaker 1: into the lower part of the pipe, which sucks all
Speaker 1: the contents out of the bowl by a siphon action.
Speaker 1: And something about me just finds this a really beautiful
Speaker 1: and elegant solution. I love the fact that the toilet
Speaker 1: doesn't need to have a trap door or anything like
Speaker 1: that in the bottom of it. It's just a correctly
Speaker 1: shaped pipe. Absolutely, and again we should we should, We
Speaker 1: should thank the universe every day that that is the case. Yeah,
Speaker 1: uh yeah. And so another thing, of course, is that
Speaker 1: there are other components. Like you you could talk about
Speaker 1: how the cistern tends to work in a toilet with
Speaker 1: the sister and the It tends to have components like
Speaker 1: a float which is designed to measure the right amount
Speaker 1: of water to allow into the sister, and like one
Speaker 1: of the things that Thomas Crapper held one of the
Speaker 1: patents for was the ballcock right, which floats up and
Speaker 1: it like trips a switch that says, hey, you can
Speaker 1: stop filling the cistern with water now because the water
Speaker 1: level has reached the right level. And there's all that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. But the basic principles of the toilet, well,
Speaker 1: we don't often think about them. Once you see how
Speaker 1: it works, it's actually very simple. It's very elegant. It's
Speaker 1: a beautiful machine. Yeah, I will say that I'm not
Speaker 1: really a handy person at all, but I I've recently
Speaker 1: repaired uh, the the machinery and the tank of my
Speaker 1: toilet when something was off and I was able to
Speaker 1: look up a video on YouTube, follow the instructions, make
Speaker 1: the repair of myself, and I just felt like a
Speaker 1: million bucks afterwards. It's a great feeling, isn't it like
Speaker 1: fixing the water appliants? Yeah, But then also it's like
Speaker 1: you can you can see it all working like it all,
Speaker 1: It all makes sense. You know, when when you when
Speaker 1: you when you when you can you can flush the toilet.
Speaker 1: Watch watch these mechanisms move, Watch the water level change. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, it's very it's very you can absorb it
Speaker 1: very easily. But as we talked about in the last episode,
Speaker 1: the toilet is not just a beautiful and elegant machine
Speaker 1: to admire from a design point of view. Of course,
Speaker 1: it does provide a ton of convenience in our lives,
Speaker 1: but also, as we said last time, the toilet saves lives.
Speaker 1: They said again, toilets save lives. This is a life
Speaker 1: and death issue. This is a major important technology that
Speaker 1: that needs that we need to improve access to all
Speaker 1: around the world. Yeah, I mean yeah, we really have
Speaker 1: to to stress the sanitation issues here. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: and it you know, it reminds me of another issue
Speaker 1: with with with waste and the spread of illnesses and parasites,
Speaker 1: especially hookworms. Hookworms being you know, a parasite that can
Speaker 1: can cause illness in humans and these will typically be
Speaker 1: acquired in sail, latrine field um and basically a parasites
Speaker 1: are acquired when bare feet come into contact with infected feces,
Speaker 1: they enter through the feet and they make their way
Speaker 1: into the hosts and testines, resulting and anemia mannutrition. And
Speaker 1: in the early twentieth century, John D. Rockefeller funded a
Speaker 1: campaign to decrease huge hookworm infections in the American South,
Speaker 1: and one of the key methods was to impose latrine
Speaker 1: pits of at least four feet, as microscopic hookworms can
Speaker 1: travel up to four feet in soil from a side
Speaker 1: of defecation. Yeah, and so this emphasizes again that like
Speaker 1: if you're not removing sewage to like a treatment facility
Speaker 1: or something like that, or you know, there are all
Speaker 1: kinds of variables that come into play about how safe
Speaker 1: like a pit storage kind of thing can be. You
Speaker 1: want to keep it closed to prevent like flies and
Speaker 1: stuff from getting out, but also if it's not sealed
Speaker 1: off from the ground soil, if it's not dug deep enough,
Speaker 1: you can encounter problems as well. Now I have to
Speaker 1: stress that I do really love my current plumbing situation. Uh,
Speaker 1: and I really especially after these episodes, I really am
Speaker 1: thankful for my functional toilet. But I sense a butt coming.
