September 12, 2020 • 40 mins
Despite our lengthy history of evacuating our bowels and bladders, it wasn’t until the relatively recent 1940s that we began to construct portable, self-contained toilets to accept our waste. Dive into the world of porta-potties in this classic episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Happy weekend, folks. In old podcast time, it is December
two thousand sixteen. In modern podcast time, it's two thousand twenty. One.
Thing that has not changed between two thousand sixteen and
two thousand twenty is how porta potties work. It's an
interesting topic, believe it or not. I remember really enjoying
(00:22):
this episode. Uh, don't really enjoy porta potties, but it's
it's kind of a neat thing to research, believe it
or not, So give it a listen. Why don't you
how porta potties work? Welcome to Stuff you Should Know,
a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
(00:45):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles
w Chuck Bryant, Jerry Master, Ace Roland. Uh, and this
is stuff you should not Yeah, poopy edition. This one's
gonna get disgusting. Yeah, I mean, I don't think you
need trigger warnings when the title of the episode is
(01:08):
got porta potti in it, But um, we'll just throw
it out there. We're gonna be talking about poop and yeah,
and so if you're having lunch, maybe just put that
chili dog down the gag easily. Yeah, you know, sure, Yeah, okay,
(01:28):
we'll check. I don't think we can put it off
any longer, you know that kind of beat it out. Um.
I kind of like how this article actually starts though
by Dave Ruse. He talks about the Taste of Chicago.
Oh is this a Ruse jam? Yes, it is good.
So he talks about how if you go to the
Taste of Chicago, right every every July, they hold it
(01:51):
at the Grant Park alongside the Lake. When was our
show there, by the way, was that July? No, it
was chillier than that. I think it was October. Okay,
they had something had happened in Grant part because I
remember seeing hundreds and hundreds of Porter potties on the
drive in. Oh really yeah, so somebo they just always
(02:12):
have them there. No, I don't think so. Okay, Well,
for the Taste of Chicago, they definitely have Porter potties.
In fact, for two thousand and fourteen, and we should
say there's like a million people that come through this
thing over the course of the week. It's a lot
of folks, it really is. Have you ever been to
Atlanta's Taste of Anything? Uh? No, I haven't either. I
(02:34):
don't think it's I don't think a million people show
up for it. It makes me want to go try
Chicago's um But so you've got a million people. UM
and Service Sanitation, Inc. Which is the company that landed
the Porter Potty contract crunch the numbers. Looked at the
food that was going to be there, uh said, you're
(02:55):
gonna have some beer. Yeah, okay. They carried the one
and they came up with three eighty regular port of potties,
twenty eight wheelchair accessible porta potties, and eighty hand washing stations.
They have soap and fresh running water. Not bad, right,
So here's the thing, Like, that's great. They delivered all
(03:16):
those things. But had they just walked away and said,
see at the end of Taste of Chicago, it would
have been a living nightmare for everyone involved. Yeah, that
would be it would be more than the taste of Chicago.
Be the sickening smell of Chicago. Yeah, that would have
(03:37):
been bad. Because well, we'll get into it. But Porter
Potty sometimes you can leave them come back a week
later and just take them away if it's like a
temporary work site or something. But sometimes when you're selling
beer and chili, you need to come at the end
of every day and clean those suckers out. Yes, and
(03:57):
that's what they did. They came at nine when everyone
was sleeping from well, I guess if you went to
bed at nine pm, that's what I'm sleeping. But they
would come every night from nine and I pm to
three am, and they would work. And here's the thing,
like porta potties, it turns out I was overthinking them.
I thought there was maybe a little more going on. No,
(04:20):
they are they are self. I don't. I really don't
know what I thought. It escaped me as as the
reality of porter potties sunk in my my delusions about
my illusions about them kind of um escaped me and
trickle away. And now I can't remember what they were
up port potty, right, Sure I have, But I was
like holding my breath and like like just barely had
(04:44):
my eyes open because I didn't want any germs to
get on my eyeballs. Um, So I wasn't paying that
much attention. It's an in and out kind of thing. Um.
It turns out that like when you serve as supporter potty,
what you're doing is you're showing up with a trunk
truck as a tank with a vacuum on at a
pressurized tank. Um, and you are sucking the contents out
(05:06):
of that porter potty and then you put it in
the truck, you drive off, and you dump it off
at the waste treatment plant of your local city or town.
It's like a gigantic wet back. Yes, it is for
poo poo and pep Yes, and a very dangerous one.
I saw at least one story um in a porter
(05:28):
potty trade magazine that of somebody who I've read a
bunch of those, in a magazine called it's called Portable
Restroom Operator TRO. It's a it's a good mag man.
They actually found um uh this one issue online going
all the way back to two thousand nine that I
was looking for. So they they're legit, but they could
(05:49):
have been a little more fun with the name and
pro well. I think they're they're saying like, hey man,
all the fun you want, but we're saving your behind.
Hey see that that sounds like a slogan. I think
I'm sure it is. Well, they do point out a
couple of the slogans because porta Potty Companies or porta John's,
Jiffy John's Portloo if you're in England, Toy toy if
(06:14):
you're in Malaysia. Yeah. Uh. They're very famous for having
pretty fun penny um slogans like we're number one in
the number two business. Not bad, No, it's not bad.
No one, there's no one takes care of our business,
like Mr John. Sure I saw that too. Yeah. Um,
there's also one called got to Go, but it's spelled
(06:36):
really impressively. Um it's g It's all one word and
it's lower case, so it's super mod g O T
you with an oom l out g O. I love it. M.
Do you like that one? Yeah? I just I thought
you were going in a different direction. I thought it
was going to be a little more like g E
(06:58):
A U X. No, that's like if they were in
Louisiana maybe, Yeah, that's what I thought. Sure, No, this
is this had an oomlout. That's what got me. And
that's why you love Motley Crue so much. Sure it
is all right? So, um, should we talk a little
bit about the history. I think so, all right, Well
(07:19):
we need to go back to World War two in
this case, and um, because World War two was going on,
there was there was there was a need for more
poopers essentially right because they had like manufacturing plants popping up,
they had temporary manufacturing plants going up. They had places
(07:41):
where they didn't want to build full service, permanent bathrooms
all over the place. All of a sudden, these people
needed to go potty. Um what I saw. I saw
a few different origin stories, but the one I saw
the most frequently was that the um shipbuilding docks at
Long Beach are in World War Two. They're building warships
(08:03):
for the US. The guys working the docks would have
to working building the ships would have to get on
a rowboat and go back to the dock to use
the bathroom. And this is no good. And they were like,
this is a terrible waste of time. Can we just
get something down the ship? So they started building temporary
what amounted to the first porta potties there on the
(08:24):
ships for them to use. Yeah, and these first ones, UM,
you can look up a picture of the Andy Gump.
Is that what it's called. I didn't see. I gotta
look that up. I think it's the Andy Gump, like
one of the just type in like nineteen forties porta
potty and there will be a picture, and it's basically
this big heavy metal square. Sometimes they were would but
(08:47):
they were super heavy and they weren't easily transported. Um
they you know, this is pre uh using like chemicals
which we'll get into to help break these the poop
poo down and stuff. So it was just a disgusting affair.
I'm having trouble right now. I see the indycomer. You
(09:08):
see it. Wow, it looks like, um, it looks safe
to be in. You know what it looks like. It
looks like what they used on mash Yeah, like the latrine. Yeah,
same idea. Basically, Yeah, it's just a latrine. You could
take places. But I came across this really cool little
thing on a website about World War two fighter pilots,
(09:31):
and um, with World War Two came along planes that
could stay in these bombers, I could stay in the
air for a lot longer. And they started to think like, Hey,
these these dudes are up there for like you know,
ten to fourteen hours, we have to come up with
ways for them to go to the bathroom. Right, yeah,
(09:52):
I mean like you don't think about that, Like when
we the frost Bite episode, I certainly didn't think that
they were up there getting frostbite because it was so
you know, cold. Also didn't think that they were up
there so long that they couldn't use the bathroom. They
had to hold it right, So yeah, And the earliest
ones were, well, here's a funnel and it's attached to
(10:12):
a tube and it leads out of the plane, so
go ahead and p Yeah, and that's basically just for
like the pilot and co pilot right this relief tube. Um.
