Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday
Speaker 1: time for a bonus episode. Normally on Saturday, you know
Speaker 1: what you'd be getting as a rerun a classic episode
Speaker 1: of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. But that's not what
Speaker 1: you're getting today. Today you're getting an episode of our
Speaker 1: other podcast, Invention. Because some of you are not subscribed
Speaker 1: to Invention yet, what's going on? Well, true, So this
Speaker 1: this is an episode of Invention, the first of two
Speaker 1: that we did on toilets. We figured this is something
Speaker 1: everybody can relate to. All of you use toilets of
Speaker 1: some form or another. Even if you just go out
Speaker 1: into a field and dig a hole, well, you are
Speaker 1: creating a toilet. You're creating a little latrine pit. And
Speaker 1: in this episode we get into the history of that.
Speaker 1: Where did it come from? What were some of the
Speaker 1: earliest advanced systems of using a toilet? Like when when
Speaker 1: was the first time someone was was actively pooping into
Speaker 1: running water? That's sort of thing now, So this is
Speaker 1: gonna be, as we're saying, part one of our two
Speaker 1: parter on toilets over on Invention. So if you listen
Speaker 1: to this episode and you'll like it and you want
Speaker 1: to learn more, You're you're hanging on the edge of
Speaker 1: a cliff. You want to know where toilets go after
Speaker 1: we leave off, you'll have to go over to the
Speaker 1: Invention feed, check out part two there and subscribe. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so the best way to do it you can go
Speaker 1: to invention pod dot com. That's the website for our show.
Speaker 1: But also you can just look for Invention on any
Speaker 1: service that you happen to use to get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: Be at say Apple podcast sort of the I Heart
Speaker 1: radio app. Uh. Look for the kind of labyrinth like
Speaker 1: sun uh emblem that we've created to go along with
Speaker 1: our title. That's right, gorge onto Dailian imagery. Uh, learn
Speaker 1: about toilet's, think about pooping, think about pooping way too much,
Speaker 1: and have a wonderful weekend. Hey, welcome to Invention. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert lamp and I'm Joe McCormick. And Robert
Speaker 1: I got a question for you. Have you ever been
Speaker 1: to like a festival or big public event where the
Speaker 1: organizers did not get enough porta potties? Probably so probably so. Um,
Speaker 1: it's I mean, it's it's a weird. It's a weird
Speaker 1: equation you have to work out right because you need
Speaker 1: to have the approximate number of porta potties for a
Speaker 1: given event. And at the same time, like I've definitely
Speaker 1: I've been to events where people care more for the
Speaker 1: porta potties, like there's more of a communal effort to like,
Speaker 1: let's let's look after these porta potties. Let's even go
Speaker 1: in there and clean the porta potties right to ensure
Speaker 1: that things don't get too vile too fast. Like if
Speaker 1: there's if it's a multi day event, people might be
Speaker 1: more respectful of the fact that people will need to
Speaker 1: continue to use these over a period of time. Then
Speaker 1: if it's just like a it's you know, this is
Speaker 1: going on for a few hours, let's just go total
Speaker 1: war on these facility teas I've been to a one
Speaker 1: time went to a beer tasting festival in North Carolina
Speaker 1: where they did not get nearly enough porta potties, and
Speaker 1: I remember feeling like this is the closest thing I've
Speaker 1: ever felt to like a Mad Max type scenario in
Speaker 1: real life. People were losing their minds, Like when when
Speaker 1: you don't have a place you've been drinking beer, and
Speaker 1: then you don't have a place where you can legally
Speaker 1: and uh in, uh in, in a polite way, go
Speaker 1: to the bathroom. Things start to get dire really fast. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I'm guessing there's probably a lot of indiscriminate aiming
Speaker 1: from male urinators at this these particular events. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: was also a you could tell just like this all
Speaker 1: over the place, frantic search like ants foraging about looking
Speaker 1: for other places they could go apart from the far
Speaker 1: too few porta potties that were swarmed by people waiting.
Speaker 1: But you start doing some very odd math if you're
Speaker 1: in a situation like that, or even if you're not,
Speaker 1: even if it's not that bad, you're just waiting in
Speaker 1: line to use a porta potty, it least I find
Speaker 1: I do. And one of the questions that I think
Speaker 1: you inevitably start pondering is how much exactly do people
Speaker 1: poop in a lifetime? Like how much do I poop
Speaker 1: in a year? How much do does does my whole
Speaker 1: household poop in you know, in twenty years? Yeah, though
Speaker 1: these are not necessarily factors that are going to help
Speaker 1: you out, for you know, weekend music festival no, no,
Speaker 1: But I mean you have to imagine that there's some
Speaker 1: kind of rough math along those lines going in. I
Speaker 1: guess it's less for the festival. It's probably less thinking
Speaker 1: about the total mass of poop and more about, like,
Speaker 1: I don't know how many people and how often they'll
Speaker 1: need to go, because it's not like the things are
Speaker 1: going to be filled up and overflowing, at least hopefully not.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that is the thing that you can start
Speaker 1: wondering about, and it's a weird question once you actually
Speaker 1: get the answer. I found an article that addresses this.
Speaker 1: It was a article on Live Science by Mindy Weisberger
Speaker 1: addressing exactly this question full on with an interview with
Speaker 1: a like health p fessional who had the dirt. So
Speaker 1: it's impossible to answer this question exactly how much you
Speaker 1: poop in a lifetime, because of course everybody's different, there's
Speaker 1: different average fecal mass production, there's different lifespan and all that.
Speaker 1: But it's actually fairly easy to get some average figures.
Speaker 1: So the article sites Kim Barrett, a professor of medicine
Speaker 1: at You See San Diego, and Barrett says, on average,
Speaker 1: men and women have roughly one bowel movement per day. Though,
Speaker 1: if you have more than that or less than that,
Speaker 1: don't panic. There's a normal range that's more and less.
Speaker 1: It's okay. But the daily average amount of feces produced
Speaker 1: by mass by a person an adult is usually about
Speaker 1: fourteen to seventeen ounces or about four hundred to five
Speaker 1: hundred grams, And from their Weisberger does some simple math
Speaker 1: quote starting with an average daily amount of about fourteen
Speaker 1: ounces or four hundred grams, the total poop production in
Speaker 1: a week's time would be about six pounds or two
Speaker 1: point eight ms. In a year, a single person would
Speaker 1: yield about three hundred and twenty pounds or a hundred
Speaker 1: and forty i've kilograms of poop, just a little more
Speaker 1: than an adult panda. Ways. Al Right, So when when
Speaker 1: one here's the sort of drill sergeant cliche of like
Speaker 1: I've I've craped bigger than you, that's probably true. If
Speaker 1: you're looking at a like a year's worth of defecation,
Speaker 1: well that starts to call to mind this thing that
Speaker 1: It got me thinking about it. It got me thinking
Speaker 1: about how as people get older, often their bodies shrink. Right,
Speaker 1: you know, after adulthood, your body can actually physically shrink.