Speaker 1: You've got beef, I do, I do, and it's twofold.
Speaker 1: On one hand, there's the there's the just the weirdness
Speaker 1: of the fact that that when you flush a toilet,
Speaker 1: you are flushing unless you have a gray water system
Speaker 1: hooked up in some way, shape or form, and you
Speaker 1: are flushing drinking water. You're using perfectly drinkable water, uh
Speaker 1: to send your urine fecis down into the sewer. It
Speaker 1: would be great if there was a gray water system
Speaker 1: for right, and people have worked in some places these
Speaker 1: are in place. And then of course in some parts
Speaker 1: of the world you're going to have a toilet that
Speaker 1: is not using drinkable water to flush, just by virtue
Speaker 1: of the availability of drinkable water. Okay, so that's one
Speaker 1: ridiculous level. But the other is that the western toilets
Speaker 1: have rebranded defecation is something that should be done from
Speaker 1: a seated position, uh, you know, the throne, the chair,
Speaker 1: when naturally the human body evolved to defecate from a
Speaker 1: squatting position, and plenty of people still do it this way,
Speaker 1: especially in Asia, Africa, in the Middle East. Squat toilets
Speaker 1: can still be found all over the place in these areas,
Speaker 1: utilizing modern flushing aesthetics. In many cases and functionality, but
Speaker 1: with the basic concept of squatting still in play. I
Speaker 1: think squatting toilets are becoming trendy in the West, too,
Speaker 1: aren't they. Well, not full blown squatting toilets where they
Speaker 1: where you squat over the floor based apparatus. You'll see
Speaker 1: more like the squatty potty, which I have a squatty potty.
Speaker 1: I love it. Uh but it allows you to essentially
Speaker 1: use a Western thrown toilet, but with more of a
Speaker 1: squatting posture, which again is what our bodies evolved to do. Likewise,
Speaker 1: you can get some toilet seats that have room for
Speaker 1: your bare feet to uh to to to rest on,
Speaker 1: so you can squat over that. I've never used one
Speaker 1: of those, but but but I'm interested because that's that's
Speaker 1: that's basically how my son likes to use a toilet.
Speaker 1: Uh so maybe that's what I need to get him
Speaker 1: down the line. Now, toilet designs continue to evolve. We
Speaker 1: were utilizing high tech bells and whistles typified by some
Speaker 1: of the Japanese toilets that we often see featured in videos.
Speaker 1: It's almost a cliche at this point, like the high
Speaker 1: tech Japanese toilet, right, Yeah, various buttons that you can
Speaker 1: push for. I mean, some of it may it's perfect sense,
Speaker 1: Like being able to call for help from the toilet
Speaker 1: is a great idea, especially if you're dealing with with
Speaker 1: an elderly population. One thing I've seen that I thought
Speaker 1: was kind of interesting was a I believe this was Japanese,
Speaker 1: but I'm not positive, but it was a toilet that
Speaker 1: has built in sort of like noisemaker. Uh that. So
Speaker 1: there's of course a common cultural phenomenon of people being
Speaker 1: embarrassed about the sounds they make when they're on the
Speaker 1: toilet in a place where people can hear them. So
Speaker 1: if you're in a public bathroom, in a stall or something,
Speaker 1: you're using a toilet, people will often just continuously flush
Speaker 1: the toilet to cut because it's loud and that covers
Speaker 1: up the sounds of what they're doing. But that also
Speaker 1: wastes a lot of water. You don't need to do that.
Speaker 1: So a way around that is you can you can
Speaker 1: help accommodate people sense of embarrassment and modesty without wasting
Speaker 1: all the water by just having a loud flushing sound
Speaker 1: play when you press a button. Well, I think the
Speaker 1: Romans might have been onto something here with having live
Speaker 1: music in the toilet. Maybe we should go that route.
Speaker 1: Maybe not live music, but maybe just piped in um
Speaker 1: like loud rock music. Maybe that will be better for everybody.