After that they're like, well, what if we have to poop? Yeah,
they said, can you get your hands on a produced crate?
And the crew would say like, well, yeah, sure, we
(10:33):
have produced creative course, what are we commies and the
people in charge to say, We'll poop in that? Take
that up in the plane and just pooping that, buddy,
and maybe wash it out when you get down here
and put it back in for later use, or maybe
just get a new crate. I guess if you're not thrifty.
Eventually they came up with something called the Elson E
(10:55):
E L S A N. It's a chemical toilet and
it was really kind of one of the first little
porta potties. But if you look up Elson and on
the images on Google you will find that it's it
looks like nothing more than a metal oil can that
you sit on. It's basically what it was pretty much. Um,
(11:19):
and you're all they're exposed. I mean, there's no room
that this is in. You're just doing this in front
of you know, your all your buddies on the plane,
right like prison. Sure, and that I mean that that
Elson toilet was still I mean as primitive as it was.
It was an advancement, but it had certain problems, right
like if you were flying through turbulence, yea, that Elson
(11:39):
would spill its contents out into the plane. Yeah, there's
a few quotes here. I'd like to read a couple
of these from some of these fighter pilots. Um, here's
one and this is from a British pilot. While we
were flying in rough air. This Devil's convenience often shared
(11:59):
its con tense with the floor of the aircraft, the
walls and ceiling, and sometimes a bit remained in the
container itself. It doesn't take much imagination to picture what
it was like trying to combat fear and airsickness while
struggling to remove enough gear in cramped quarters and at
the same time trying to use the bloody Elson. If
it wasn't an invention of the devil, it certainly might
have been one foisted on us by the enemy. When
(12:22):
seated in frigid cold, amid the cacophony of roaring engines
and whistling air, away from what should have been one
of life's peaceful moments, the occupant had a chance to
fully ponder the miserable condition of his life. This lowsome creation,
invariably overflowed on long trips and in turbulence, was always
prone to bathe the nether regions of the user. It
was one of the true reminders to me that war
(12:44):
as hell. You don't think about this stuff. You hear
about all the glory of being like a bomber pilot.
You don't think about sitting on a can and having
your your friends poop and pe slash up on your fannie.
Sorry to those in the UK, weies doesn't even make
sense in that context. That means something different here in
the US, right, but right so, uh yeah, that's the
(13:09):
the first I guess. Chemical toilet, which is a designation
of a porta potty, right, like a porter potty is
a chemical toilet, but not all chemical toilets or porta potties,
But a chemical toilet is any kind of toilet where
you have um something in there that's intended to break
down waste. And actually I don't know that an els
(13:31):
In toilet, I guess it was a chemical toilet. I
see now, But that's gross because in addition to getting
the rest of the cruise poop and pa slopped up
against your rear end, um, so too, were you getting
very very hazardous chemicals as well. Yeah, so that's a
good man. That guy may have had his buttocks removed
(13:54):
after the war. Uh. One of the uses of the toilet,
they said that this is supposedly very true. It was
that some members of the Royal Air Force UM actually
jettisoned the Elson toilets with their bomb payload onto German targets,
so they would drop these toilets full of pooh on
the Germans. And Uh. There was an American too, had
(14:17):
a great quote about peeing through the little hose. He said,
as the urine ran through the tube, it turned to
ice and dropped like topaz colored hail to the ground.
I like to imagine every time I urinated over Germany.
My my acidulous projectile would plank on some Nazi Burger's
aryan nose poetry. Yeah, there's some more good stories in here.
(14:42):
You should, uh man, I don't remember which website it was. Yeah,
I have to. I have to post that later on
Facebook and I'll tweet it, all right. So that's the
the war effort that eventually ultimately led to the creation
of the porta potty, right, and again, like there were
already latrines that had already been out houses. And the
(15:05):
difference between an outhouse and a porta potty is that
an out house is basically some sort of rigid structure
that's intended to be permanent or semipermanent, permanent that's dug
over a hole in the ground. That's it. A porta
potty is a self contained unit that has a place
(15:27):
where the waste goes, and it's held inside that unit
rather than like put into the ground, which is extremely
dangerous that we learned a very long time ago. Pooping
in holes in the ground is not a good way
to go as far as public health is concerned. It's not.
And that's one of the legitimate um marks in the
(15:47):
favor of porta potties. Is gross, as as most people
who have ever used one thinks they are. They're actually
um quite beneficial to public health. Yeah, and they're green too.
Saves a lot of water. Yeah. I saw um a
hundred and seventy billion leaders a year, about a hundred
and twenty five million gallons a day in the U
(16:08):
s alone. Crazy. Yeah, So, um, you want to take
a break for a second. Yeah, we'll break in. We'll
talk a little bit more about the evolution of the
port of John right after this y s game that
(16:34):
you should know, that you should know, but Josh Clark,
all right, chuckers. So we're talking about the evolution of
the port porta john. You've got the Andy Gump, you've
got the Elson toilet, and then finally, in actually the sixties,
(16:57):
you have what is the what we think of as
a porta potty. Um. A patent was developed by a
guy named George Harding Um and he called it for
a portable toilet Cabana and it was made from plastic
and um. Although he had the patent for it, the
guy who actually gets credit for actually creating the first
(17:19):
real modern port to john reporta potty was a guy
named Um Harvey Heather, and he created what's called the
strong Box. Great name. Did you see Have you seen
the strong Box? Oh? You did? That's what I went
and found the December two thousand nine UM issue of
Pro magazine. Um to find because I saw a reference
(17:41):
that they had published a picture of it, and I
couldn't find it anywhere else. Those things are ugly. Yeah,
it wasn't. It wasn't a great looking Uh. It's not
like the fantastic porter John say have today, just so
gorgeous to look at right now. This thing was ugly,
had had no alibi. Uh. Yeah. And these were made
(18:02):
of fiberglass, which um, it was good. It was lightweight
but um, and it was sturdy. It was as sturdy
as metal or wood, and it was a lot easier
to clean. But the problem with the strong Box and
the fiberglasses it was a big kind of one piece mold. Um.
It was dark inside, which was not good. They weren't
(18:25):
stackable as far as transporting them, and so that just
made it really expensive to get them where they needed
to go and back again. It did. And the fact
that like it was completely opaque um and there was
no light that could get in. That's that's an issue.
Plus I also get the impression that the floors could
(18:45):
get pretty slick and you could fall and die of
positional asphyxiation and important you. Yeah, and they were also
fiberglasses pretty fragile, so they would break a lot uh,
fiberglass absorb odors, which was not good. Uh. And so
shortly after the fiberglass came along, someone said, you know what,
(19:06):
how about poly ethylene um. This is what we will use.
And George Harding, who you mentioned, co founded the Polly
John Corporation, and he started building the polyethylene portable toilets
that were much better because they lasted longer. They would
last like a decade. Although I would not want to
use a nine year old port of John. Well, so
(19:28):
the that picture of the strong box that was published
in Pro magazine apparently had been out in service. It
was still in service, and it had been built like
thirty years before. Well, yeah, you would know that your
company could not have cared less about you if you
show up to your job site and there's a strong
box there. Yeah, and that's what you're expected to use,
(19:50):
with all of the with all of the possible choices
that your company could choose from, and they went with
the strong box. They don't care about you or your happiness.
The polyethylene. The other good thing about them where they
were assembled into different parts and pieces, so it made
them a lot easier to transport, a lot cheaper. Uh
(20:10):
and if apart broke, you might be able to replace it.