Speaker 1: You don't continue getting bigger and bigger as life goes on.
Speaker 1: And yet there's this invisible phantom of biomass following every
Speaker 1: person around throughout the years, and no matter what, it's
Speaker 1: always getting larger and larger the older you get. It
Speaker 1: is the phantom mountain of combined mass of all the
Speaker 1: feces you've ever produced. Like like a big poop golem
Speaker 1: following you around, you have an invisible phantom poop golem
Speaker 1: that follows you everywhere and only gets bigger with age.
Speaker 1: So so this means that like if you live to
Speaker 1: the age of seventy six, Weisberger does the math, on average,
Speaker 1: you'll produce like twenty four thousand, three hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: pounds or eleven thousand and thirty kilograms of poop in
Speaker 1: your lifetime. If you live to eighty one, it's more
Speaker 1: like it's close to twenty six thousand pounds are close
Speaker 1: to twelve thousand kilograms. Quote, So a lifetime of a
Speaker 1: woman's poop, because the average female lifespan is about eighty
Speaker 1: one years in the United States, UH, the average lifetime
Speaker 1: of a woman's poop weighs as much as three adult
Speaker 1: male hippos. But if you follow the same averages we've
Speaker 1: mentioned a minute ago, think about those people who lived
Speaker 1: like a hundred and twenty, you know, the super supercentenarians. Uh.
Speaker 1: One of these people who lives to like a hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty has created, by the end of their life
Speaker 1: a phantom poop mountain, or one of these poop golems
Speaker 1: of thirty eight thousand, four hundred pounds or about seventeen thousand,
Speaker 1: four hundred and twenty kilograms. I was trying to find
Speaker 1: an object to compare this to. It's close to the
Speaker 1: weight of a number of lighter combat vehicles like the
Speaker 1: M twenty four Chafee light tank, the first used by
Speaker 1: the Americans in World War Two. Just imagine this. If
Speaker 1: you live to a hundred and twenty, over the course
Speaker 1: of your life, you can, on average, poop a tank.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, uh, let's think about these poop golems.
Speaker 1: Obviously they cannot live with us. They must live elsewhere.
Speaker 1: And that's why that's where we get to the subject
Speaker 1: today's episode and the episode to follow this, because this
Speaker 1: is gonna be a two parter and we think you'll
Speaker 1: love this one. But episode number two is going to
Speaker 1: be a real doozy. Yes, so, yeah, that's that's the
Speaker 1: subject of our episodes. It brings us to the technology
Speaker 1: of the toilet and ultimately the concept of the flush toilet. Um. So,
Speaker 1: I think in today's episode, we're gonna be focusing primarily
Speaker 1: on sort of the history of toilet technology, what we
Speaker 1: what we were dealing with, like the problems faced by
Speaker 1: disposal of human waste and and toilets before the flush
Speaker 1: toilet was invented, And then the next episode we'll meet
Speaker 1: the power of the flush. But so, I think one
Speaker 1: of the things to think about is that the problem
Speaker 1: of what to do with human waste only really becomes
Speaker 1: a huge issue once you have sedentary lifestyles and civilization,
Speaker 1: like once you get a lot of people living in
Speaker 1: roughly the same place and not constantly moving right absolutely, uh,
Speaker 1: you know. I was looking back at one of my
Speaker 1: favorite books on hygiene clean A History of Personal Hygiene
Speaker 1: Impurity by Virginia Smith, and she points out that making
Speaker 1: sure that your poop is somewhere other than your immediate
Speaker 1: living environment has always been just a universal human behavior.
Speaker 1: It's just part of our our species, and certainly you
Speaker 1: see this in any number of species as well. Um,
Speaker 1: I mean you see, like dogs would rather go poop
Speaker 1: somewhere far away from where they live. You know, they
Speaker 1: don't want to poop in their den right, and they're
Speaker 1: they're even you know, we've talked about coprophagia. There even
Speaker 1: like some ideas and science about like when a dog
Speaker 1: ends up pooping in its house. This may come from
Speaker 1: like an instinct to the fact that sometimes dogs will
Speaker 1: then eat it, which seems gross to us, is actually
Speaker 1: something to like prevent possible parasite eggs from hatching in it,
Speaker 1: because there can be a health risk from poop staying
Speaker 1: around in your living areas. Yeah, and if you want
Speaker 1: to hear more about this Stufforable in your Mind has
Speaker 1: an entire episode about animals eating poop. That's right. We're
Speaker 1: not going to be focusing on eating poop today, except
Speaker 1: in the sense the toilet eats poop if you will, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can. You can look at it that way for sure.
Speaker 1: So but you know, back when we were just nomadic creatures,
Speaker 1: we didn't have to worry about this is so much.
Speaker 1: You you poop where you had to poop, You did
Speaker 1: whatever you needed to do to to hide the feces.
Speaker 1: But then you're going to be moving on. You're not
Speaker 1: going to stay in that immediate area, and you're probably
Speaker 1: there aren't that many of you anyway, like any given
Speaker 1: group of human nomads. Uh, it's not going to be
Speaker 1: the size of of a of a village or the
Speaker 1: stuff certainly the size of a large metropolitan area. Now
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean there are no dangerous associated with defecation
Speaker 1: at this stage. Even you're not gonna have nearly as
Speaker 1: much of a problem with what to do with the excrement.
Speaker 1: You are still like when you when you go to
Speaker 1: go to the bathroom, you're putting yourself in a vulnerable state. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: I mean, poop itself opens up vulnerabilities. You see this
Speaker 1: in any number of animals that have various methods for
Speaker 1: hiding their own poops. Sometimes it's essentially self hiding, such
Speaker 1: as the way a goat's poop will rolled away. Goats
Speaker 1: often would favor hilly environment so that the poop rolls
Speaker 1: away hides itself. Cats, on the other hand, of course,
Speaker 1: or are known for their uh, their their skillet, bearing
Speaker 1: their poop and thus hiding it from from larger predators
Speaker 1: because that's the fear, right, is that your fecal matter
Speaker 1: is h is a signal. Uh, it's an it's a
Speaker 1: it's an odor that is letting anyone with a nose
Speaker 1: to smell it know where you are and perhaps what
Speaker 1: degree of healthier in as well. Yeah, if you are
Speaker 1: a prey animal, it shows you where a predator can
Speaker 1: come get a meal. If you're a predator, it can
Speaker 1: scare off prey animals. Uh. There's a paper that looked
Speaker 1: into into some of this. It's a two paper called
Speaker 1: the Control of Defecation in Humans and Evolutionary Advantage. The
Speaker 1: question mark part of it there by Italian bowel experts G.
Speaker 1: Massotti and V. Villainacci, And they did something interesting here.