Speaker 1: Just save you'll save money. Uh. I guess two other
Speaker 1: key innovations here. One that I think is is excellent,
Speaker 1: and that is various low flush features, which I'll save
Speaker 1: the amount of water reduced the amount of water that
Speaker 1: you're you're doing to flush your business. Another innovation that
Speaker 1: I absolutely despise is the auto flush toilet, in which
Speaker 1: a yeah will decide when you need a flush, and
Speaker 1: it almost at least the ones that I've ever used,
Speaker 1: almost always decides to flush at the the the absolute
Speaker 1: wrong time and will end up flushing too many times
Speaker 1: or just phantom flushing. Uh, you know, with nobody in there.
Speaker 1: There's a toilet in the building here. One time that
Speaker 1: I encountered that was just forever flushing. It was stuck
Speaker 1: in eternal flush. It never stopped. Like I I seriously,
Speaker 1: I end up wasting extra toylet paper because my first
Speaker 1: step is to mask the sensor with toilet paper, to
Speaker 1: to wrap to give it a blindfold so that it
Speaker 1: won't scare me and friends, and like, I don't need
Speaker 1: to feel like a predator is about to attack me
Speaker 1: while I'm doing my business. And I've done the same one.
Speaker 1: I've had to take my son to the toilet. It's
Speaker 1: like it's gonna scare It's gonna scare him. It's just ridiculous. So,
Speaker 1: I mean it's a great idea ultimately, but I think
Speaker 1: the sensor technology is not quite there. Are you the
Speaker 1: person who keeps vandalizing the auto toilets and our building?
Speaker 1: There's no need to vandalize them, I want to I
Speaker 1: want to stress that because people do literally take them apart. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but there's no need to do that. You can just
Speaker 1: wrap some toilet paper around their sensor, blindfold the toilet
Speaker 1: and it'll be fine. Now. Another interesting bit of difference
Speaker 1: in cultural toilet design, uh is the the flox spuler
Speaker 1: plate in older German toilets. Did you did you ever
Speaker 1: encounter any? I don't think so. So I got to
Speaker 1: experience some of these when I went on high school
Speaker 1: trip to Germany back I guess it was like the
Speaker 1: late nineties. They weren't everywhere, but they were some of
Speaker 1: the places, and apparently you don't find as many anymore. Um, Basically,
Speaker 1: it's it's very much just like any other Western toilet,
Speaker 1: except there's kind of a raised plate upon which the
Speaker 1: fecal matter will will fall and then when you flush,
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's flushed away off of that little plate.
Speaker 1: And contrary to what you might have heard, these are
Speaker 1: not examination plates. That was kind of like the the
Speaker 1: I don't know, the not not even an urban legend,
Speaker 1: but it was just like false information where people say, oh,
Speaker 1: that's so that you can poop, and then you want
Speaker 1: to look at your poop and it's on a plate
Speaker 1: for you to see it, you know. Rather, the feature
Speaker 1: was aimed at preventing you from splashing yourself with toilet
Speaker 1: water when you defecated. Yeah, well that's a smart idea,
Speaker 1: I agree, But apparently they you can you can design
Speaker 1: a toilet in such a way that maybe there's less
Speaker 1: splash without having to use the plate, because the drawback
Speaker 1: to a plate is that sometimes it requires more brushing
Speaker 1: of the toilet bowl. Now, speaking of toilet bowl innovation,
Speaker 1: we would be remiss if we didn't mention the infamous
Speaker 1: masculine toilet. Yes, this has been in the news. Yeah,
Speaker 1: championed by former acting United States Attorney General Matt Whittaker. Yeah.
Speaker 1: What he was representing some business that like, uh they
Speaker 1: what they claim to sort of like be advocates on
Speaker 1: behalf of inventions. And one of the inventions that somebody
Speaker 1: was doing business with them with was this this toilet
Speaker 1: for how did they put it? What was the polite terminology?
Speaker 1: Well endowed men? Yes, the idea being that that, oh, well,
Speaker 1: these men their penises are longer, and if they sit
Speaker 1: on the toilet, their penis is going to get in
Speaker 1: the water of the toilet, and therefore they need more
Speaker 1: distance between seat and water. Um, which you know. I
Speaker 1: I would argue that this could be avoided in plenty
Speaker 1: of other ways, such as you could use a squatty potty.