Oh yeah, that that is kind of good. Yeah, makes sense.
So hooray for poly ethylene toilets. But one of the
things that George harding Um created in his patent that
I noticed was a ventilation system. This is a big improvement,
right for sure, because when you're just piling human waste
upon human waste into a hole, um that it's going
(20:34):
to create gases, noxious gases, because bacteria is going to
start decomposing that waste, and as a byproduct of the decomposition,
they're going to produce what we see what we experience
as rotting fecal material. Right. Yes, not just that it's stinky,
it's dangerous. It is dangerous and as that gas tries
to find a way to escape upward, if the only
(20:56):
hole available to it is the toilet that you're pooping
or peeing into, those gases are going to come out
of it, and you're going to vomit while you pooper
p as well. So what George Harding had I told
you this phone is going to be cruts. What George
Harding figured out was that if you could just basically
create a pipe venting off that gas upward and out
(21:19):
of the porter potty, people would be willing to use
porter potties a lot more. And that was a huge improvement. Yeah.
He also said, how about we make this rooftop translucent
white so we can let in some natural light at least,
why don't we improve the flooring so that it's not
as slippy and um, maybe even further down the line,
(21:42):
we'll have porter potties that have a little urnal that's separate,
so you don't even have to sit your butt down
on that most horrid of places. Right yep, what about
the roll around toilet? Did you see these? Yeah? Those?
I mean that it makes sense. So basically, if you
are on like a job site right um, where there
(22:03):
are like different multiple stories being built and you're up
on one of the higher stories, it's the same thing
as when you're working in the shipyards building a ship.
You don't want to have to come all the way
down to use the bathroom. So they created porter potties
that were a lot more mobile that could be um
hoisted by cranes. UM just two different different levels. Yeah,
(22:28):
if you look up roll around toilet, it basically looks
like one of those UM coolers that has the two
wheels and the handle and you can pull the cooler around,
except it's larger and UM sitting above the wheels is
a is a urinal. Right. I don't see how you
go poopy in those, so maybe maybe that's when you
(22:48):
go downstairs. Uh yeah, I don't know either, because it's
not enclosed or anything. I mean, it's just wide open,
just like prison. And there's actually a great um a
great scene from I think the First Police Academy starring
our friend and Twitter followers Steve Guttenberg goots and UM.
(23:09):
I think it's Mauser who uses a porter potty and
Steve Guttenberg goes over and gets some crane operator to
lend him the crane and now it's Mauser's um, his
right hand man. I don't remember that guy's name, but
they lift the porter potty up while he's inside using it.
It's hilarious, wacky, wacky stuff and sus uh. And then
(23:32):
if you really are living the good life, or you
have a maybe a really nice upscale wedding that's out
in a remote area, you don't want to bring in
just even the nicest polly ethylene porta John won't do.
You will bring in what we call in in the
movie business a honey wagon. Um. It is a restroom trailer.
(23:55):
And these are actually nice. They are have running water,
they have dolls, they have porcelain uh, toilets, it's all partition.
They have sinks and running water and mirrors, hand towels.
It's like a rolling trailer full of toilets. Yeah. Like
you can breathe through your nose in these things. You
(24:15):
can lay down on the floor if you wanted. Yeah.
And apparently these first started in nineteen eight four Polly
John in Columbus, Ohio, go by guys. Yeah, And the
original trailer was eight stalls or as we said in
the movie business, and eight banger at three journals, and
it was thirty two ft long. And now there are
(24:37):
nineteen companies manufacturing luxury restroom trailers around the world today. Yeah.
I saw one in um like that they market for
like outdoor weddings and stuff like that. They said, all
you need are like I think six outlets maybe six
D and twenty bowl outlets. Yeah, and like standard garden
hose connection. And you've got yourself a luxury porter potty
(24:59):
trailer for your next remote black tie event, right, which
I mean even people in black tie got a p Yeah. Sure,
so you might as well take it easy on him
with a nice looks trailer. That's right. So, speaking of Chuck,
you want to you want to take a break. Yeah,
I'm gonna go to a real bathroom and hug it,
and I'm going to get a crane operator to probably
(25:20):
a prank on you. All right, we'll be right back.
That's y s games a little bit that you should know,
y sk should know. But Josh Clark, okay, Chuck, Yep,
(25:52):
we can't put it off any longer. We gotta go inside.
We're gonna go inside, deep dive into the bowels of
the porta pott Oh my gosh. Okay, okay, you're ready, Yeah,
catch your snorkel. Okay. So when you look into a
porter potty, you may notice that the stuff that's inside
(26:12):
the bowl or inside the holding tank is blue. Yeah,
it's in brown, sure, yeah, but it's more blue than brown.
And that's no accident, that's right. Any porta potty is
going to use a deep blue dye. In the entire purpose,
from beginning to end of the blue dye is to
visually mask the presence of human feces. Yeah, they don't.
(26:37):
They don't want you looking down there and seeing. Uh
if it was just like clear, like it's already disgusting,
You're you're getting the full experience from the smell alone.
You don't need the visual and and you don't pooping
these things to you? Oh no, okay, No, I I
think I would just put my pants and walk around instead.
(27:01):
I don't. I don't think I would. I certainly don't remember.
It's possible I blacked out that memory, but I don't
think I ever have it, like the first Lallapalooza, right,
I The only time I pooped in these I'm sure
there's been like some extreme emergency. But the only time
I can really recall is when Emily and I were
(27:22):
getting our master bath built at our house. Um, we
had our own we had another little bathroom kind of
you know, a little small guest bathroom, and we shared that,
and then we had a construction toilet on site because
they were doing construction. And so I would get up
in the mornings because I didn't want to. I want
to be a good husband, you know, and not ruin
(27:42):
Emily's day in morning, um by getting in there first.
So I would, I would get my newspaper and I
would walk outside in my slippers and use the port
to john in my driveway every morning. But I mean,
I guess it was pretty clean. It was yours, right,
it was great. It was me and like, you know,
two or three dudes there you go, that's that is doable.
Festival taste of Chicago, Like, yes, there's there are like
(28:08):
of course, like surely if you're sharing a porter potty
with a couple of other people that you have to
look in the eye here there, you're gonna take care
of it. But if it's random drunk strangers or people
on drugs or something like that, you, uh, it's gonna
get messy awfully fast. And and again it's more and
more people use it, that blue dye becomes more and
more important. Right as it does, there's also gonna be
(28:31):
a fragrance that they're gonna add to hopefully mask the
odor and apparently well, I was reading in some uh
some trade magazines, and I haven't experienced it myself, but
I did get the impression that they have come a
long way as far as fragrance goes. Yeah, like I saw, um,
(28:51):
you can get bubblegum fragrance. It doesn't sound good vanilla
um that comes from just standard use to the taste
of Chicago. Yeah, I mean, you know me with fragrance
this period, it's it's even worse to me, um everything bagel. No.
(29:15):
But like I came across the site and there's like
a Jaguar brand porta potty fragrance additive, and they have
like any fragrance you can imagine. Wow. Uh. And then
the finally final thing you're going to see down there,
or that it's going to be down there are biosides
to kill the bacteria and microbes and um. It used
(29:37):
to be that they would use formaldehyde uh to take
care of that, but more and more wastewater treatment plants
UM started saying, hey, we can't properly dispose of that
stuff now carcinogen, and we don't feel good about it.
So they've been phasing that out over the years going
a little greener and now um they actually use enzymes
(29:59):
like in official enzymes and microbes that feed on this stuff. Right,
they feed they helped break down the poop, and they
also feed on the bacteria that causes the smells. Right,
So they're making the poop and nert but they're also
naturally cutting down and smells, which I just find fascinating. Um.
