BrainStuff Classics: What's the History (and Future) of Toilets?

The 'modern' toilet was invented in the 1700s. So what was it like in the past, and how could we improve on it in the future? Learn more about waste technologies in this classic episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/everyday-innovations/toilets-past-future-flush.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
Lauren voel Bomb here with a classic episode of the podcast.
This one gets down and dirty into the history and
future of waste technologies because the basic design for toilets
hasn't changed in about three hundred years. Hey brain Stuff,

(00:24):
Lauren vogel Bomb here. Consider the flush toilet. It's a
fascinating device if you think about it. This giant porcelain
chair is installed into every modern American bathroom, using up
gallons of precious drinking water every day to whisk your
urine feces into oblivion. Better known as the municipal wastewater
treatment plant nearest you every time you flush. But have

(00:45):
you ever considered what else we could be doing with
our poop and pea? You probably don't really want to
think about it, and neither does pretty much anybody else,
which is why the flush toilet we twenty first century
humans use hasn't changed much since it was first patented
in seventeen seventy five by a Scottish watchmaker named Alexander Cumming.
Cummings toilet was a slightly altered version of the commode

(01:06):
designed for Queen Elizabeth the first by her godson, Sir
John Harrington in fifteen ninety two. Cummings had an S
shaped pipe, two trap bad odors, while Harrington's had not,
of course, self flushing toilets. Heated seats in those vacuum
boddies like you see on airplanes and tour buses came later.
But our one and done attitude towards commode innovation probably
comes from the fact that we simply don't want to

(01:27):
think about poop that much. We spoke with Deanna McDonough,
a professor of industrial design in the Beckmann Institute of
Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at
Urbana Champaign. She said, within the American culture, there is
still a resistance and reluctance to discuss body waste. The
toilet has remained relatively unexplored, I think because we're failing

(01:48):
to realize that, to quote a British saying, where there
is muck, there's brass. We are failing to see the
potential opportunity our modest toilet is offering us because the
notion of immersing yourself in such a product makes us
all feel so uncomfort But going to the bathroom isn't
something we've always been squeamish about long ago. It was
just another experience, an opportunity for relaxation and hanging out.

(02:10):
The ancient Romans used toilet time as a time to
catch up with their friends. In the year three hundred
and fifteen BCE, Rome had one hundred and forty four
bustling public toilets lined with stone benches with keyhole shaped
cutouts situated all along them, where people would sit together
and do their business and maybe some gossiping too. Later
in medieval England, you could be walking down the street

(02:31):
and someone might throw the contents of their chamber pot
out the window onto you. Oops. They might say sorry
about it, but it would kind of be on you
for walking too close to their house. Fancier medieval people
used a garter robe, a little closet stuck onto the
side of a castle with a hole in the floor
that emptied into a moat or cesspit. Clothes were also
kept in the garter robe because it was thought stench

(02:51):
of human waste would keep the fleas and moths out
of the garments. Public guard robes in London emptied directly
into the Thames, which was an unbelievably poor our public
health move As the population of Europe grew over the
course of the eighteen hundreds, up to one hundred people
would share the same public garderobe, and the waste just
washed into the rivers, tainting the drinking water supply, which
explains why so many outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, and other

(03:14):
waterborne diseases bedeviled nineteenth century Europeans, resulting in more than
half the working class population dying before the age of five.
It was a mess as a result of a particularly
hot summer in London in eighteen fifty eight, when the
smell of rotting sewage made living in the city completely unbearable,
Parliament commissioned the construction of the London Sewer, which was

(03:34):
finished in eighteen sixty five. Deaths resulting from waterborne diseases plummeted,
and cities all over the world followed suit and constructed
their own sanitary sewers. The toilet patented by Coming eventually
became standard in houses in wealthy countries all over the world,
along with slight variations patented by others like Thomas Crapper
yes that's his real name, whose contributions to the overall

(03:56):
design of the toilet were minimal, but whose legacy indoors
because he made sure his name was on all of
his products. And hey, it's great that fewer people are
dying due to poor sanitation in these places anymore. But
the toilet is due for an upgrade. So what do
we need our new toilets to do? MacDonough said, toilets
offer a relatively unexplored territory that offers significant potential in

(04:18):
respect to healthy living and healthy aging. As individuals are
taking more responsibility for their health, eating habits, and well being,
the bathroom offers a somewhat blank canvas for us to
integrate intuitive technology to support the individual. Imagine a toilet
that could tell you how hydrated you were, whether you
were deficient in particular vitamins, warn you of blood in
your stools, and changes in your hormones. We literally flush

(04:40):
all that information away each day in the form of
waste matter, so we could find out a lot about
our own health from our toilets. But according to the
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which launched there reinvent the
toilet Challenge back in twenty eleven, the next generation of
toilets will also be able to kill pathogens, compost human waste,
and keep up with the fast urbanization of the twenty
four century, and all that without sewer infrastructure, electricity, or

(05:04):
a water source. They might even be able to mine
our waste for valuable elements like phosphorus, nitrogen, and potassium,
and separate solid and liquid waste in order to use
them to make things like building supplies. But will the
new toilets look very much different from the one in
your bathroom now or the one Sir John Harrington made
for Queen Elizabeth in the sixteenth century. Probably not much,

(05:24):
unless you've got any bright ideas. Today's episode is based
on the article who Invented the Toilet? A Brief History
of the flush on how stuffworks dot com, written by
Katherine Whitbourne and Jesslynshields. Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio
in partnership with how stuffworks dot Com. It is produced

(05:45):
by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.