Speaker 1: I think that would probably help, or just basic manipulation
Speaker 1: and an awareness of one's own genitals. Uh. But I
Speaker 1: also I can't help but wonder, and maybe this is
Speaker 1: something that is detailed in the patent information or the
Speaker 1: literature surrounding the masculine toilet is wouldn't it results in
Speaker 1: a maximum splashdown It's like a giant deep bowl. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: so it seems like, yeah, okay, you can sit on
Speaker 1: the toilet and you can feel like, you know, you
Speaker 1: don't have to worry about your anatomy touching the water
Speaker 1: until you know the fecal matter drops like five feet
Speaker 1: and then splashes up like a torpedo went off. So
Speaker 1: I don't know. I have a lot of questions about
Speaker 1: the practicality of the masculine toilet. I think it's only
Speaker 1: twelve inches, but that seems actually that's like the worst distance, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that seems like that would be maximum splashdown distance.
Speaker 1: If it were five feet, Yeah, you'd be fine. You
Speaker 1: don't have to climb up a ladder to get on
Speaker 1: your toilet, and then it would make you look like
Speaker 1: a tiny person on a giant toilet, which probably runs
Speaker 1: against like the masculine impulse of the design, right. I'd
Speaker 1: have to imagin jen if anybody actually bought something like that,
Speaker 1: it was probably not someone who literally needed it. They
Speaker 1: just they needed the world to to think they needed it.
Speaker 1: But maybe we're wrong. Hey, if if anyone listening out
Speaker 1: there has used a masculine toilet, uh, let us do
Speaker 1: not email us. Do not. I don't want to hear
Speaker 1: about it. That I seriously do want to hear about
Speaker 1: anybody any kind of toilet we've we've discussed here, any
Speaker 1: kind of latrine situation if you have insightful um experience
Speaker 1: with them, be it a various so squat toilet, squatty potties,
Speaker 1: um dry latrines, wet latrines, washing versus um wiping. I
Speaker 1: want to hear about all of it. You know we can.
Speaker 1: We can withhold the names as necessary. Okay, I gotta
Speaker 1: finish today with a with a great story about toilet
Speaker 1: technology and and a flush fiasco from the twentieth century history.
Speaker 1: Do you want to hear about when a toilet sik
Speaker 1: a Nazi submarine? Oh? Yes, please? So had you come
Speaker 1: across this story before? I had not. No, I had
Speaker 1: rebly thought much about U boats and toilets. Really, Oh,
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, that's inherently a fascinating subject, right, So
Speaker 1: on April fourteenth, you had a German U boat called
Speaker 1: You one two oh six that was forced to surface
Speaker 1: after a German officer screwed up the toilet and caused
Speaker 1: poison gas to vent into the crew areas. So, unfortunately
Speaker 1: we know this officer's name, and he will be remembered
Speaker 1: in history. The officer was named Captain Lieutenant Carl Adolph Schlit,
Speaker 1: and the submarine was so it was traveling submerged I think,
Speaker 1: in the North Sea. It was off the coast of Scotland,
Speaker 1: and this particular U boat had been fitted with a
Speaker 1: new model of underwater toilet that was supposed to work
Speaker 1: at greater depths, I think, and there might be some
Speaker 1: kind of pressure pressurization issue going on, I'm not sure,
Speaker 1: but so anyway, for whatever reason, it was a new
Speaker 1: model of toilet. And the story goes that Schlit did
Speaker 1: his business on this new high tech toilet but couldn't
Speaker 1: figure out how he was supposed to flush it. Uh
Speaker 1: So he called in tech support and the engineer who
Speaker 1: arrived apparently pulled the wrong lever or something, operated the
Speaker 1: machine incorrectly, and seawater flooded in and it soaked a
Speaker 1: bunch of electrical batteries underneath the toilet, which in turn
Speaker 1: started releasing poisonous chlorine gas into the cabin and then
Speaker 1: the boat was forced to go to the surface to
Speaker 1: ventilate with the outside air because the poison gas. But
Speaker 1: it was in enemy waters off the coast of Scotland,
Speaker 1: and Allied aircraft quickly attacked it. Then the boat was
Speaker 1: damaged and the crew was forced to abandon ship somehow.
