August 16, 2024 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, our own Greg Hengler, and others, tell the splinter-free story of the toilet—and other toilet accessories. You're going to want to be sitting down for this one!
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories. This is the
unspoken story about the small, unmentionable seat in the corner
of all of our lives. Or said another way, this
is how we have been shaped by our grossest national product.
Take it away, Greg Hangler, Elvis.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Died in one and Charles, the fifth Holy Roman Emperor
was born on one. Although we use them every day,
most of us know very little about toilets. Here's author
of the Porcelain God, Julie Horin and public health historian
David Rossner.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Not only did civilization start with the onset of writing,
but it also started with man actually coming and getting
a hold of his sanitation needs.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
Creation of sanitary systems were, in some sense, the basis
for creating great cities and great communities.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
The earliest written reference to the disposal of human waste
is more than thirty six hundred years old and is
found in the Bible. In Deuteronomy twenty three twelve through thirteen,
God instructs the Hebrews to do their exodus in a
holy fashion. You are to have a place outside the camp.
Go there to relieve yourself. You are to have a
(01:34):
digging tool in your equipment. When you relieve yourself, dig
a hole with it, and cover up your excrement. For
hundreds of thousands of years before this was written, human
beings simply squatted when they had the urge to go.
As the world became more populated, disposal of human waste
(01:55):
became a bit more difficult. In ancient Egypt, cities began
to up from the desert. By twenty five hundred BC,
the Egyptians solved the waste disposal dilemma, constructing bathrooms with latrines,
which were flushed by hand with buckets of water. The
latrines emptied into earthenware pipes, many of which are still
(02:17):
functional today. The Roman Empire also had a public sewage system.
Here's David Rossner and sociologist Steven Seifer.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
Rome was not built in a day, but it was
built around its water supply system and its ability to
get rid of its material without polluting itself or polluting
people downstream.
Speaker 5 (02:38):
Their development of the bathroom was incredible. Middle class Romans
in their homes were able to hook up a private
bathroom to the public sewer system that Rome had developed,
and actually half the waste carried away to the main
sewage disposal plant.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Like Rome's private lavatories, they're public latrines, which were seed
holes carved into stone. Benches were erected over channels of
water that came from distant mountain streams that flowed through
aqueducts for over two hundred miles. Here's poet Eva up
Glynn visiting some Roman restroom ruins.
Speaker 6 (03:20):
This was a communal privy. You'd have sat here, the
seat has disappeared, and your waist would have dropped into
this drainage channel. Here the water flushed the waste away.
Nobody had to touch it, and of course as it
dropped into the water that mini I smell.
Speaker 7 (03:34):
Now.
Speaker 6 (03:34):
Then this second water channel running in front of us
here was what you would have used to wash yourself afterwards.
You'd have had a stick with a piece of sponge
on the end. Did that in the water wash behind yourself,
thus giving rice to the phrase the importance of not
getting hold of the wrong end of the stick.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
But the privy, which takes its name from the Latin
word for privacy, couldn't save the Roman Empire. And when
it finally fell, the water fed toilet fell into the
lavatorial dark ages, clogging up toilet innovation for more than
a thousand years. During these medieval times, castle dwellers would
(04:14):
strengthen their defenses by dumping waste into their moats. The
raws sewage discouraged invaders from crossing it. Here's physicist Charles Penetti,
author of Extraordinary Origins.
Speaker 8 (04:28):
The only thing that you had indoors for the next
really one thousand years was the chamber pot, which was
really something of a horror story. It was a convenience
in one way when you needed to go in the
middle of the night.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
At night time was the time when people would dump
the contents of the chamber pot outside their windows into
the streets below. And the idea that a man walks
on the left side of the female dates back to
this time. It was polite for him to get hit
by the contents of the chamber pot and to spare
(05:01):
the woman.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
In the sixteenth century, the flushing toilet made its debut
in England.