Speaker 1: They ran a human fecal sample. Uh. They were they
Speaker 1: use both a modern and an ancient example through complex
Speaker 1: gas uh chromatographic mass spectro spectrometric analysis, and they discovered
Speaker 1: that quote, human feces are rich in volatile compounds likely
Speaker 1: to be identified by potential predators. And so they went
Speaker 1: on to argue that the high predation risk for ancient
Speaker 1: hominids by large carnivores suggests something rather amazing about our
Speaker 1: pooping powers. Quote. We hypothesize that the voluntary control of
Speaker 1: defication by our ancestors, together with greater brain volume, the
Speaker 1: rex stature, opposable things, and other changes may have contributed
Speaker 1: to the successful march of hominids along the road of evolution.
Speaker 1: In fact, by deciding when, how and where to defecate
Speaker 1: may have several advantages in the complex prey predator relationship
Speaker 1: because spores are left in places undetectable by predators, or
Speaker 1: there are no fecal tracks who sent maybe easily individualated
Speaker 1: by prey. So they propose that choosing carefully where to
Speaker 1: poop maybe an important part of what kind of animal
Speaker 1: we are exactly so. But but even from an early
Speaker 1: point um, as Virginia Smith points out, Neolithic people's they
Speaker 1: made use of midden piles. So you would have an
Speaker 1: area in which you're living, and if you need to
Speaker 1: to poop, you're either pooping beyond the area in which
Speaker 1: you're living, or you're taking your poop and dumping it
Speaker 1: out there in in the midden pile. And there are
Speaker 1: you know, a few different systems that that one can
Speaker 1: use here, one of course, is the dry sewer system.
Speaker 1: And uh and this is this will remind probably a
Speaker 1: lot of people of a hat box because a cat's
Speaker 1: litter box is a dry sewer system. Uh that this
Speaker 1: would have been an indoor bucket of sand, ash or
Speaker 1: dirt that one would defecate into, and then you could
Speaker 1: take that dirt, sand or ash outside, take it to
Speaker 1: the mid and bile dump it out and you're done.
Speaker 1: Or you could do it in the inverse. I mean
Speaker 1: this is actually still a common method and dry pit
Speaker 1: latrines around the world. Like if you've got an outhouse
Speaker 1: and it's just a pit latrine. UM, a common thing
Speaker 1: to do to help prevent smells and and help keep
Speaker 1: things from getting too nasty is after you do your
Speaker 1: business in the pit, you've got a bucket of like
Speaker 1: old coal ash or something like that, or lime or
Speaker 1: something in the uh in the out house, and you
Speaker 1: scatter that on top, and that helps contain smells and
Speaker 1: so forth. Now, of course, the wet sewer system, We're
Speaker 1: gonna get more into that in a bit, but that,
Speaker 1: of course is ultimately what we have today in much
Speaker 1: of the world where you certainly a flush toilet is
Speaker 1: an example of this, right, and that simply derives from
Speaker 1: sort of the the ingenious mechanical action of water flow. Right.
Speaker 1: If you have to if you want to say, poop
Speaker 1: in a chamber pot or in a bucket or something
Speaker 1: like that, you've got to physically remove it yourself from
Speaker 1: where you are. If you are to poop into moving water,
Speaker 1: then the moving water can remove your waste for you
Speaker 1: and you don't have to do that, right Or I
Speaker 1: guess one could poop into a container of water that
Speaker 1: is not moving and then you would remove that yourself.
Speaker 1: That's also a possibility, I guess it is now the
Speaker 1: other They are all kinds of things you can poop into,
Speaker 1: and I imagine people have tried all of them at
Speaker 1: one point or another. Now, beyond this dry wet distinction,
Speaker 1: there's another important one that Smith points out, and she
Speaker 1: says that toilet culture divides sharply into wiper and washer culture. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this is, of course, is just how one cleans
Speaker 1: one's bomb toilet defecation. Yeah, like toilet paper versus like
Speaker 1: a b day or wet wipes or something like that. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: most ancient culture, she points out that they were wipers,
Speaker 1: so they would have used certainly paper if it was available.
Speaker 1: Of course, for the longest paper was um, it was
Speaker 1: a rarity. So you're gonna probably depend on things like grass, leaves, sticks,
Speaker 1: corn cobs, mud balls, and of course stones I've commonly
Speaker 1: seen sided. I'm trying to imagine this. I just see
Speaker 1: it pop up in like articles about ancient toilets, that
Speaker 1: people would use bits of broken pottery to clean themselves.
Speaker 1: That I see that sited. But I'm just trying to
Speaker 1: picture it, and it will not picture it. But you
Speaker 1: know it, it seems it seems a little little risky.
Speaker 1: Well it it drives down just the ridiculousness I think
Speaker 1: of any wiping culture, because I feel like ultimately washing
Speaker 1: culture has the stronger argument. Um. And washing culture is,
Speaker 1: of course, instead of using even paper, what have you
Speaker 1: simply depended more or exclusively on running water or spraying
Speaker 1: water or water poured from an apparatus. That the the
Speaker 1: sort of lubricant power of water. It's taking the principle
Speaker 1: of the flush toilet to your own skin, right. And
Speaker 1: you know this is the standard in many parts of
Speaker 1: the world, you know, particularly say in Islamic and Hindu cultures. Um.
Speaker 1: I mean you'll even find this. Uh, if you've ever
Speaker 1: traveled abroad, you may have encountered this. But I have
Speaker 1: also I know people who like purchased a house in
Speaker 1: the Atlanta area and they're like, I don't know why,
Speaker 1: but there's a vegetable sprayer installed next to my toilet. Well,
Speaker 1: that is, it's a bi day sprayer. That's that's simply
Speaker 1: a means of of washing one's bum after one has defecated,
Speaker 1: and it's a rather elegant solution. I would, in my opinion,
Speaker 1: hard to argue there. I mean, yeah, water gets things
Speaker 1: cleaner than than without water. I mean it's not a
Speaker 1: perfect analogy, but imagine if I gave you the option
Speaker 1: of would you rather be able to take showers or
Speaker 1: just wipe yourself down with some paper towels to clean
Speaker 1: your body? Absolutely, I think most of us would probably
Speaker 1: choose the running water if it is an an option. Uh.
Speaker 1: That being said, for many of these cultures, running water
Speaker 1: was not an option. You know that, then that's one
Speaker 1: of the main reasons that you're seeing the wiping method
Speaker 1: is the primary method in these in among ancient peoples. Now,
Speaker 1: for the most part, this this worked right. They were
Speaker 1: able to sort of roll with very simple um sewage systems.
Speaker 1: Just simply get up and move on. Because you're nomadic
Speaker 1: or if you're living in a small area, just keep
Speaker 1: it on the outside of your your living environment. But
Speaker 1: the thing about humans is that we inevitably did a
Speaker 1: number of things. We overcame all of our predators. We
Speaker 1: we conquered the natural world and innovented to agriculture, and
Speaker 1: then we started more move and then we started building cities.