Speaker 1: I'm sure this is not the only case in history
Speaker 1: of critical problems caused by pooping on a submarine. It
Speaker 1: had to have happened before. But this is the story
Speaker 1: of car of a Carl Adolf Schlitt. That is interesting.
Speaker 1: I've never heard that one before. But like, this was
Speaker 1: the new model. It was perhaps it was invented because
Speaker 1: of previous problems, so it was there perhaps a whole
Speaker 1: string of other U boat just general submarine in bathroom issues.
Speaker 1: I mean, we've covered on the show before and stuff
Speaker 1: to blow your mind. Anyway, the history of of toilets
Speaker 1: in in orbit, toilets in in in microgravity, and like
Speaker 1: that's that's a whole engineering fiasco into itself. But it's
Speaker 1: also amazing. I mean, if you ever wanted to poop
Speaker 1: into a vacuum cleaner as opposed to just pooping into
Speaker 1: a bag, which was the earlier option, right, everybody else
Speaker 1: wanted to poop into a vacuum cleaner. Who hasn't thought
Speaker 1: about that? All Right, Well, we're gonna leave it there
Speaker 1: with pooping into the vacuum cleaner, because it does make
Speaker 1: you wonder, like, what does the future hold for the toilet?
Speaker 1: To what extent have we we reach peak toilet? I
Speaker 1: mean we keep we We do see new models, new
Speaker 1: innovations coming out every year. There are toilet companies that
Speaker 1: depend on finding new twists, pushing new designs. So I
Speaker 1: wonder what humans will be pooping into and say a
Speaker 1: hundred years, two hundred years. Yeah, one thing I could
Speaker 1: mention in my re search I came across there was
Speaker 1: an article that had a quote from a Dutch architect
Speaker 1: named Rim Kolas, and he said that the toilet, this
Speaker 1: is where you put it. It's the fundamental zone of interaction,
Speaker 1: on the most intimate level between humans and architecture. Okay,
Speaker 1: I can kind of see that. Yeah, it's almost like
Speaker 1: where we're built. Because like, you've got other furniture in
Speaker 1: your house, but you can move that around usually or
Speaker 1: you don't have such a deeply intimate relationship with it
Speaker 1: as you do with the toilet, but usually not. Yeah,
Speaker 1: most people do not have a carnal relationship with their furniture,
Speaker 1: but everybody has a very intimate relationship with the toilet. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I like thinking about it like that. It's almost
Speaker 1: like it's the you know you mentioned earlier that like
Speaker 1: the s pipe is sort of like the century that
Speaker 1: they were, the trap whatever it is that the water
Speaker 1: trap that the century that guards the gates and doesn't
Speaker 1: let demons from odor hell come up into your house.
Speaker 1: The toilet is also sort of like a diplomat. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's it's how you interface with the world of infrastructure beyond,
Speaker 1: most most deeply, and most fundamentally. It's what it's how
Speaker 1: you interface your body with the sewer. It's communion with
Speaker 1: the arteries of civilization and modern sanitation. It does make
Speaker 1: me wonder, however, how did the toilets on the Starship
Speaker 1: Enterprise work? Do you think they're like teleporter based? Well,
Speaker 1: I would guess that they probably just atomize the uh,
Speaker 1: the stuff and turned it into raw materials to be
Speaker 1: used in the what's it called the you know the
Speaker 1: stuff that the what's it called the replicated? Yeah? Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's just atoms. Why not? Yeah, no problem
Speaker 1: with that. I mean, poop is poop is unclean, but
Speaker 1: atoms aren't unclean. That's right. You reduce everything to its
Speaker 1: basic atoms. It's it's all good and it only takes
Speaker 1: the energy of like thirty thousand nuclear bomb. All right, Well, again,
Speaker 1: we'd love to hear from everyone out there if you
Speaker 1: have any insight on the the the evolution of the
Speaker 1: toilet uh toilet technology across the ages, and indeed where
Speaker 1: it will go in the future. Perhaps there there is
Speaker 1: a wonderful treatment of of of science fiction uh toilets
Speaker 1: out there, and we'd love to hear about that as well.
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