Speaker 8 (05:07):
The first nearly modern toilet was made for Queen Elizabeth
I in fifteen ninety six. It was made by her godson,
Sir John Harrington. He made it to get back in
her good graces because she had banished him from court
for using foul language. He came up with a really
clever device. It had a tank at the top, it
(05:27):
had a valve you open to let water down, and
there was a trap door that you could close after
you use the toilet.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Harrington's primitive toilet had a critical design flaw. One the
flushing sound was ear piercing, and number two, the pipe
beneath the bowl was vertical. Waste when straight down, and
sewer smells came straight up.
Speaker 8 (05:52):
The queen complained that fumes came up from the cesspool,
but it was a problem that her godson.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Was never able to solve.
Speaker 8 (06:00):
You realize how bad the situation was if you look
at the Palace o Versailles. A fortune was spent in constructing.
It had these wonderful hall of mirrors, elaborate chandeliers, and
you might have a thousand people being entertained, eating and
drinking copiously.
Speaker 9 (06:15):
But where did they go to the bathroom?
Speaker 8 (06:17):
There was not a single bathroom in the entire elaborate palace.
Speaker 9 (06:20):
And the answer is they went in the stairwells.
Speaker 8 (06:22):
And one of the reasons the French applied so much
perfume during that period was to overcome all of the
indoor odors from people relieving.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Themselves outside Versailles, people were relieving themselves in indoor cesspits.
They were simply benches or seats perched over holes lined
with wood, stone or brick. Their main drawback, aside from
the smell, was that you had to pay nightmen called
scavengers wielding a bucket and a shovel to clean them
(06:51):
out and carry them on a horse drawn cart to
local streams and rivers. This is why it pays to
be upstream. And if you ventured into town and nature
called a man called a Johnny offered his customers privacy.
He wore a large black cape and carried a chamber pot.
(07:12):
The customer would pay a half a cent and squat
over the pot while Johnny covered him with the large cape.
Fast forward to eighteenth century America, colonists modified the cesspit
by taking it outside and constructing a small wooden shack
over it. The outhouse was born.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
They would place the outhouses far enough from the house
where there would not be a problems with smell or
with seeping into the water supply of the house.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
In seventeen seventy five, while America was embroiled in the
Revolutionary War, back in the mother country, another revolution was
taking place. British watchmaker Alexander Cumming filed for the first
ever patent on a toilet with a twist. Literally, the
pipe beneath Coming's toilet bowl curved backward in a distinctive
(08:05):
S shaped bend. This allowed water to pool in the
U shaped part of the pipe, cutting off the explosive
and stinky sewer gas from below.
Speaker 8 (08:16):
It actually is the modern toilet because we still have
that water separating us from the cesspool today.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Long before President Lyndon Johnson held meetings with Robert Kennedy
while sitting on the john the toilet played a leading
role in governing our nation. America's first owner of this
modern toilet was Thomas Jefferson, who had three of these
elite oddities installed at Monticello. By the dawn of the
nineteenth century, one important factor was still missing. Without working sewers,
(08:48):
waste was just too big a load for the cesspits
of the city and seeped deep into the ground.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
And you've been listening to our own Greg Hangler tell
the story the history of the toilet, and it's something
we all take for granted. It reminds me of a
story we did about horses and cities right up until
the nineteenth and twentieth century. Horses, well, they powered everything,
and the streets were dirt and the horses had manure,
and it became a real problem. Diseases spread the stench
(09:19):
until Henry Ford invented the car, and then of course
paved roads. The story of the toilet continues here on
our American stories, and we continue with our American stories
(09:42):
and the story the history of the toilet. Let's pick
up when we last left off with Greg Hangler.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
By the dawn of the nineteenth century, one important factor
was still missing. Without working sewers, waste was just too
big a load for the cesspits of the city and
seeped deep into the ground. Here's David Rossner and scientist
Adam hart Davis.
Speaker 4 (10:05):
If you have a privy and it's not too far
away from your pump, you're going to have a real problem.