Speaker 1: We started building just increasingly large cramped complex um just
Speaker 1: accretions of human population, which of course is one of
Speaker 1: the reasons we have I have so many wonderful things
Speaker 1: in our culture. But also it created a lot of problems. Yeah,
Speaker 1: of course the city comes with many wonders for good
Speaker 1: and ill, and it just I mean, obviously, how to
Speaker 1: deal with human waste is a major one of the ills,
Speaker 1: right is one of the biggest problems that you immediately
Speaker 1: face as soon as you decide to create crowded, sedentary civilization.
Speaker 1: Cramming a bunch of people close together and having them
Speaker 1: all live there and not leave, and what to do
Speaker 1: with human waste has long been I think one of
Speaker 1: the single most important and consequential problems in the design
Speaker 1: of human civilizations. Like think about okay, if we go
Speaker 1: with those numbers earlier, like the you know, fourteen ounces
Speaker 1: or whatever. Average a day, a household of five people
Speaker 1: is producing on average, like thirty pounds of feces a week.
Speaker 1: An apartment building of fifty people produces like three hundred
Speaker 1: pounds a week. Obviously, people don't want that stuff hanging around,
Speaker 1: So where does it go? And how does it get there?
Speaker 1: If you Okay, so if you're in a city, you
Speaker 1: can't walk outside the outskirts of the city every time
Speaker 1: you need to go to the bathroom and go to
Speaker 1: like a midden pile, that's you know, where nobody is.
Speaker 1: I mean, we'll come back to it. To a certain extent,
Speaker 1: you can, but that's only going to scale for so long, right,
Speaker 1: Like residents of New York City cannot go to New
Speaker 1: Jersey to poop. It's it's you can't leave. If you
Speaker 1: have to leave Manhattan to poop, then I mean, why
Speaker 1: you can't really live in Manhattan. And even then that's
Speaker 1: not a good idea, especially when you've got lots of
Speaker 1: people crowded around open defecation, even if it's in in
Speaker 1: a place separated from you, if it's often a midden
Speaker 1: pile or something like that, that can lead to negative
Speaker 1: health outcomes. And we'll talk about that in a bit um.
Speaker 1: But so, yeah, so you don't want all that stuff
Speaker 1: hanging around. And it's not just because we don't esthetically
Speaker 1: like the idea of feces piling up in the streets
Speaker 1: and alleys around our homes because it's gross. It can
Speaker 1: actually be dangerous to be exposed to untreated human waste,
Speaker 1: like untreated sewage getting into water sources is especially dangerous.
Speaker 1: This can spread water borne diseases like diarrhea, which you
Speaker 1: know is one of the biggest killers of children around
Speaker 1: the world in terms of infectious disease, and then like
Speaker 1: a cholera. I mean, cholera has been just one of
Speaker 1: the most awful diseases in human history, and it still
Speaker 1: kills tens of thousands of people every single year, I
Speaker 1: mean even today. And this generally is it's the fecal
Speaker 1: oral route of disease transmission. It's kind of gross to
Speaker 1: talk about, but it's when sewage contaminates sources that end
Speaker 1: up going into people's mouths, like drinking water, like soil
Speaker 1: that you know that ends up on food um. And
Speaker 1: so for this reason, like you know, I was reading
Speaker 1: this the thing by the United Nations about the sort
Speaker 1: of their toilet initiatives, trying to get toilets and clean
Speaker 1: sewage sewage disposal systems to people around the world, and
Speaker 1: they say, bluntly, toilets save lives. We should think about that,
Speaker 1: because obviously the toilet is a nice thing to have.
Speaker 1: It's a good convenience that makes life more esthetically pleasing.
Speaker 1: But it's also like a life or death question, right,
Speaker 1: And and it is so easy to take it for
Speaker 1: granted just because it's this it's this thing that we're
Speaker 1: we're grateful for it when we have it and when
Speaker 1: we need it, but we're also very willing to forget
Speaker 1: it and and and probably not plan our life around
Speaker 1: it too much unless we absolutely have to. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: and one way to definitely know that you shouldn't take
Speaker 1: it for granted is to think about all the people
Speaker 1: who are around the world who are deprived of these amenities.
Speaker 1: Like according to the World Health Organization and UNI SEF,
Speaker 1: about sixty percent of the global population either don't have
Speaker 1: a toilet in their home or they don't have one
Speaker 1: that's safely removes uh removes human ways. So they might
Speaker 1: have one, but it doesn't Maybe it just goes into
Speaker 1: a place where it re enters drinking water areas and stuff.
Speaker 1: Among the facts they said also is that like almost
Speaker 1: nine dred million people worldwide still regularly practice open defecation
Speaker 1: just out you know, they have to go wherever, like
Speaker 1: in a latrine field or or something like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it just means somewhere that is not being captured or treated.
Speaker 1: Like if you had if you had a properly dug
Speaker 1: pit latrine, that would not count. But so you're going
Speaker 1: somewhere in the open, like an open pit or something.
Speaker 1: And then this was crazy. So the they say globally,
Speaker 1: about eight percent of waste water generated by human civilization
Speaker 1: flows back into the ecosystem without being treated. Without being treated. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: I mean it's just ramping around the world that this
Speaker 1: obviously is going to have be having lots of negative
Speaker 1: environmental consequences but also negative health outcomes for humans. And
Speaker 1: then another thing that we shouldn't take for granted is
Speaker 1: like just the idea of you know, people don't like
Speaker 1: the idea of fly is getting into their their stuff. Right,
Speaker 1: So like if if people have an outhouse or a
Speaker 1: pit latrine, they tend to want to keep a lid
Speaker 1: on it. And one thing that does It helps keep
Speaker 1: flies from getting down in there and buzzing around, and
Speaker 1: of course that would be an annoyance when people are
Speaker 1: trying to use these facilities. But that's also not just
Speaker 1: an esthetic concern when when human feces are left uncovered
Speaker 1: their breeding ground. For for like the fly um Musca
Speaker 1: sorbins known as the bizarre fly, which there's some evidence
Speaker 1: or a disease vector for the bacterium Chlamydia trachomatis, which
Speaker 1: can cause an infection in the eye, is called trachoma,
Speaker 1: which is a leading cause of blind us around the world.
Speaker 1: It's it leads to hundreds of thousands of people being
Speaker 1: blind worldwide. So again we have we have real life consequences,
Speaker 1: actual hygiene public health consequences UH to lack of efficient
Speaker 1: UH toiletry and sewage technology. I can't emphasize this enough.
