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 episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
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
urinine feces into oblivion. Better known as the municipal wastewater

(00:23):
treatment plant nearest you every time you flush. But have
you ever considered what else we could be doing with
our poop and p 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 Scottish watchmaker named Alexander Cumming.

(00:45):
Cummings toilet was a slightly altered version of the commode
designed for Queen Elizabeth the First by her godson, Sir
John Harrington's in two. Cummings had an S shaped pipe
to trap bad odors, while Harrington's had not, of course,
self flushing toilet, heated seats and those vacuum potties like
you see on airplanes and tour buses came later, but
our one and done attitude towards commode innovation probably comes

(01:08):
from the fact that we simply don't want to think
about poop that much. We spoke with Diana mcdonnaugh, a
professor of industrial design in the Beckman 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 to realize that,

(01:31):
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 uncomfortable.
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. The ancient Romans used

(01:54):
toilet time as a time to catch up with their friends.
In the year threef B. C Rome had one 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 and someone might throw the contents of their chamber

(02:15):
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 guard 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 guard robe, but because it was
that stench of human waste would keep the fleas and

(02:35):
moths out of the garments. Public guarter robes in London
emptied directly into the Thames, which was an unbelievably poor
public health move. As the population of Europe grew over
the course of the eighteen hundreds, up to a hundred
people would share the same public guarter robe, and the
waist just washed into the rivers, tainting the drinking water supply,
which explains why so many outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, and

(02:56):
other water borne 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,

(03:16):
which was 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

(03:37):
contributions to the overall design of the toilet were minimal,
but whose legacy in endoors because he made sure his
name was visible 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? McDonough said, toilets offer a relatively unexplored

(03:58):
territory that offers signific potential in 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

(04:20):
changes in your hormones. We literally flush 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 their Reinvent the Toilet Challenge back in,
the next generation of toilets will also be able to
kill pathogens, compost human waste, and keep up with the

(04:40):
fast urbanization of the twenty first century. And all that
without sewer infrastructure, electricity, or 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 in your bathroom now or the one

(05:01):
Sir John Harrington made for Queen Elizabeth in the sixteenth century.
Probably not much, unless you've got any bright ideas. Today's
episode was written by Jessline Shields and produced by Tyler
Clang for I Heeart Media and How Stuff Works. For
more on this and lots of other topics, visit our
home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.