You may literally be drinking the excrement that you are
dumping the day before.
Speaker 9 (10:16):
Absolutely disgusting. And when they had drains, the drains simply
went out into the street, so all the streets were
running with sewage.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
Toilet technology could only go so far until engineers could
construct water delivery systems like the Roman aqueducts able to
service entire cities. In eighteen forty two, contending with the
sudden rise of population due to an influx of immigrants,
New York City paved the way. The systems designers harnessed
(10:45):
a fundamental law of nature that water always flows downhill.
That water in your city follows the same principle. Water
is pumped to the top of giant towers that are
linked to pipes beneath the street. Since the tower is
higher than the water's final destination, gravity maintains pressure and
(11:07):
forces the water through the pipes to your tap and toilet.
After water is used, gravity is rendered once again and
carries it away through sewer pipes angled downhill. During the
nineteenth century, more and more cities followed New York's example.
At the turn of the twentieth century, plumbing was an
(11:27):
exploding business in America, much like web search engines are today,
and by the nineteen thirties, America's entire urban population at
access to running water. About three quarters of feces is
water and ten percent is undigested food, but the remaining
fifteen percent is all bacteria. Billions of them, and its
(11:50):
these bacteria that give feces its distinctive smell. Most of
the bacteria are harmless and spend their lives processing the
food inside our intestine, but some are lethal.
Speaker 9 (12:03):
Faces contain all the fiber that we can't digest that
comes in the breakfast cereal and in fresh fruits and
vegetables and so on. They contain the remains of dead
blood cells, which is why it's brann because that's what
the remains are. It's stuff called billy rubin, which comes
from broken down blood cells, and it contains enormous contes
of bacteria. And if you ingest those bacteria, if you
(12:24):
eat them, then you're going to get.
Speaker 4 (12:26):
Very Historically, the two great diseases that are associated with
human waste are, of course cholera. People can be perfectly
healthy in the morning and be dead, literally dead in
the evening, and typhoid.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Between eighteen thirty one to eighteen thirty two, fifty thousand
Brits died from cholera. In Paris, cholera killed eighteen thousand
in a single summer. The US was next.
Speaker 4 (12:57):
Cholera had been moving east. We never expected to hit here,
and then eighteen thirty two, it hit Boston, it hit Philadelphia.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
More than one hundred and fifty thousand Americans died during
the two cholera pandemics between eighteen thirty two and eighteen
forty nine. With the help of the new toilet, the
westernized world was drowning in its own excrement. The smell, germs,
and death finally led politicians to an effective solution, high
(13:27):
capacity sewers that carried the waste far away from town.
Speaker 9 (13:31):
They're sort of monuments to excrement, if you like. And
I've been down the sewers and it's absolutely amazing how
well they were built. The stuff running through them is
not fun, but the sewers themselves are utterly bredentes.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
As the astronauts were to be the heroes of the
twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, toilet inventors with the
giants that walked among men. The key innovation was a
water siphoning system to force waste through the base of
the ball with unpaid paralleled efficiency. What worked then still
works now. Once the toilet bowl's flush handle is pulled,
(14:08):
a valve inside the holding tank called the flapper, opens
up and water drains quickly into the bowl through a
series of angled holes under the rim. The man who
was often credited with inventing this flushing wonder probably had
little to do with it. Thomas Crapper, Yes, he really existed.
What he did patent is the pole chain that worked
(14:30):
in conjunction with a valveless cistern, thus decreasing noise and
preserving water. Due to his toilet innovations, the Victorian era
plumbing magnate earned himself a place in toilet history, if
only by selling lots of them.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
During World War One, when American soldiers were stationed over
in Britain, they would come across a lot of these toilets,
and they started the euphemism of I'm going to the
c and they based on what they saw on the toilets,
which said Thomas Crapper in company.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
And the John is derived from the toilets installed at
Harvard University in seventeen thirty five, which were emblazoned with
the manufacturer's name, Reverend Edward Johns. While Crapper and John's
were making a name for themselves, two enterprising brothers were
busy inventing the toilet's most essential accessory. Although the Chinese
(15:28):
invented paper in the second century, it took them more
than twelve hundred years to get around to using it
in the bathroom. They finally did in thirteen ninety one
a d. But it was strictly for the use of emperors.