They also, since it's capable of breaking down UM bacteria,
(30:22):
it's also capable of breaking down um any organic material,
so that if you use the right kind of toilet paper,
they'll break down the toilet paper as well. Yeah. It's
just basically magic in a in a porter potty. Yeah.
And they the other benefit there is they don't need
to be emptied as often UM if it's doing the
job like it should. Yeah. UM weather has an effect obviously,
(30:46):
if you're in Georgia in the hot summer, things are
gonna get even worse. I imagine Chicago in July is
probably no picnic either, and the taste of Chicago. No
one's gonna go to the taste of Chicago anymore. They're
like attended stop by this year. You don't know what's
going on, but when temperatures go up, bacteria go to
work even harder, and things are just gonna smell even worse.
(31:10):
So they might actually use more chemicals in the summer
um or more chemicals, especially if it's a summer festival.
And then conversely, I saw this, I guess it was
a blog post by a Porta Potti worker that was
published on Cracked and um, they basically just went over
(31:31):
most of the stuff you can imagine, but just crazy
stuff that they found. Um. But one of the things
that they made reference to is that the worst thing
that they can encounter is um a frozen waste, because
they said, once that happens, you have to break it
up by hand. Oh, so to protect to defend their
(31:54):
people from having to do this, they well, typically in colder,
colder areas during the winter, they'll they'll create a briny mixture. Yeah,
that will have a lower freezing temperature, like the Minnesota
ice Fishing festival, Right, But eventually you're going to reach
a point where it's cold enough that it's it's freezing
no matter how much salt you add to it. Yeah,
And I did see one of their little tricks of
(32:15):
the trade is they put a a cake of this
rock salt in the urinal, so you go peepy on it,
and as you peep on it, it just adds a
little more salt slowly throughout the day. Right. The only
issue with those is that you have to keep the
deer away because they love salt licks. You like that one. Yeah,
(32:37):
I'm ashamed of basically every joke I've made this whole episode.
I don't feel good about myself right now. All right,
so let's finish up by talking about the really the
worst part of this. If you're one of like eight
people still listening, right, Uh, if you're still listening, then
we'll finish up with the worst part, which is servicing
(32:57):
these things. And we talked about it. It's like a
wet back. You suck it out, drive it to a
waste water plant. But uh, you have to add new water.
You have to add new blue junk, uh and some
more dry solution. And I saw I saw like a
ratio of one to one about fresh water to solution.
(33:19):
We don't want to mess that up. Uh. And you think, like,
all right, so that's pretty gross and everything. But um,
especially at like a music festival or something, there's stuff
everywhere like you've been in these There's there's urine everywhere,
there's poop and places where you think, like, what in
the world of someone doing in there, and they have
(33:40):
to be cleaned out by somebody. It's an awful job. Yeah,
there's um stuff that people drop down there. Like if
you use the sock to wipe your bottom with and
you just deposit the sock into the porta potty, that's
gonna as you comp up the tank or the pump. Um.
So they have to get that kind of stuff out first.
(34:00):
About your cell phone, cell phone, Yeah, apparently they find
all sorts of stuff, especially things like phones, wallets full
of cash, jewelry, drugs. Yeah, guns. Uh. That crrarect guy
said that, Um he had a friend who showed up
at a porta potty where they just found a body.
Oh my god. Yeah, the thing now in the porta potty,
(34:23):
not in the actual hole. That's just cruel. Yeah, but um, yeah,
they find all sorts of stuff because almost everybody would say,
well that's gone. I'll just have to get a new
identity because I dropped my whole wallet into porta potty. Actually,
I saw a stat where five percent of people that
go into porta potties don't come out at all, so right,
(34:44):
the dead body scenario makes sense. They end up in
the other dimension from phantasm uh. And then our article says,
the worst case scenario if you're a porta potty service
person is uh that the porta potty Well, there's two
worst case, one worse and one way worse. One is
(35:06):
if it just gets knocked over, either by a car
hitting it or the wind, or some jerk who thinks
it's funny, that's not cool knocks it not cool at all,
knocks it over on purpose. But the ultimate ultimate worst
is if it tips over on its door. That's its
achilles heel, any porta potties achilles heel, because what happens,
(35:28):
all of the stuff that's in the holding tank gets
dumped out. When it's facing on its front on the door,
all of the stuff is liable to come out, and
it does, especially when they pick it back up. It
just slashes around everywhere and the poor porter potty service
operator has to wash this thing out. And those are
the worst. Like like somebody can put poop like on
(35:50):
the ceiling or on the walls or something that's pretty bad.
But when it falls on its front on the door
and everything slashes out. It gets everywhere, so you have
to like inside to clean the whole thing. And at
the very least, it takes them a lot more time
and screws up their entire day's schedule. At the worst,
they're in there cleaning a filthy porter, potties, nook and
(36:12):
crannies from the inside. Yeah, I would just say it
fell off the truck, boss, right, Sorry, it's in that
phantasm dimension, boss, didn't they Jack asked, do one of
these like put one of them in there and tip
it over or something? Yeah, I'm sure I think they
did that when they were like four. Yeah, I think
they did, like I had a crane lifted and turn
(36:34):
it over something. I don't know. No, you're thinking police
Academy and also police academy, giegs. You don't have to
write in it was Police Academy three. So I was
about to say, I didn't remember that. You didn't see what? Nah?
I think I petered out after two. Even three might
have been the best of all of them, which is
(36:55):
that what was the full name of it? Uh? Citizens
on Patrol? Okay, it's the one where Bob gold Thwaite,
like goes over from his life of crime to being
a junior police academy guy. Yeah, I love Bob Goldthwaite.
But good, he's great. Can we stop, sure, man, Okay,
(37:15):
we have to say you got anything else? No, okay, Chuck? Well,
actually I do know. If you see these porter potty
service people in your neighborhood, if there's construction going on,
you see them, bring in the truck, just flash a
nice smile, give him a tip of the cap. It's
a really gnarly job. And like they say, somebody's got
(37:36):
to do it. They're making a living. Like they've got
a job. They went out and got that job to
make money and provide for their family. And don't forget,
they're defending public health and they're saving a significant amount
of water. So there you go. Nice Chuck, all right,
good way to finish. If you want to know more
about porta potties, you can type those that hyphenated word
(37:58):
on the search bar at how stuff works dot com.
And since I said hyphen it's time for listening. Now
I'm gonna call this quick. John Clase uh direction or
John please exactly. Congratulations on an absolutely marvelous episode concerning
Monty Python guys, it's great to hear so much of
the history of the group. Well done. One bit of information.
(38:21):
I happen to see John Clease present a one man
show a few years ago in Carmel, California. He just
stood on stage and talked for about seventy five minutes. Um, boy,
that's a good gig. He discussed his life in general,
Python in particular, and lots of things. Other things he noticed.
Noted that his name is pronounced to rhyme with cheese
(38:43):
rather than fleece. In fact, his surname was originally Cheese,
but his father changed it to please. Uh. This was
a good thing for the Sun being named John because
he did not want to go by Jack Cheese. Yeah.
I guess not, so it's John Klees. Never knew that
that's from David Hewitt. Yeah. And um, I also want
(39:05):
to say, chuck. Somebody called us out for not mentioning
Carol Cleveland. She was, for all intents and purposes, the
seventh member of Monty Python. Yeah, we felt terrible because
she was in our notes and we mentioned her and
lavish praise on her and our runthrough that we did
in the studio, and it was just one of those
live show things that got biased. Yeah, so sorry, Carol Cleveland.
(39:30):
We uh, hats off to you. We appreciate your work
and we're sorry we'll left you out, agreed. Uh. If
you want to get in touch with me, your Chuck,
you can tweet to us I'm at joshuam Clark and
there's also s y s K podcast Chuck sat Charles W.