Speaker 1: The toilet and I want to be very clear about this,
Speaker 1: and not just the toilet in your house, but the
Speaker 1: toilet paired with a waste disposal and sewer infrastructure. That's
Speaker 1: really important. UH. Those things together are not just esthetically nice,
Speaker 1: they save lives. This is a life and death issue. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And but just to bring it back to a joke. Uh,
Speaker 1: this is exactly why the sign at a Kia and
Speaker 1: the model apartment says, do not use this toilet. It's
Speaker 1: not hooked up to anything. The toilet in and of
Speaker 1: itself will do nothing exactly. And we'll revisit this theme
Speaker 1: throughout these episodes. But so without a flush to I
Speaker 1: guess we should sort of consider the history of toilet
Speaker 1: technology in in in consider some broad categories. Right, So,
Speaker 1: without a flush toilet connected to a safe disposal system
Speaker 1: like a sewer or a well contained septic tank, what
Speaker 1: options do you have for disposing of human waste? There
Speaker 1: are a few main categories, and they pretty much all
Speaker 1: have some major disadvantages. One of course, as we've discussed,
Speaker 1: is open defecation. That's just anywhere in the environment. We
Speaker 1: know now that's that's dangerous, that can lead to disease
Speaker 1: risks um. Another option is pit latrines is like an outhouse,
Speaker 1: you go in a hole, you know, and uh, these
Speaker 1: these are better than open defecation because they can be
Speaker 1: covered up and they can keep stuff separating contained. But
Speaker 1: also they're outside your home, you lose the convenience and
Speaker 1: the privacy. If they're inside your home, there can be
Speaker 1: problems with smells and exposure to waste, so they might
Speaker 1: be better from a health perspective than just open defecation
Speaker 1: or defecation and to say water sources, but they're also
Speaker 1: that their problems with them that make people not prefer
Speaker 1: them generally. And then you've got like chamber pots and buckets.
Speaker 1: Historically these are very common. These were often emptied by
Speaker 1: pouring the contents out of windows into city streets, which
Speaker 1: is obviously unsanitary. Even though it's more convenient like you
Speaker 1: do your stuff indoors, the impact is sort of the
Speaker 1: same as like open defecation on city streets and can
Speaker 1: lead to unsanitary conditions and disease and all that like
Speaker 1: immediately right outside your your your building. So ideally, what
Speaker 1: you'd want, given the limitations of all these things, is
Speaker 1: some kind of appliance that allows you to do your
Speaker 1: thing inside the privacy and comfort of your own home
Speaker 1: and then removes the waste automatically to somewhere that it
Speaker 1: can be safely stored or treated that doesn't allow unpleasant
Speaker 1: sights and smells to bother you, and doesn't allow the
Speaker 1: waste to pollute the surrounding environment or get into drinking
Speaker 1: water and soil. Obviously, this is a recipe that a
Speaker 1: that a flush toilet could meet very nicely if it's
Speaker 1: paired with the right kind of like sewer system. But
Speaker 1: I think maybe we should take a quick break and
Speaker 1: then come back and discuss some of the solutions that
Speaker 1: ancient civilizations came up with for for toilets and sewer designs.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back. So we're talking about ancient complex
Speaker 1: latrine systems. I was reading about this in a book
Speaker 1: by Brian Fagan that I've mentioned on the show before,
Speaker 1: the seventy Great Inventions of the Ancient World, and he
Speaker 1: points to one of the earliest examples we have of
Speaker 1: of latrine technology being that of a latrine drainage system
Speaker 1: in the Neolithic period. Uh one example being uh Scara
Speaker 1: Bray on the Orkney Islands of Scotland from roughly one
Speaker 1: hundred to b C. And the site featured six houses,
Speaker 1: each with a buried duct that drains from small toilet
Speaker 1: rooms to a single duct that removed waste from the houses.
Speaker 1: So it's it's simple, but basically in that you have
Speaker 1: the roots of modern sewage technology. Yeah, and uh, so
Speaker 1: we see things kind of like this in other ancient
Speaker 1: civilizations like for example, one of the great UH ancient
Speaker 1: civilizations in terms of civic design and UH and technological
Speaker 1: advancement in the way cities are put together is the
Speaker 1: Indis River Valley civilization like including sites like Mahinjo Daro
Speaker 1: and Harapa, where they had buildings with these sort of
Speaker 1: toilet holes that rested over an underground brick drainage pipe
Speaker 1: and these sewer drains could be washed out with water
Speaker 1: to carry the waste away to cess pits. Right, this
Speaker 1: would have been about And another interesting bit about the
Speaker 1: Mahinjo Daro site is that they appeared to be channel
Speaker 1: junctions in the sewage system so that you could it
Speaker 1: could be easily be cleaned, You could go in there
Speaker 1: to prevent blockage. So it would seem to be in
Speaker 1: an advancement from from earlier designs. Yeah. And another advancement,
Speaker 1: of course, comes if you have a good source of
Speaker 1: flowing water, like the ancient Romans made use of their
Speaker 1: aqueduct supplied water to power a sort of flush toilet.
Speaker 1: I think it's not quite a flush toilet because it
Speaker 1: depends on how you define it, but it consisted of
Speaker 1: in ancient rome basically a bench with multiple holes in it,
Speaker 1: So this would have been a very communal affair. These
Speaker 1: holes are just like right next to each other, so
Speaker 1: you'd go and sit next to a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: people and I guess just sit around talking while you
Speaker 1: were pooping. And uh. These holes in the bench were
Speaker 1: suspended over a drainage ditch with running water, and the
Speaker 1: flowing water below the toilet bench would remove the waste
Speaker 1: and would also help limit smells. So this is great, Like,
Speaker 1: you don't you know, it doesn't stink in there because
Speaker 1: stuff skinting. Well, it might stink a little bit, but
Speaker 1: it's not as bad as it could be because it's
Speaker 1: all getting washed away immediately by the running water. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's running water. There's there's there, there's their mosaics and frescoes,
Speaker 1: there is there's probably live music at some of these. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I didn't know that. Yeah, that that was a detail
Speaker 1: I was reading in I believe it was Smith's book.
Speaker 1: Um put pointing out that, Yeah, this would have been
Speaker 1: just kind of a fun place to hang out and
Speaker 1: have a poop. Yeah, I mean it does seem like
Speaker 1: it was a thing that Uh, it's it's hard to
Speaker 1: like with modern Western sensibilities about like embarrassment. You know,
Speaker 1: you know, when you when you have to go to
Speaker 1: the bathroom. It's just hard to imagine sitting around talking
Speaker 1: to people while you're all pooping on the same bench.
Speaker 1: But when in Rome, you know, poop poop on the bench.
Speaker 1: But of course this this had some limitations also because
Speaker 1: it relied on a certain kind of infrastructure, right, it
Speaker 1: relied on the constant running water supplied by the aqueduct system,
Speaker 1: and it had to be done at the end of
Speaker 1: the water supply system or else you would of course
Speaker 1: foul the water sources downstream of you. So this sort
Speaker 1: of had to you know, you wouldn't want to put
Speaker 1: this toilet side at like the first place the aqueduct
Speaker 1: water supplied water gets to in the city. Right now,
Speaker 1: and now, certainly we're going to talk some more about
Speaker 1: Roman toilets here, because just the Roman plumbing situation was fabulous.