Where did that leave commoners?
Speaker 3 (15:44):
People generally used their hands, and currently in many countries
around the world where paper is a premium, people continue
to use their left hand. That is why when you
travel to parts of the Middle East, to Southeast Asia
and Asia, you won't find it any left handed people.
Everyone there is right handed because the left hand is
(16:04):
considered unclean.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
In medieval Europe, commoners used hay, grass and plant leaves
to clean themselves. In early America, millions used corn cobs.
The cobs were softened first by prolonged soaking in water.
Speaker 3 (16:21):
The corn cobs were generally given to the pigs to eat,
and then when the pigs were finished with them and
there was just the cob left, they would take those
and use them to wipe themselves, so there was very
little waste.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
When math published newspapers and catalogs became commonplace in the
nineteenth century, Americans finally said goodbye to corn cobs and
Hello to Sears Roebuck.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
People would take the catalog, hang it in their outhouses
and they would read from it while they were doing
their business, and at the finish of the business, they
would tear off a piece and use it to wipe themselves.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
Things changed in the twenties.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
Unfortunately, Sears started using glossy print paper. The absorbing benefits
of the catalog kind of lost it, so you didn't
see so many people using the Sears Catalog as toilet
paper from then on.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
By that time, however, consumers had another option, real toilet paper.
Here's Ken Fischberg, author of Toilet Paper Encyclopedia, and Charles Pennetti.
Speaker 7 (17:24):
There was a man named Joseph Gaietti. He was in
New Yorker and he had a paper business in New Jersey.
He was the first person who actually took paper, cut
it into sheets into small sheets, and sold it through
drug stores as therapeutic paper.
Speaker 8 (17:40):
The people who bought them thought the paper was too
nice and ended up using it as stationary writing on
it and still using their catalog.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
In eighteen seventy nine, entrepreneurs Irvin and brother Clarence Scott
began selling rolled toilet paper. It was made from tissue
paper bought from other manufacturers, which they cut, up, rolled
and repackaged. Although there have been some improvements over the years,
today's toilet tissue is made basically the same way. In
the nineteen forty, Scott's competitor, Northern Paper Mills of Green Bay, Wisconsin,
(18:11):
began using chemicals to completely dissolve wood fibers and refer
to their toilet paper as splinter free. In two thousand
and seven, the prestigious British medical journals eleven thousand medical
experts and readers, mostly doctors, voted modern sanitation as the
number one medical advance since eighteen forty. Not antibiotics, not vaccines,
(18:35):
but toilets in clean water. The average human life expectancy
increased nearly thirty five years over the span of the
twentieth century. Roughly thirty of those thirty five years are
attributable to improvements in sanitation. While Harrenton's godmother Elizabeth I
might be baffled by a twenty first century porcelain throne,
(18:57):
Queen Victoria would easily recognize the set upon which her
great great granddaughter Elizabeth the II did her sovereign business. Harry,
are you in there in this modern game of thrones,
beg right out. We're all privileged members of the same
royal family.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
Had a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hengler, And what a story he told.
We love these stories of the things behind things, the
things that make life work. Always there are innovators, Always
there are inventors, and always making life better. The free markets, entrepreneurialism,
free market capitalism, making the world a safer place and
(19:39):
a better place. And think about the problems that modern
sanitation solved, Well, you heard about all of them. And
my goodness, modern sanitation's benefit, as we learned, is that
we've lifted lifespans thirty five years, most of it attributed
not to medical and scientific innovation, but in the end
to sanitation innovation. Also, of course, running water and getting
(20:03):
water supplies. To be the story of the toilet, the
story of toilet paper, the story of modern sanitation, and
the role one of our great cities, New York City,
played in it. Here on our American stories
And we continue with our American stories. This is the
unspoken story about the small, unmentionable seat in the corner
of all of our lives. Or said another way, this
is how we have been shaped by our grossest national product.