Chuck Bryant on Facebook and at Stuff you Should Know
on Facebook. You can send the both of us and
Jerry an email to stuff podcast at how stuff Works
(39:53):
dot com and has always hang out with us at
our home on the web. Stuff you Should Know dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's
How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. H
Happy weekend, folks. In old podcast time, it is December
two thousand sixteen. In modern podcast time, it's two thousand twenty. One.
Thing that has not changed between two thousand sixteen and
two thousand twenty is how porta potties work. It's an
interesting topic, believe it or not. I remember really enjoying
(00:22):
this episode. Uh, don't really enjoy porta potties, but it's
it's kind of a neat thing to research, believe it
or not, So give it a listen. Why don't you
how porta potties work? Welcome to Stuff you Should Know,
a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
(00:45):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles
w Chuck Bryant, Jerry Master, Ace Roland. Uh, and this
is stuff you should not Yeah, poopy edition. This one's
gonna get disgusting. Yeah, I mean, I don't think you
need trigger warnings when the title of the episode is
(01:08):
got porta potti in it, But um, we'll just throw
it out there. We're gonna be talking about poop and yeah,
and so if you're having lunch, maybe just put that
chili dog down the gag easily. Yeah, you know, sure, Yeah, okay,
(01:28):
we'll check. I don't think we can put it off
any longer, you know that kind of beat it out. Um.
I kind of like how this article actually starts though
by Dave Ruse. He talks about the Taste of Chicago.
Oh is this a Ruse jam? Yes, it is good.
So he talks about how if you go to the
Taste of Chicago, right every every July, they hold it
(01:51):
at the Grant Park alongside the Lake. When was our
show there, by the way, was that July? No, it
was chillier than that. I think it was October. Okay,
they had something had happened in Grant part because I
remember seeing hundreds and hundreds of Porter potties on the
drive in. Oh really yeah, so somebo they just always
(02:12):
have them there. No, I don't think so. Okay, Well,
for the Taste of Chicago, they definitely have Porter potties.
In fact, for two thousand and fourteen, and we should
say there's like a million people that come through this
thing over the course of the week. It's a lot
of folks, it really is. Have you ever been to
Atlanta's Taste of Anything? Uh? No, I haven't either. I
(02:34):
don't think it's I don't think a million people show
up for it. It makes me want to go try
Chicago's um But so you've got a million people. UM
and Service Sanitation, Inc. Which is the company that landed
the Porter Potty contract crunch the numbers. Looked at the
food that was going to be there, uh said, you're
(02:55):
gonna have some beer. Yeah, okay. They carried the one
and they came up with three eighty regular port of potties,
twenty eight wheelchair accessible porta potties, and eighty hand washing stations.
They have soap and fresh running water. Not bad, right,
So here's the thing, Like, that's great. They delivered all
(03:16):
those things. But had they just walked away and said,
see at the end of Taste of Chicago, it would
have been a living nightmare for everyone involved. Yeah, that
would be it would be more than the taste of Chicago.
Be the sickening smell of Chicago. Yeah, that would have
(03:37):
been bad. Because well, we'll get into it. But Porter
Potty sometimes you can leave them come back a week
later and just take them away if it's like a
temporary work site or something. But sometimes when you're selling
beer and chili, you need to come at the end
of every day and clean those suckers out. Yes, and
(03:57):
that's what they did. They came at nine when everyone
was sleeping from well, I guess if you went to
bed at nine pm, that's what I'm sleeping. But they
would come every night from nine and I pm to
three am, and they would work. And here's the thing,
like porta potties, it turns out I was overthinking them.
I thought there was maybe a little more going on. No,
(04:20):
they are they are self. I don't. I really don't
know what I thought. It escaped me as as the
reality of porter potties sunk in my my delusions about
my illusions about them kind of um escaped me and
trickle away. And now I can't remember what they were
up port potty, right, Sure I have, But I was
like holding my breath and like like just barely had
(04:44):
my eyes open because I didn't want any germs to
get on my eyeballs. Um, So I wasn't paying that
much attention. It's an in and out kind of thing. Um.
It turns out that like when you serve as supporter potty,
what you're doing is you're showing up with a trunk
truck as a tank with a vacuum on at a
pressurized tank. Um, and you are sucking the contents out
(05:06):
of that porter potty and then you put it in
the truck, you drive off, and you dump it off
at the waste treatment plant of your local city or town.
It's like a gigantic wet back. Yes, it is for
poo poo and pep Yes, and a very dangerous one.
I saw at least one story um in a porter
(05:28):
potty trade magazine that of somebody who I've read a
bunch of those, in a magazine called it's called Portable
Restroom Operator TRO. It's a it's a good mag man.
They actually found um uh this one issue online going
all the way back to two thousand nine that I
was looking for. So they they're legit, but they could
(05:49):
have been a little more fun with the name and
pro well. I think they're they're saying like, hey man,
all the fun you want, but we're saving your behind.
Hey see that that sounds like a slogan. I think
I'm sure it is. Well, they do point out a
couple of the slogans because porta Potty Companies or porta John's,
Jiffy John's Portloo if you're in England, Toy toy if
(06:14):
you're in Malaysia. Yeah. Uh. They're very famous for having
pretty fun penny um slogans like we're number one in
the number two business. Not bad, No, it's not bad.
No one, there's no one takes care of our business,
like Mr John. Sure I saw that too. Yeah. Um,
there's also one called got to Go, but it's spelled
(06:36):
really impressively. Um it's g It's all one word and
it's lower case, so it's super mod g O T
you with an oom l out g O. I love it. M.
Do you like that one? Yeah? I just I thought
you were going in a different direction. I thought it
was going to be a little more like g E
(06:58):
A U X. No, that's like if they were in
Louisiana maybe, Yeah, that's what I thought. Sure, No, this
is this had an oomlout. That's what got me. And
that's why you love Motley Crue so much. Sure it
is all right? So, um, should we talk a little
bit about the history. I think so, all right, Well
(07:19):
we need to go back to World War two in
this case, and um, because World War two was going on,
there was there was there was a need for more
poopers essentially right because they had like manufacturing plants popping up,
they had temporary manufacturing plants going up. They had places
(07:41):
where they didn't want to build full service, permanent bathrooms
all over the place. All of a sudden, these people
needed to go potty. Um what I saw. I saw
a few different origin stories, but the one I saw
the most frequently was that the um shipbuilding docks at
Long Beach are in World War Two. They're building warships
(08:03):
for the US. The guys working the docks would have
to working building the ships would have to get on
a rowboat and go back to the dock to use
the bathroom. And this is no good. And they were like,
this is a terrible waste of time. Can we just
get something down the ship? So they started building temporary
what amounted to the first porta potties there on the
(08:24):
ships for them to use. Yeah, and these first ones, UM,
you can look up a picture of the Andy Gump.
Is that what it's called. I didn't see. I gotta
look that up. I think it's the Andy Gump, like
one of the just type in like nineteen forties porta
potty and there will be a picture, and it's basically
this big heavy metal square. Sometimes they were would but
(08:47):
they were super heavy and they weren't easily transported. Um
they you know, this is pre uh using like chemicals
which we'll get into to help break these the poop
poo down and stuff. So it was just a disgusting affair.
I'm having trouble right now. I see the indycomer. You
(09:08):
see it. Wow, it looks like, um, it looks safe
to be in. You know what it looks like. It
looks like what they used on mash Yeah, like the latrine. Yeah,
same idea. Basically, Yeah, it's just a latrine. You could
take places. But I came across this really cool little
thing on a website about World War two fighter pilots,
(09:31):
and um, with World War Two came along planes that
could stay in these bombers, I could stay in the
air for a lot longer. And they started to think like, Hey,
these these dudes are up there for like you know,
ten to fourteen hours, we have to come up with
ways for them to go to the bathroom. Right, yeah,
(09:52):
I mean like you don't think about that, Like when
we the frost Bite episode, I certainly didn't think that
they were up there getting frostbite because it was so
you know, cold. Also didn't think that they were up
there so long that they couldn't use the bathroom. They
had to hold it right, So yeah, And the earliest
ones were, well, here's a funnel and it's attached to
(10:12):
a tube and it leads out of the plane, so
go ahead and p Yeah, and that's basically just for
like the pilot and co pilot right this relief tube. Um.