Speaker 1: It was really it was a wonderful creation. They were
Speaker 1: really proud of it too. Oh yeah. But at the
Speaker 1: same time, there's a problem with thinking too much about
Speaker 1: ancient toilets in light of our you know, our modern concepts,
Speaker 1: because you know, we're standing at the end of a
Speaker 1: long journey in which innate, uh, you know, sensibilities about
Speaker 1: cleanliness are confused with concepts of purity and they're augmenting,
Speaker 1: augmented to varying but hopefully significant degrees by public health concerns. Right, So,
Speaker 1: like you know for a fact that exposure to human
Speaker 1: feces can actually be a public health risk. But there's
Speaker 1: also like this weird kind of primal thing where you
Speaker 1: think of feces as morally bad or something. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: that's one of the major trends. And in a Smith's
Speaker 1: book about hygiene is that these two things just become
Speaker 1: interwoven and it's hard to to to to take them apart.
Speaker 1: But the ancient understandings of public health, we're very unlike
Speaker 1: our own we've discussed before, are unstuff to blow your mind.
Speaker 1: How Roman civil engineer Vitruvius advised against building towns near
Speaker 1: marshes because of the fear of the miasma, right, which
Speaker 1: which there's some truth to that, and also just like
Speaker 1: he seems the fund truth, but at the same time,
Speaker 1: there's no magical fog that's going to come out and
Speaker 1: give you an illness. Well, he was right for the
Speaker 1: wrong reason. Right, Like, so, the idea that you might
Speaker 1: get malaria because there are bad smells and vapors coming
Speaker 1: off of the marshes is wrong, but it might actually
Speaker 1: be correct, so that you don't want to be too
Speaker 1: close to the marshes because the standing water produces disease
Speaker 1: vectors the mosquitoes that are the vector for the malaria. Now,
Speaker 1: he also advised that latrine should be positioned so that
Speaker 1: odor is directed away from public spaces. Sounds reasonable, but
Speaker 1: as Brian Fagan um at All point out in the
Speaker 1: seventy grade Inventions of the Ancient World, quote, such purely
Speaker 1: practical measures need not reflect they generalized concern for public
Speaker 1: health as we understand it. Uh, you know. But for all,
Speaker 1: for all the the Roman feats of plumbing, you know,
Speaker 1: it all says little about what they necessarily thought about hygiene.
Speaker 1: For instance, Fagan points out that many private toilets and
Speaker 1: pompeii were positioned right next to the kitchen. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it makes me think about Simpson's episode where they building
Speaker 1: at Flanders a new house and the toilet is just
Speaker 1: in the middle of the kitchen. Because they're like, you
Speaker 1: haven't tried lugging a toilet up a flight of stairs.
Speaker 1: Another fact about how these Roman toilets don't necessarily like
Speaker 1: completely interlocked with common ideas about hygiene. So you wonder,
Speaker 1: what are the ancient Romans used for toilet paper? Right
Speaker 1: like when when they were sitting around by the dozens
Speaker 1: for social pooping, where they wipers or where they washers,
Speaker 1: there was sort of in between, there were well, I
Speaker 1: guess you call them washers because there was water elements.
Speaker 1: So they apparently wiped themselves with a kind of wetted
Speaker 1: sponge on a stick, which they So you'd be sitting
Speaker 1: there on the toilet, and then in front of you
Speaker 1: there'd be a separate stream of fresh water washing in um,
Speaker 1: and then everybody would sort of dip their sponges at
Speaker 1: the end of their sick in this water to like
Speaker 1: wet it and wash it off, and then they'd wipe
Speaker 1: themselves with that and then dip it in there to
Speaker 1: wash it off again, and everybody like you would you know,
Speaker 1: people would share these things obviously, uh, I mean, imagine
Speaker 1: an alternate version of our present world and which instead
Speaker 1: of using toilet paper or any kind of sprayer or
Speaker 1: what have you, instead it's single use disposable sponges on sticks.
Speaker 1: You know, like we're very we're hygienic about it, but
Speaker 1: we're just so extra wasteful about it. I came across
Speaker 1: I think, what is a false factoid that I'm I
Speaker 1: wonder if I should even repeat because I don't want
Speaker 1: to spread it via the illusory truth effect. But I'll
Speaker 1: say it anyway. Uh. There there are people out there
Speaker 1: saying that the phrase getting the wrong end of the
Speaker 1: stick comes from this Roman experience. But I did not
Speaker 1: find good evidence so that is true. I do not
Speaker 1: think that is the origin of that phrase in English. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and really what which what end is the wrong end?
Speaker 1: It kind of depends on what you're doing, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean if they were like, if it's good enough
Speaker 1: for your butt, why isn't it good enough for your hand? End? Um?
Speaker 1: All right, we're gonna come back to the Romans, but
Speaker 1: but real quick, I want to touch base again on
Speaker 1: some of these these older settlements, Um, because we don't
Speaker 1: want to give the false impression that like from a
Speaker 1: very early point, from say again UT B C onward,
Speaker 1: people were just all on board with some sort of
Speaker 1: primitive sewage system because that's not the case, because there
Speaker 1: are plenty of other advanced settlements in the ancient world.
Speaker 1: They just didn't seem that concerned with the latrine technology.
Speaker 1: Cattle Hook, I believe I'm attempting to pronounce that correctly.
Speaker 1: This has been abrout seven thousand b C. In modern Turkey.
Speaker 1: So they had mud brick houses for thousands of people.
Speaker 1: And one of the interesting things about this settlement is
Speaker 1: that most of these buildings were accessible by like sometimes
Speaker 1: like apertures in the sides of the buildings, but often
Speaker 1: ceiling holes. And they had no proper streets. The rooftops
Speaker 1: were the streets um so so so so that's fascinating.