Take it away, Greg Hangler, Elvis.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Died in one and Charles, the fifth Holy Roman Emperor
was born on one. Although we use them every day,
most of us know very little about toilets. Here's author
of the Porcelain God, Julie Horin and public health historian
David Rossner.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Not only did civilization start with the onset of writing,
but it also started with man actually coming and getting
a hold of his sanitation needs.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
Creation of sanitary systems were, in some sense, the basis
for creating great cities and great communities.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
The earliest written reference to the disposal of human waste
is more than thirty six hundred years old and is
found in the Bible. In Deuteronomy twenty three twelve through thirteen,
God instructs the Hebrews to do their exodus in a
holy fashion. You are to have a place outside the camp.
Go there to relieve yourself. You are to have a
(01:34):
digging tool in your equipment. When you relieve yourself, dig
a hole with it, and cover up your excrement. For
hundreds of thousands of years before this was written, human
beings simply squatted when they had the urge to go.
As the world became more populated, disposal of human waste
(01:55):
became a bit more difficult. In ancient Egypt, cities began
to up from the desert. By twenty five hundred BC,
the Egyptians solved the waste disposal dilemma, constructing bathrooms with latrines,
which were flushed by hand with buckets of water. The
latrines emptied into earthenware pipes, many of which are still
(02:17):
functional today. The Roman Empire also had a public sewage system.
Here's David Rossner and sociologist Steven Seifer.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
Rome was not built in a day, but it was
built around its water supply system and its ability to
get rid of its material without polluting itself or polluting
people downstream.
Speaker 5 (02:38):
Their development of the bathroom was incredible. Middle class Romans
in their homes were able to hook up a private
bathroom to the public sewer system that Rome had developed,
and actually half the waste carried away to the main
sewage disposal plant.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Like Rome's private lavatories, they're public latrines, which were seed
holes carved into stone. Benches were erected over channels of
water that came from distant mountain streams that flowed through
aqueducts for over two hundred miles. Here's poet Eva up
Glynn visiting some Roman restroom ruins.
Speaker 6 (03:20):
This was a communal privy. You'd have sat here, the
seat has disappeared, and your waist would have dropped into
this drainage channel. Here the water flushed the waste away.
Nobody had to touch it, and of course as it
dropped into the water that mini I smell.
Speaker 7 (03:34):
Now.
Speaker 6 (03:34):
Then this second water channel running in front of us
here was what you would have used to wash yourself afterwards.
You'd have had a stick with a piece of sponge
on the end. Did that in the water wash behind yourself,
thus giving rice to the phrase the importance of not
getting hold of the wrong end of the stick.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
But the privy, which takes its name from the Latin
word for privacy, couldn't save the Roman Empire. And when
it finally fell, the water fed toilet fell into the
lavatorial dark ages, clogging up toilet innovation for more than
a thousand years. During these medieval times, castle dwellers would
(04:14):
strengthen their defenses by dumping waste into their moats. The
raws sewage discouraged invaders from crossing it. Here's physicist Charles Penetti,
author of Extraordinary Origins.
Speaker 8 (04:28):
The only thing that you had indoors for the next
really one thousand years was the chamber pot, which was
really something of a horror story. It was a convenience
in one way when you needed to go in the
middle of the night.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
At night time was the time when people would dump
the contents of the chamber pot outside their windows into
the streets below. And the idea that a man walks
on the left side of the female dates back to
this time. It was polite for him to get hit
by the contents of the chamber pot and to spare
(05:01):
the woman.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
In the sixteenth century, the flushing toilet made its debut
in England.