After that they're like, well, what if we have to poop? Yeah,
they said, can you get your hands on a produced crate?
And the crew would say like, well, yeah, sure, we
(10:33):
have produced creative course, what are we commies and the
people in charge to say, We'll poop in that? Take
that up in the plane and just pooping that, buddy,
and maybe wash it out when you get down here
and put it back in for later use, or maybe
just get a new crate. I guess if you're not thrifty.
Eventually they came up with something called the Elson E
(10:55):
E L S A N. It's a chemical toilet and
it was really kind of one of the first little
porta potties. But if you look up Elson and on
the images on Google you will find that it's it
looks like nothing more than a metal oil can that
you sit on. It's basically what it was pretty much. Um,
(11:19):
and you're all they're exposed. I mean, there's no room
that this is in. You're just doing this in front
of you know, your all your buddies on the plane,
right like prison. Sure, and that I mean that that
Elson toilet was still I mean as primitive as it was.
It was an advancement, but it had certain problems, right
like if you were flying through turbulence, yea, that Elson
(11:39):
would spill its contents out into the plane. Yeah, there's
a few quotes here. I'd like to read a couple
of these from some of these fighter pilots. Um, here's
one and this is from a British pilot. While we
were flying in rough air. This Devil's convenience often shared
(11:59):
its con tense with the floor of the aircraft, the
walls and ceiling, and sometimes a bit remained in the
container itself. It doesn't take much imagination to picture what
it was like trying to combat fear and airsickness while
struggling to remove enough gear in cramped quarters and at
the same time trying to use the bloody Elson. If
it wasn't an invention of the devil, it certainly might
have been one foisted on us by the enemy. When
(12:22):
seated in frigid cold, amid the cacophony of roaring engines
and whistling air, away from what should have been one
of life's peaceful moments, the occupant had a chance to
fully ponder the miserable condition of his life. This lowsome creation,
invariably overflowed on long trips and in turbulence, was always
prone to bathe the nether regions of the user. It
was one of the true reminders to me that war
(12:44):
as hell. You don't think about this stuff. You hear
about all the glory of being like a bomber pilot.
You don't think about sitting on a can and having
your your friends poop and pe slash up on your fannie.
Sorry to those in the UK, weies doesn't even make
sense in that context. That means something different here in
the US, right, but right so, uh yeah, that's the
(13:09):
the first I guess. Chemical toilet, which is a designation
of a porta potty, right, like a porter potty is
a chemical toilet, but not all chemical toilets or porta potties,
But a chemical toilet is any kind of toilet where
you have um something in there that's intended to break
down waste. And actually I don't know that an els
(13:31):
In toilet, I guess it was a chemical toilet. I
see now, But that's gross because in addition to getting
the rest of the cruise poop and pa slopped up
against your rear end, um, so too, were you getting
very very hazardous chemicals as well. Yeah, so that's a
good man. That guy may have had his buttocks removed
(13:54):
after the war. Uh. One of the uses of the toilet,
they said that this is supposedly very true. It was
that some members of the Royal Air Force UM actually
jettisoned the Elson toilets with their bomb payload onto German targets,
so they would drop these toilets full of pooh on
the Germans. And Uh. There was an American too, had
(14:17):
a great quote about peeing through the little hose. He said,
as the urine ran through the tube, it turned to
ice and dropped like topaz colored hail to the ground.
I like to imagine every time I urinated over Germany.
My my acidulous projectile would plank on some Nazi Burger's
aryan nose poetry. Yeah, there's some more good stories in here.
(14:42):
You should, uh man, I don't remember which website it was. Yeah,
I have to. I have to post that later on
Facebook and I'll tweet it, all right. So that's the
the war effort that eventually ultimately led to the creation
of the porta potty, right, and again, like there were
already latrines that had already been out houses. And the
(15:05):
difference between an outhouse and a porta potty is that
an out house is basically some sort of rigid structure
that's intended to be permanent or semipermanent, permanent that's dug
over a hole in the ground. That's it. A porta
potty is a self contained unit that has a place
(15:27):
where the waste goes, and it's held inside that unit
rather than like put into the ground, which is extremely
dangerous that we learned a very long time ago. Pooping
in holes in the ground is not a good way
to go as far as public health is concerned. It's not.
And that's one of the legitimate um marks in the
(15:47):
favor of porta potties. Is gross, as as most people
who have ever used one thinks they are. They're actually
um quite beneficial to public health. Yeah, and they're green too.
Saves a lot of water. Yeah. I saw um a
hundred and seventy billion leaders a year, about a hundred
and twenty five million gallons a day in the U
(16:08):
s alone. Crazy. Yeah, So, um, you want to take
a break for a second. Yeah, we'll break in. We'll
talk a little bit more about the evolution of the
port of John right after this y s game that
(16:34):
you should know, that you should know, but Josh Clark,
all right, chuckers. So we're talking about the evolution of
the port porta john. You've got the Andy Gump, you've
got the Elson toilet, and then finally, in actually the sixties,
(16:57):
you have what is the what we think of as
a porta potty. Um. A patent was developed by a
guy named George Harding Um and he called it for
a portable toilet Cabana and it was made from plastic
and um. Although he had the patent for it, the
guy who actually gets credit for actually creating the first
(17:19):
real modern port to john reporta potty was a guy
named Um Harvey Heather, and he created what's called the
strong Box. Great name. Did you see Have you seen
the strong Box? Oh? You did? That's what I went
and found the December two thousand nine UM issue of
Pro magazine. Um to find because I saw a reference
(17:41):
that they had published a picture of it, and I
couldn't find it anywhere else. Those things are ugly. Yeah,
it wasn't. It wasn't a great looking Uh. It's not
like the fantastic porter John say have today, just so
gorgeous to look at right now. This thing was ugly,
had had no alibi. Uh. Yeah. And these were made
(18:02):
of fiberglass, which um, it was good. It was lightweight
but um, and it was sturdy. It was as sturdy
as metal or wood, and it was a lot easier
to clean. But the problem with the strong Box and
the fiberglasses it was a big kind of one piece mold. Um.
It was dark inside, which was not good. They weren't
(18:25):
stackable as far as transporting them, and so that just
made it really expensive to get them where they needed
to go and back again. It did. And the fact
that like it was completely opaque um and there was
no light that could get in. That's that's an issue.
Plus I also get the impression that the floors could
(18:45):
get pretty slick and you could fall and die of
positional asphyxiation and important you. Yeah, and they were also
fiberglasses pretty fragile, so they would break a lot uh,
fiberglass absorb odors, which was not good. Uh. And so
shortly after the fiberglass came along, someone said, you know what,
(19:06):
how about poly ethylene um. This is what we will use.
And George Harding, who you mentioned, co founded the Polly
John Corporation, and he started building the polyethylene portable toilets
that were much better because they lasted longer. They would
last like a decade. Although I would not want to
use a nine year old port of John. Well, so
(19:28):
the that picture of the strong box that was published
in Pro magazine apparently had been out in service. It
was still in service, and it had been built like
thirty years before. Well, yeah, you would know that your
company could not have cared less about you if you
show up to your job site and there's a strong
box there. Yeah, and that's what you're expected to use,
(19:50):
with all of the with all of the possible choices
that your company could choose from, and they went with
the strong box. They don't care about you or your happiness.
The polyethylene. The other good thing about them where they
were assembled into different parts and pieces, so it made
them a lot easier to transport, a lot cheaper. Uh
(20:10):
and if apart broke, you might be able to replace it.
Oh yeah, that that is kind of good. Yeah, makes sense.