Speaker 1: But but then they also had they had cooking hearts,
Speaker 1: they had ovens, they had storage rooms, uh. And yet
Speaker 1: they seemed to have been just content with carrying all
Speaker 1: of their trash and ratrine latrine waste out to dumping sites,
Speaker 1: out to middens beyond the limits of their uh, their
Speaker 1: their town. Well. I wonder if the fact that the
Speaker 1: streets were positioned above the dwelling spaces actually would have
Speaker 1: discouraged them from dumping all of their waste out on
Speaker 1: the streets as often happened in other cities because they
Speaker 1: would quickly and easily run into people's homes. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: could be another big example. Classical Athens may do just
Speaker 1: open sewers. Fagan adds that although the water supply was
Speaker 1: taken care of, the fifth century BC drainage system consisted
Speaker 1: of a single large duct in the marketplace, and everybody
Speaker 1: else just had to make do. But let's get back
Speaker 1: to Rome, Okay, So obviously a lot of time, energy
Speaker 1: and money went into the sewage system, into the overall
Speaker 1: plumbing infrastructure. We've mentioned the Acqua ducks already, but we
Speaker 1: haven't mentioned Rome's great central sewer, the Cloaca maxima. Cloaca maxima,
Speaker 1: that's like a body part on a Tyrannosaurus reaxident. But
Speaker 1: cloaca means sewer, So yeah, it's the So it's the
Speaker 1: maximum sewer, the great sewer, I mean. So to clarify
Speaker 1: the cloaca in the uh, in the animal world, I think,
Speaker 1: I'm I think it's basically like a single passage way
Speaker 1: that serves the function of like a rectum and a
Speaker 1: urethra and a birth canal and all that. It's all
Speaker 1: sort of in one right and so but but here
Speaker 1: we're talking about a great central sewer, and accounts vary
Speaker 1: on when this was built. There's there's a tradition that
Speaker 1: says that it was built in the sixth century BC,
Speaker 1: but Fagin stresses that it likely came later and may
Speaker 1: have remained an open sewer until about second century BC.
Speaker 1: But but it was a pretty impressive sense system. For instance,
Speaker 1: our old friend Plinity Elder was absolutely bonker balls. I
Speaker 1: want to read a quote here. This is from the
Speaker 1: Rackham translation that we've used before on the show. You
Speaker 1: mean of the natural history. Yes, this is from the
Speaker 1: Natural history quote. But at that time elderly men still
Speaker 1: admired the vast dimensions of the rampart, the substructures of
Speaker 1: the capital, and furthermore, the city sewers, the most noteworthy
Speaker 1: achievement of all, seeing that hills were tunneled, and Rome,
Speaker 1: as we mentioned a little earlier, became a hanging city
Speaker 1: beneath which men traveled in boats during Marcus Agrippa's term
Speaker 1: as Edile after his consulship. Through the city, there flows
Speaker 1: seven rivers meeting in one channel. These rushing downwards like
Speaker 1: mountain torrents, are constrained to sweep away and remove everything
Speaker 1: in their path, and when they are thrust forward by
Speaker 1: an additional volume of rain water, they batter the bottom
Speaker 1: and sides of the sewer. So yes, in case anyone
Speaker 1: missed it, there plenty is telling us that Marcus Agrippa
Speaker 1: took a sailing vessel through the sewers. That's how amazing
Speaker 1: they were. That there's a sin actually a river uh
Speaker 1: that runs through Rome, and it is the fabulous sewer.
Speaker 1: So this sort of toilet technology. You find this throughout
Speaker 1: the Roman Empire. Uh. And yet at the same time
Speaker 1: they still had to post warnings against public defication. So
Speaker 1: I want to touch on some of these, but I'm
Speaker 1: gonna stress here that apparently in translating these, the word
Speaker 1: poop is not always sufficient. So I am going to
Speaker 1: go ahead. We're gonna go ahead and use the stronger
Speaker 1: S word for excrement, but we're going to come up
Speaker 1: with the delightful ways to bleep the profanity. This is
Speaker 1: a show of family values, folks, right, But but it
Speaker 1: also has a show about about history, and apparently these
Speaker 1: these bits of often graffiti cannot be properly translated without
Speaker 1: using some vulgar terminology. Let's give vulgar alright. So one
Speaker 1: this was a graffiti on a wall in Pompeii that says,
Speaker 1: again translated with comfort and good cheer, so long as
Speaker 1: you don't do it here. So it's a warning, please
Speaker 1: please don't poop here. Don't poop here. There are places
Speaker 1: to poop, but not here. There's a kind of beautiful
Speaker 1: irony about that being on a house at Pompeii. They
Speaker 1: want to keep all nice and clean. Yeah. Uh, there's
Speaker 1: another one. This was on a wall of a Roman amphitheater.
Speaker 1: Uh that is what is it? Cassatur cave mallum. I
Speaker 1: think it would be hard season in Latin. I think
Speaker 1: it would be cocatour cocatur cave mallum, which means roughly
Speaker 1: translated as sure beware the evil eye, which is which
Speaker 1: is a delightful thing. I actually actually saw a website
Speaker 1: where someone had had taken this thing in Latin and
Speaker 1: they framed it above their modern toilet in their apartment,
Speaker 1: which is a nice, a nice, a nice twist. So
Speaker 1: Christina Kilgrove actually wrote a wonderful article on Forbes about
Speaker 1: these inscriptions, titled Uh, scatological graffiti was the Roman version
Speaker 1: of Yelp and Twitter, and she points out that you know,
Speaker 1: even with with latrines, pooping was still something you were
Speaker 1: exposed to a lot. Again, they were very communal, these
Speaker 1: Roman toilets. Now, she points out that these bits of
Speaker 1: for grel graffiti were generally not found in actual latrine zones.
Speaker 1: They were found elsewhere in the city. And part of that,
Speaker 1: of course is warning against inappropriate defecation. Please go usual trine,
Speaker 1: don't do it here. But then she said, there are
Speaker 1: other such inscriptions that were essentially Yelp reviews, like one
Speaker 1: that is translated as we pete in the bed. I
Speaker 1: confess we have aired innkeeper. If you ask why there
Speaker 1: was no chamber pot, that's a good excuse, except why
Speaker 1: in the bed? Why not somewhere else in the room? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean yeah, I mean you could just use the corner.
Speaker 1: I guess. It's like it would be the most destructive
Speaker 1: thing you could do, right, And since you can't, you can't.
Speaker 1: Actually you leave a Yelp review. You can just say
Speaker 1: I peet in this bed, but the reason is because
Speaker 1: you didn't provide a latrine of media used. So yes,
Speaker 1: graffiti artists of Rome had some fun with with defecation
Speaker 1: in general, and with the use of latrines. Um the
Speaker 1: whole books have been written on Roman graffiti. It's it's
Speaker 1: a wonderful topic. But still at the same time, we
Speaker 1: stressed that the latrines of ancient Rome, they do represent
Speaker 1: a major contribution to public health. Uh, you know, even
Speaker 1: if they didn't have the science down perfectly on everything,
Speaker 1: and even if there were a few rogues who didn't
Speaker 1: appreciate any of it. Okay, I think we need to
Speaker 1: take one more break and then we will come back
Speaker 1: to finish up our discussion about toilet history. All right,
Speaker 1: we're back. Are we ready to get into some medieval
Speaker 1: toilet technology here? Joe, Yeah, we've talked about some pit latrines.