Speaker 8 (05:07):
The first nearly modern toilet was made for Queen Elizabeth
I in fifteen ninety six. It was made by her godson,
Sir John Harrington. He made it to get back in
her good graces because she had banished him from court
for using foul language. He came up with a really
clever device. It had a tank at the top, it
(05:27):
had a valve you open to let water down, and
there was a trap door that you could close after
you use the toilet.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Harrington's primitive toilet had a critical design flaw. One the
flushing sound was ear piercing, and number two, the pipe
beneath the bowl was vertical. Waste when straight down, and
sewer smells came straight up.
Speaker 8 (05:52):
The queen complained that fumes came up from the cesspool,
but it was a problem that her godson.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Was never able to solve.
Speaker 8 (06:00):
You realize how bad the situation was if you look
at the Palace o Versailles. A fortune was spent in constructing.
It had these wonderful hall of mirrors, elaborate chandeliers, and
you might have a thousand people being entertained, eating and
drinking copiously.
Speaker 9 (06:15):
But where did they go to the bathroom?
Speaker 8 (06:17):
There was not a single bathroom in the entire elaborate palace.
Speaker 9 (06:20):
And the answer is they went in the stairwells.
Speaker 8 (06:22):
And one of the reasons the French applied so much
perfume during that period was to overcome all of the
indoor odors from people relieving.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Themselves outside Versailles, people were relieving themselves in indoor cesspits.
They were simply benches or seats perched over holes lined
with wood, stone or brick. Their main drawback, aside from
the smell, was that you had to pay nightmen called
scavengers wielding a bucket and a shovel to clean them
(06:51):
out and carry them on a horse drawn cart to
local streams and rivers. This is why it pays to
be upstream. And if you ventured into town and nature
called a man called a Johnny offered his customers privacy.
He wore a large black cape and carried a chamber pot.
(07:12):
The customer would pay a half a cent and squat
over the pot while Johnny covered him with the large cape.
Fast forward to eighteenth century America, colonists modified the cesspit
by taking it outside and constructing a small wooden shack
over it. The outhouse was born.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
They would place the outhouses far enough from the house
where there would not be a problems with smell or
with seeping into the water supply of the house.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
In seventeen seventy five, while America was embroiled in the
Revolutionary War, back in the mother country, another revolution was
taking place. British watchmaker Alexander Cumming filed for the first
ever patent on a toilet with a twist. Literally, the
pipe beneath Coming's toilet bowl curved backward in a distinctive
(08:05):
S shaped bend. This allowed water to pool in the
U shaped part of the pipe, cutting off the explosive
and stinky sewer gas from below.
Speaker 8 (08:16):
It actually is the modern toilet because we still have
that water separating us from the cesspool today.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Long before President Lyndon Johnson held meetings with Robert Kennedy
while sitting on the john the toilet played a leading
role in governing our nation. America's first owner of this
modern toilet was Thomas Jefferson, who had three of these
elite oddities installed at Monticello. By the dawn of the
nineteenth century, one important factor was still missing. Without working sewers,
(08:48):
waste was just too big a load for the cesspits
of the city and seeped deep into the ground.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
And you've been listening to our own Greg Hangler tell
the story the history of the toilet, and it's something
we all take for granted. It reminds me of a
story we did about horses and cities right up until
the nineteenth and twentieth century. Horses, well, they powered everything,
and the streets were dirt and the horses had manure,
and it became a real problem. Diseases spread the stench
(09:19):
until Henry Ford invented the car, and then of course
paved roads. The story of the toilet continues here on
our American stories, and we continue with our American stories
(09:42):
and the story the history of the toilet. Let's pick
up when we last left off with Greg Hangler.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
By the dawn of the nineteenth century, one important factor
was still missing. Without working sewers, waste was just too
big a load for the cesspits of the city and
seeped deep into the ground. Here's David Rossner and scientist
Adam hart Davis.
Speaker 4 (10:05):
If you have a privy and it's not too far
away from your pump, you're going to have a real problem.
You may literally be drinking the excrement that you are
dumping the day before.