So hooray for poly ethylene toilets. But one of the
things that George harding Um created in his patent that
I noticed was a ventilation system. This is a big improvement,
right for sure, because when you're just piling human waste
upon human waste into a hole, um that it's going
(20:34):
to create gases, noxious gases, because bacteria is going to
start decomposing that waste, and as a byproduct of the decomposition,
they're going to produce what we see what we experience
as rotting fecal material. Right. Yes, not just that it's stinky,
it's dangerous. It is dangerous and as that gas tries
to find a way to escape upward, if the only
(20:56):
hole available to it is the toilet that you're pooping
or peeing into, those gases are going to come out
of it, and you're going to vomit while you pooper
p as well. So what George Harding had I told
you this phone is going to be cruts. What George
Harding figured out was that if you could just basically
create a pipe venting off that gas upward and out
(21:19):
of the porter potty, people would be willing to use
porter potties a lot more. And that was a huge improvement. Yeah.
He also said, how about we make this rooftop translucent
white so we can let in some natural light at least,
why don't we improve the flooring so that it's not
as slippy and um, maybe even further down the line,
(21:42):
we'll have porter potties that have a little urnal that's separate,
so you don't even have to sit your butt down
on that most horrid of places. Right yep, what about
the roll around toilet? Did you see these? Yeah? Those?
I mean that it makes sense. So basically, if you
are on like a job site right um, where there
(22:03):
are like different multiple stories being built and you're up
on one of the higher stories, it's the same thing
as when you're working in the shipyards building a ship.
You don't want to have to come all the way
down to use the bathroom. So they created porter potties
that were a lot more mobile that could be um
hoisted by cranes. UM just two different different levels. Yeah,
(22:28):
if you look up roll around toilet, it basically looks
like one of those UM coolers that has the two
wheels and the handle and you can pull the cooler around,
except it's larger and UM sitting above the wheels is
a is a urinal. Right. I don't see how you
go poopy in those, so maybe maybe that's when you
(22:48):
go downstairs. Uh yeah, I don't know either, because it's
not enclosed or anything. I mean, it's just wide open,
just like prison. And there's actually a great um a
great scene from I think the First Police Academy starring
our friend and Twitter followers Steve Guttenberg goots and UM.
(23:09):
I think it's Mauser who uses a porter potty and
Steve Guttenberg goes over and gets some crane operator to
lend him the crane and now it's Mauser's um, his
right hand man. I don't remember that guy's name, but
they lift the porter potty up while he's inside using it.
It's hilarious, wacky, wacky stuff and sus uh. And then
(23:32):
if you really are living the good life, or you
have a maybe a really nice upscale wedding that's out
in a remote area, you don't want to bring in
just even the nicest polly ethylene porta John won't do.
You will bring in what we call in in the
movie business a honey wagon. Um. It is a restroom trailer.
(23:55):
And these are actually nice. They are have running water,
they have dolls, they have porcelain uh, toilets, it's all partition.
They have sinks and running water and mirrors, hand towels.
It's like a rolling trailer full of toilets. Yeah. Like
you can breathe through your nose in these things. You
(24:15):
can lay down on the floor if you wanted. Yeah.
And apparently these first started in nineteen eight four Polly
John in Columbus, Ohio, go by guys. Yeah, And the
original trailer was eight stalls or as we said in
the movie business, and eight banger at three journals, and
it was thirty two ft long. And now there are
(24:37):
nineteen companies manufacturing luxury restroom trailers around the world today. Yeah.
I saw one in um like that they market for
like outdoor weddings and stuff like that. They said, all
you need are like I think six outlets maybe six
D and twenty bowl outlets. Yeah, and like standard garden
hose connection. And you've got yourself a luxury porter potty
(24:59):
trailer for your next remote black tie event, right, which
I mean even people in black tie got a p Yeah. Sure,
so you might as well take it easy on him
with a nice looks trailer. That's right. So, speaking of Chuck,
you want to you want to take a break. Yeah,
I'm gonna go to a real bathroom and hug it,
and I'm going to get a crane operator to probably
(25:20):
a prank on you. All right, we'll be right back.
That's y s games a little bit that you should know,
y sk should know. But Josh Clark, okay, Chuck, Yep,
(25:52):
we can't put it off any longer. We gotta go inside.
We're gonna go inside, deep dive into the bowels of
the porta pott Oh my gosh. Okay, okay, you're ready, Yeah,
catch your snorkel. Okay. So when you look into a
porter potty, you may notice that the stuff that's inside
(26:12):
the bowl or inside the holding tank is blue. Yeah,
it's in brown, sure, yeah, but it's more blue than brown.
And that's no accident, that's right. Any porta potty is
going to use a deep blue dye. In the entire purpose,
from beginning to end of the blue dye is to
visually mask the presence of human feces. Yeah, they don't.
(26:37):
They don't want you looking down there and seeing. Uh
if it was just like clear, like it's already disgusting,
You're you're getting the full experience from the smell alone.
You don't need the visual and and you don't pooping
these things to you? Oh no, okay, No, I I
think I would just put my pants and walk around instead.
(27:01):
I don't. I don't think I would. I certainly don't remember.
It's possible I blacked out that memory, but I don't
think I ever have it, like the first Lallapalooza, right,
I The only time I pooped in these I'm sure
there's been like some extreme emergency. But the only time
I can really recall is when Emily and I were
(27:22):
getting our master bath built at our house. Um, we
had our own we had another little bathroom kind of
you know, a little small guest bathroom, and we shared that,
and then we had a construction toilet on site because
they were doing construction. And so I would get up
in the mornings because I didn't want to. I want
to be a good husband, you know, and not ruin
(27:42):
Emily's day in morning, um by getting in there first.
So I would, I would get my newspaper and I
would walk outside in my slippers and use the port
to john in my driveway every morning. But I mean,
I guess it was pretty clean. It was yours, right,
it was great. It was me and like, you know,
two or three dudes there you go, that's that is doable.
Festival taste of Chicago, Like, yes, there's there are like
(28:08):
of course, like surely if you're sharing a porter potty
with a couple of other people that you have to
look in the eye here there, you're gonna take care
of it. But if it's random drunk strangers or people
on drugs or something like that, you, uh, it's gonna
get messy awfully fast. And and again it's more and
more people use it, that blue dye becomes more and
more important. Right as it does, there's also gonna be
(28:31):
a fragrance that they're gonna add to hopefully mask the
odor and apparently well, I was reading in some uh
some trade magazines, and I haven't experienced it myself, but
I did get the impression that they have come a
long way as far as fragrance goes. Yeah, like I saw, um,
(28:51):
you can get bubblegum fragrance. It doesn't sound good vanilla
um that comes from just standard use to the taste
of Chicago. Yeah, I mean, you know me with fragrance
this period, it's it's even worse to me, um everything bagel. No.
(29:15):
But like I came across the site and there's like
a Jaguar brand porta potty fragrance additive, and they have
like any fragrance you can imagine. Wow. Uh. And then
the finally final thing you're going to see down there,
or that it's going to be down there are biosides
to kill the bacteria and microbes and um. It used
(29:37):
to be that they would use formaldehyde uh to take
care of that, but more and more wastewater treatment plants
UM started saying, hey, we can't properly dispose of that
stuff now carcinogen, and we don't feel good about it.
So they've been phasing that out over the years going
a little greener and now um they actually use enzymes
(29:59):
like in official enzymes and microbes that feed on this stuff. Right,
they feed they helped break down the poop, and they
also feed on the bacteria that causes the smells. Right,
So they're making the poop and nert but they're also
naturally cutting down and smells, which I just find fascinating. Um.
They also, since it's capable of breaking down UM bacteria,
(30:22):
it's also capable of breaking down um any organic material,
so that if you use the right kind of toilet paper,
they'll break down the toilet paper as well. Yeah. It's
just basically magic in a in a porter potty. Yeah.