Speaker 1: We've talked about some uh some ancient sewer systems sort
Speaker 1: of with toilets suspended over them. I wanted to talk
Speaker 1: about guard robes. So guard robes are a common solution
Speaker 1: later in like sole building periods in Europe, And there's
Speaker 1: a simple principle at work here. Why not let gravity
Speaker 1: flush for you? Uh So, a garden robe would generally
Speaker 1: be like a small room with holes that you could
Speaker 1: sit over, suspended up high over a pit or over
Speaker 1: an exposed area outdoors, so there could be multiple ways
Speaker 1: you would do this, but the waste would generally fall
Speaker 1: down into a pit where it would be stored and
Speaker 1: then could be removed by workers at some point, or
Speaker 1: it would fall into a moat this was pretty common
Speaker 1: for castles, or it would just fall down to the
Speaker 1: ground along the exterior wall of the castle or manor house.
Speaker 1: Uh And because of exposure to like cold winter winds.
Speaker 1: A sixteenth century poet named John Harrington, who we will
Speaker 1: revisit in the next episode, called this quote sitting on
Speaker 1: the draft, so you can imagine it was like, you know,
Speaker 1: there's just a hole that's exposed to outside, and I
Speaker 1: guess your your stuff falls down along the castle wall
Speaker 1: and and you've got the winter winds biting at your butt. Ye,
Speaker 1: your hole is exposed to the outside. Think this, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So of course the waste would either end up in
Speaker 1: a water source and that's not great, or it would
Speaker 1: pile up below and have to be removed by workers.
Speaker 1: And I'm not positive, but I think a guarterobe type
Speaker 1: structure is the central UH architectural feature. In a story
Speaker 1: that I loved about a castle, I've actually been to
Speaker 1: in Slovenia. Uh. So, there's a castle called Prajamsky Grod
Speaker 1: and Slovenia also known as Prajama Castle, and I've got
Speaker 1: a picture of it here. It's it's so. It's a
Speaker 1: castle that was built in the thirteenth century in the
Speaker 1: mouth of a cave. Yeah. And Slovenia just generally has
Speaker 1: awesome caves and like karst geological features. But here's somebody
Speaker 1: decided to be super bad and build a castle right
Speaker 1: on a cliff at the entrance of a cave system.
Speaker 1: I like the way they think. So, You've got this
Speaker 1: guy named erism Luger or Erasmus of Lugue, who is
Speaker 1: a so called robber baron. He's a bad dude who
Speaker 1: owns a castle, though I guess most of the people
Speaker 1: who own castle are bad. Yeah. It's kind of a
Speaker 1: red flag. Yeah. Oh, and that's something we'll get to
Speaker 1: again in a minute. Uh So. Uh he's a he's
Speaker 1: a so called robber baron, and he and his family
Speaker 1: Arizon Luker. Uh. They take over the Progama Castle by
Speaker 1: the end of the fifteenth century, and at one point
Speaker 1: Luger gets in trouble because he murders a relative of
Speaker 1: the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick the Third, and the Holy
Speaker 1: Roman Empire comes to collect and they end up laying
Speaker 1: siege to his castle here at the Cave Mouth. But
Speaker 1: the siege went on and on because the castle had
Speaker 1: a secret weapon for siege survival. It had a tunnel
Speaker 1: leading into the cave system, which had other openings to
Speaker 1: the countryside, so it allowed occupants occupants of the castle
Speaker 1: to secretly sneak out and get supplies while they were
Speaker 1: under siege. And this of course means the siege can
Speaker 1: go on for a really long time. For all I know.
Speaker 1: You know, it could go on forever. While the army
Speaker 1: is waiting outside to starve you out, you're sneaking off
Speaker 1: to the snack bar. So apparently somebody within the castle
Speaker 1: got sick of this after about a year or so,
Speaker 1: and the insider decided to betray Lugar, the master of
Speaker 1: the castle. And I guess they must have coordinated a
Speaker 1: plan with the army outside. But however they arrived at
Speaker 1: this plan. What happened is they waited until Luger himself
Speaker 1: had to go up to the garter robe. It was
Speaker 1: this little room overhanging the outside wall of the castle,
Speaker 1: and then they raised a red flag to let the
Speaker 1: army outside know, and the army blasted the garter robe
Speaker 1: with a cannon and killed Luger in one shot. And
Speaker 1: that should have been adapted to a Game of Thrones scene.
Speaker 1: Maybe it still will be. That's right. The Game of
Speaker 1: Thrones did have a death on the toilet scene. They
Speaker 1: also had the moon door, which was not a toilet,
Speaker 1: but was. It was very much like what we're describing here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a hole that opens up onto the the expanse below
Speaker 1: the castle or along the castle walls. No One more
Speaker 1: note about medieval toilets. Generally, there were two ways to
Speaker 1: do your business in the medieval bedroom. There was a
Speaker 1: jerry which you simply pushed under the bad so this
Speaker 1: would be just like a standard chamber pot. But then
Speaker 1: there was also the closed stool, which is like a
Speaker 1: toilet box. And you'll you'll find some examples in the cushion.
Speaker 1: It's like satin cushion. It's the fancy little box. It's
Speaker 1: like imagine the fanciest um, you know, enclosure for a
Speaker 1: litter box you can purchase and it's essentially that for
Speaker 1: human defecation, you know, I find. So you look at
Speaker 1: a lot of this like medieval royal toilet technology, you know,
Speaker 1: the stuff that kings and queens of Europe would poop in,
Speaker 1: and in these times there's an awful lot of like
Speaker 1: cloth in the elements involved. It just seems like a
Speaker 1: bad idea, like you don't want you know, when you
Speaker 1: see people who have like toilet like toilet seat covers
Speaker 1: that are like fuzzy cloth stuff, and I'm always just like,
Speaker 1: what are you doing? A toilet should be all like
Speaker 1: hard surfaces that are easy to clean off. You know,
Speaker 1: my god, it just seems wrong to like be putting
Speaker 1: cushions and fabric and all that are all over your toilet.
Speaker 1: That just seems like a recipe for disgusting nous. Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: An example of this, my family wants rented a home
Speaker 1: that had a white carpet in the bathroom all the
Speaker 1: way up to the toilet. Is ridiculous. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: that's horrible, like brown shag carpet. Fine, but you don't
Speaker 1: want white carpet. It's just a terrible idea. I mean,
Speaker 1: why don't you If you're gonna do that, why not
Speaker 1: just have like cloth dinner plates and stuff hard non
Speaker 1: porous surfaces people though, yeah, you gotta be able to
Speaker 1: clean it all right, So we're gonna go and close
Speaker 1: out this episode right here, but we will be back
Speaker 1: because the next episode we're going to really get into
Speaker 1: what you probably think of as the modern toilet. We're
Speaker 1: gonna talk more about the modern flush toilet, where it
Speaker 1: came from, uh, and what it's it's impact has been.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, if you want to check out more
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Speaker 1: week uh new amazing, mundane and world changing inventions. That's right, So,
Speaker 1: as always, thanks so much to our excellent audio producer,
Speaker 1: Torre Harrison, And if you would like to get in
Speaker 1: touch with us with feedback about this episode or any
Speaker 1: other to suggest a topic for the future, or just
Speaker 1: to say hello. You can email us at contact at
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