Speaker 9 (10:16):
Absolutely disgusting. And when they had drains, the drains simply
went out into the street, so all the streets were
running with sewage.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
Toilet technology could only go so far until engineers could
construct water delivery systems like the Roman aqueducts able to
service entire cities. In eighteen forty two, contending with the
sudden rise of population due to an influx of immigrants,
New York City paved the way. The systems designers harnessed
(10:45):
a fundamental law of nature that water always flows downhill.
That water in your city follows the same principle. Water
is pumped to the top of giant towers that are
linked to pipes beneath the street. Since the tower is
higher than the water's final destination, gravity maintains pressure and
(11:07):
forces the water through the pipes to your tap and toilet.
After water is used, gravity is rendered once again and
carries it away through sewer pipes angled downhill. During the
nineteenth century, more and more cities followed New York's example.
At the turn of the twentieth century, plumbing was an
(11:27):
exploding business in America, much like web search engines are today,
and by the nineteen thirties, America's entire urban population at
access to running water. About three quarters of feces is
water and ten percent is undigested food, but the remaining
fifteen percent is all bacteria. Billions of them, and its
(11:50):
these bacteria that give feces its distinctive smell. Most of
the bacteria are harmless and spend their lives processing the
food inside our intestine, but some are lethal.
Speaker 9 (12:03):
Faces contain all the fiber that we can't digest that
comes in the breakfast cereal and in fresh fruits and
vegetables and so on. They contain the remains of dead
blood cells, which is why it's brann because that's what
the remains are. It's stuff called billy rubin, which comes
from broken down blood cells, and it contains enormous contes
of bacteria. And if you ingest those bacteria, if you
(12:24):
eat them, then you're going to get.
Speaker 4 (12:26):
Very Historically, the two great diseases that are associated with
human waste are, of course cholera. People can be perfectly
healthy in the morning and be dead, literally dead in
the evening, and typhoid.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Between eighteen thirty one to eighteen thirty two, fifty thousand
Brits died from cholera. In Paris, cholera killed eighteen thousand
in a single summer. The US was next.
Speaker 4 (12:57):
Cholera had been moving east. We never expected to hit here,
and then eighteen thirty two, it hit Boston, it hit Philadelphia.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
More than one hundred and fifty thousand Americans died during
the two cholera pandemics between eighteen thirty two and eighteen
forty nine. With the help of the new toilet, the
westernized world was drowning in its own excrement. The smell, germs,
and death finally led politicians to an effective solution, high
(13:27):
capacity sewers that carried the waste far away from town.
Speaker 9 (13:31):
They're sort of monuments to excrement, if you like. And
I've been down the sewers and it's absolutely amazing how
well they were built. The stuff running through them is
not fun, but the sewers themselves are utterly bredentes.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
As the astronauts were to be the heroes of the
twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, toilet inventors with the
giants that walked among men. The key innovation was a
water siphoning system to force waste through the base of
the ball with unpaid paralleled efficiency. What worked then still
works now. Once the toilet bowl's flush handle is pulled,
(14:08):
a valve inside the holding tank called the flapper, opens
up and water drains quickly into the bowl through a
series of angled holes under the rim. The man who
was often credited with inventing this flushing wonder probably had
little to do with it. Thomas Crapper, Yes, he really existed.
What he did patent is the pole chain that worked
(14:30):
in conjunction with a valveless cistern, thus decreasing noise and
preserving water. Due to his toilet innovations, the Victorian era
plumbing magnate earned himself a place in toilet history, if
only by selling lots of them.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
During World War One, when American soldiers were stationed over
in Britain, they would come across a lot of these toilets,
and they started the euphemism of I'm going to the
c and they based on what they saw on the toilets,
which said Thomas Crapper in company.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
And the John is derived from the toilets installed at
Harvard University in seventeen thirty five, which were emblazoned with
the manufacturer's name, Reverend Edward Johns. While Crapper and John's
were making a name for themselves, two enterprising brothers were
busy inventing the toilet's most essential accessory. Although the Chinese
(15:28):
invented paper in the second century, it took them more
than twelve hundred years to get around to using it
in the bathroom. They finally did in thirteen ninety one
a d. But it was strictly for the use of emperors.