And they the other benefit there is they don't need
to be emptied as often UM if it's doing the
job like it should. Yeah. UM weather has an effect obviously,
(30:46):
if you're in Georgia in the hot summer, things are
gonna get even worse. I imagine Chicago in July is
probably no picnic either, and the taste of Chicago. No
one's gonna go to the taste of Chicago anymore. They're
like attended stop by this year. You don't know what's
going on, but when temperatures go up, bacteria go to
work even harder, and things are just gonna smell even worse.
(31:10):
So they might actually use more chemicals in the summer
um or more chemicals, especially if it's a summer festival.
And then conversely, I saw this, I guess it was
a blog post by a Porta Potti worker that was
published on Cracked and um, they basically just went over
(31:31):
most of the stuff you can imagine, but just crazy
stuff that they found. Um. But one of the things
that they made reference to is that the worst thing
that they can encounter is um a frozen waste, because
they said, once that happens, you have to break it
up by hand. Oh, so to protect to defend their
(31:54):
people from having to do this, they well, typically in colder,
colder areas during the winter, they'll they'll create a briny mixture. Yeah,
that will have a lower freezing temperature, like the Minnesota
ice Fishing festival, Right, But eventually you're going to reach
a point where it's cold enough that it's it's freezing
no matter how much salt you add to it. Yeah,
And I did see one of their little tricks of
(32:15):
the trade is they put a a cake of this
rock salt in the urinal, so you go peepy on it,
and as you peep on it, it just adds a
little more salt slowly throughout the day. Right. The only
issue with those is that you have to keep the
deer away because they love salt licks. You like that one. Yeah,
(32:37):
I'm ashamed of basically every joke I've made this whole episode.
I don't feel good about myself right now. All right,
so let's finish up by talking about the really the
worst part of this. If you're one of like eight
people still listening, right, Uh, if you're still listening, then
we'll finish up with the worst part, which is servicing
(32:57):
these things. And we talked about it. It's like a
wet back. You suck it out, drive it to a
waste water plant. But uh, you have to add new water.
You have to add new blue junk, uh and some
more dry solution. And I saw I saw like a
ratio of one to one about fresh water to solution.
(33:19):
We don't want to mess that up. Uh. And you think, like,
all right, so that's pretty gross and everything. But um,
especially at like a music festival or something, there's stuff
everywhere like you've been in these There's there's urine everywhere,
there's poop and places where you think, like, what in
the world of someone doing in there, and they have
(33:40):
to be cleaned out by somebody. It's an awful job. Yeah,
there's um stuff that people drop down there. Like if
you use the sock to wipe your bottom with and
you just deposit the sock into the porta potty, that's
gonna as you comp up the tank or the pump. Um.
So they have to get that kind of stuff out first.
(34:00):
About your cell phone, cell phone, Yeah, apparently they find
all sorts of stuff, especially things like phones, wallets full
of cash, jewelry, drugs. Yeah, guns. Uh. That crrarect guy
said that, Um he had a friend who showed up
at a porta potty where they just found a body.
Oh my god. Yeah, the thing now in the porta potty,
(34:23):
not in the actual hole. That's just cruel. Yeah, but um, yeah,
they find all sorts of stuff because almost everybody would say,
well that's gone. I'll just have to get a new
identity because I dropped my whole wallet into porta potty. Actually,
I saw a stat where five percent of people that
go into porta potties don't come out at all, so right,
(34:44):
the dead body scenario makes sense. They end up in
the other dimension from phantasm uh. And then our article says,
the worst case scenario if you're a porta potty service
person is uh that the porta potty Well, there's two
worst case, one worse and one way worse. One is
(35:06):
if it just gets knocked over, either by a car
hitting it or the wind, or some jerk who thinks
it's funny, that's not cool knocks it not cool at all,
knocks it over on purpose. But the ultimate ultimate worst
is if it tips over on its door. That's its
achilles heel, any porta potties achilles heel, because what happens,
(35:28):
all of the stuff that's in the holding tank gets
dumped out. When it's facing on its front on the door,
all of the stuff is liable to come out, and
it does, especially when they pick it back up. It
just slashes around everywhere and the poor porter potty service
operator has to wash this thing out. And those are
the worst. Like like somebody can put poop like on
(35:50):
the ceiling or on the walls or something that's pretty bad.
But when it falls on its front on the door
and everything slashes out. It gets everywhere, so you have
to like inside to clean the whole thing. And at
the very least, it takes them a lot more time
and screws up their entire day's schedule. At the worst,
they're in there cleaning a filthy porter, potties, nook and
(36:12):
crannies from the inside. Yeah, I would just say it
fell off the truck, boss, right, Sorry, it's in that
phantasm dimension, boss, didn't they Jack asked, do one of
these like put one of them in there and tip
it over or something? Yeah, I'm sure I think they
did that when they were like four. Yeah, I think
they did, like I had a crane lifted and turn
(36:34):
it over something. I don't know. No, you're thinking police
Academy and also police academy, giegs. You don't have to
write in it was Police Academy three. So I was
about to say, I didn't remember that. You didn't see what? Nah?
I think I petered out after two. Even three might
have been the best of all of them, which is
(36:55):
that what was the full name of it? Uh? Citizens
on Patrol? Okay, it's the one where Bob gold Thwaite,
like goes over from his life of crime to being
a junior police academy guy. Yeah, I love Bob Goldthwaite.
But good, he's great. Can we stop, sure, man, Okay,
(37:15):
we have to say you got anything else? No, okay, Chuck? Well,
actually I do know. If you see these porter potty
service people in your neighborhood, if there's construction going on,
you see them, bring in the truck, just flash a
nice smile, give him a tip of the cap. It's
a really gnarly job. And like they say, somebody's got
(37:36):
to do it. They're making a living. Like they've got
a job. They went out and got that job to
make money and provide for their family. And don't forget,
they're defending public health and they're saving a significant amount
of water. So there you go. Nice Chuck, all right,
good way to finish. If you want to know more
about porta potties, you can type those that hyphenated word
(37:58):
on the search bar at how stuff works dot com.
And since I said hyphen it's time for listening. Now
I'm gonna call this quick. John Clase uh direction or
John please exactly. Congratulations on an absolutely marvelous episode concerning
Monty Python guys, it's great to hear so much of
the history of the group. Well done. One bit of information.
(38:21):
I happen to see John Clease present a one man
show a few years ago in Carmel, California. He just
stood on stage and talked for about seventy five minutes. Um, boy,
that's a good gig. He discussed his life in general,
Python in particular, and lots of things. Other things he noticed.
Noted that his name is pronounced to rhyme with cheese
(38:43):
rather than fleece. In fact, his surname was originally Cheese,
but his father changed it to please. Uh. This was
a good thing for the Sun being named John because
he did not want to go by Jack Cheese. Yeah.
I guess not, so it's John Klees. Never knew that
that's from David Hewitt. Yeah. And um, I also want
(39:05):
to say, chuck. Somebody called us out for not mentioning
Carol Cleveland. She was, for all intents and purposes, the
seventh member of Monty Python. Yeah, we felt terrible because
she was in our notes and we mentioned her and
lavish praise on her and our runthrough that we did
in the studio, and it was just one of those
live show things that got biased. Yeah, so sorry, Carol Cleveland.
(39:30):
We uh, hats off to you. We appreciate your work
and we're sorry we'll left you out, agreed. Uh. If
you want to get in touch with me, your Chuck,
you can tweet to us I'm at joshuam Clark and
there's also s y s K podcast Chuck sat Charles W.
Chuck Bryant on Facebook and at Stuff you Should Know
on Facebook. You can send the both of us and
Jerry an email to stuff podcast at how stuff Works
(39:53):
dot com and has always hang out with us at
our home on the web. Stuff you Should Know dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's
How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
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