Where did that leave commoners?
Speaker 3 (15:44):
People generally used their hands, and currently in many countries
around the world where paper is a premium, people continue
to use their left hand. That is why when you
travel to parts of the Middle East, to Southeast Asia
and Asia, you won't find it any left handed people.
Everyone there is right handed because the left hand is
(16:04):
considered unclean.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
In medieval Europe, commoners used hay, grass and plant leaves
to clean themselves. In early America, millions used corn cobs.
The cobs were softened first by prolonged soaking in water.
Speaker 3 (16:21):
The corn cobs were generally given to the pigs to eat,
and then when the pigs were finished with them and
there was just the cob left, they would take those
and use them to wipe themselves, so there was very
little waste.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
When math published newspapers and catalogs became commonplace in the
nineteenth century, Americans finally said goodbye to corn cobs and
Hello to Sears Roebuck.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
People would take the catalog, hang it in their outhouses
and they would read from it while they were doing
their business, and at the finish of the business, they
would tear off a piece and use it to wipe themselves.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
Things changed in the twenties.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
Unfortunately, Sears started using glossy print paper. The absorbing benefits
of the catalog kind of lost it, so you didn't
see so many people using the Sears Catalog as toilet
paper from then on.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
By that time, however, consumers had another option, real toilet paper.
Here's Ken Fischberg, author of Toilet Paper Encyclopedia, and Charles Pennetti.
Speaker 7 (17:24):
There was a man named Joseph Gaietti. He was in
New Yorker and he had a paper business in New Jersey.
He was the first person who actually took paper, cut
it into sheets into small sheets, and sold it through
drug stores as therapeutic paper.
Speaker 8 (17:40):
The people who bought them thought the paper was too
nice and ended up using it as stationary writing on
it and still using their catalog.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
In eighteen seventy nine, entrepreneurs Irvin and brother Clarence Scott
began selling rolled toilet paper. It was made from tissue
paper bought from other manufacturers, which they cut, up, rolled
and repackaged. Although there have been some improvements over the years,
today's toilet tissue is made basically the same way. In
the nineteen forty, Scott's competitor, Northern Paper Mills of Green Bay, Wisconsin,
(18:11):
began using chemicals to completely dissolve wood fibers and refer
to their toilet paper as splinter free. In two thousand
and seven, the prestigious British medical journals eleven thousand medical
experts and readers, mostly doctors, voted modern sanitation as the
number one medical advance since eighteen forty. Not antibiotics, not vaccines,
(18:35):
but toilets in clean water. The average human life expectancy
increased nearly thirty five years over the span of the
twentieth century. Roughly thirty of those thirty five years are
attributable to improvements in sanitation. While Harrenton's godmother Elizabeth I
might be baffled by a twenty first century porcelain throne,
(18:57):
Queen Victoria would easily recognize the set upon which her
great great granddaughter Elizabeth the II did her sovereign business. Harry,
are you in there in this modern game of thrones,
beg right out. We're all privileged members of the same
royal family.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
Had a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hengler, And what a story he told.
We love these stories of the things behind things, the
things that make life work. Always there are innovators, Always
there are inventors, and always making life better. The free markets, entrepreneurialism,
free market capitalism, making the world a safer place and
(19:39):
a better place. And think about the problems that modern
sanitation solved, Well, you heard about all of them. And
my goodness, modern sanitation's benefit, as we learned, is that
we've lifted lifespans thirty five years, most of it attributed
not to medical and scientific innovation, but in the end
to sanitation innovation. Also, of course, running water and getting
(20:03):
water supplies. To be the story of the toilet, the
story of toilet paper, the story of modern sanitation, and
the role one of our great cities, New York City,
played in it. Here on our American stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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