September 15, 2025 • 28 mins
Cintas isn't the only bathroom name on the block. In frustration with their slow timeline, Hunter discusses a long waited subject: The Flushometer and the company, or man, behind this standard setting device.
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Social and Contact Links: drum.io/privycast
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To a Freer World and Cleaner Water:
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Music:
Intro and Outro: Music Derived from "Barroom Ballet" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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Transition Music: Big Blue by Podington Bear. www.podingtonbear.com Artist: Podington Bear
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Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Elvis_Sloan
https://www.sloan.com/company/about-us/history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Chicago
http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/300020.html
https://www.sloan.com/resources/education/infographics/over-110-years-sustainability
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
You want to know what else the building didn't have?
Elevators.
Freaking elevators.
It's stairs all the way up.
10 floors of stairs.
Not sure.
You know what?
I'm not sure I need to go more than four stories high at that point anyway.
(00:21):
Welcome back to privy privy is a podcast about bathrooms recorded from my home bathroomI'm your host hunter Hoover.
I love bathrooms Welcome back everyone.
Thank you again for being here and joining me in my home bathroom Couple of confessions atthe start of the episode.
(00:42):
want I want to get this out.
I want to air some laundry speaking of laundry.
I Recently was showing the show to a colleague
at the high school.
One of which, by the way, nothing breaks the ice like, yeah, I've got a podcast.
Do you mean the one about the Bible or the one about the bathroom?
(01:05):
Cause those both exist.
And they always for some reason mean the bathroom.
I don't know.
Here we are.
I showed him the YouTube and one of the things he noticed is like, you're always wearingthe same shirt.
You're always wearing a red shirt.
And I was like, I mean, no, I'm not.
And I proved him wrong, but like I was wearing a red shirt quite frequently.
(01:27):
So I've made a new endeavor.
This episode is being recorded, a mere minute after the last episode, but I did change myshirt to give.
And now that I've said it, the whole shtick is shot.
But like it's to give some semblance that I'm not some weird
(01:47):
same shirt wearing Street Urchin.
I'm not, I promise.
But, so that's confession number one.
I changed my shirt.
If anything to make you think that it's been longer in time, that I had a different, Idid, I changed my shirt for you.
But the second confession I have is this episode has been written for some time and it'sactually been written for well over a month.
(02:16):
This episode, and I tagged it in here, was written on August 4th.
Now you might look at that and you might be like, well, shoot, what's this dude recyclingstuff for?
But as of August 4th, the Cintas Corporation had yet to release the finalists forAmerica's Best Restroom.
This is back when I'm still living super triggered in the world where the CintasCorporation hasn't told me who the finalists for America's Best Restroom was.
(02:46):
And as such, slated this episode, this episode was slated to release on August 25th.
Now, I noted in my notes that this episode will only come out in September if Cintus getstheir act together between now and then and allows us to do full coverage of America's
(03:08):
Best Restroom.
Now, as we saw, they did sort of.
They released the finalists over a week into the month of August, even though they saidthey would be out by the end of July.
And so we bumped our coverage of America's Best Restroom up, even up past its normalrelease window, so as to tell y'all so you could be informed voters on the America's Best
(03:35):
Restroom.
Now, as of right now, voting is closed.
And as of the release of, or the recording of this episode, yes.
As of the recording of this episode, America's Best Restroom has not been announced.
They've got their nine finalists listed, but they have not announced the winner.
(03:56):
And so this episode got pushed down in the hopper and I wanted Byron's episode and hisvery many good bathrooms from his trip to Uganda.
Go check out Byron's episode.
It was a treasure and exploration of bathroom.
Yeah.
oh
enjoyment.
It's little things that we track here on privy.
(04:17):
And so, but back in August 4th, when I was very annoyed with the Cintus Corporation, Idecided, you know what?
Cintus isn't the only name out there that's dealing in and selling bathroom wares andservices.
And so I figured, hey, Cintus, you've made me mad every year for the last handful ofyears.
(04:43):
every time during the America's Best Restroom Competition and your release window for thefinalists.
And so.
I decided to cover another prominent bathroom company, one which has sat in my notes appfor some time and which may prove to be even more influential than selecting a best
(05:05):
restroom here in America every year.
In the 1860s and in the years after the Civil War, the United States underwent a hugecultural and social change.
One of these was the relocation of many peoples.
(05:30):
This led many areas to undergo rapid growth and the need for further industrializedexpansion in these areas.
Illinois.
A large supporter and player in the Union side of the war underwent a huge economic andindustrial boom in the years after the war.
(05:56):
In Chicago, what was once a small town started the process of growing into a large urbancenter and in time, metropolitan city it is today.
Living in Chicago, just shortly after the Civil War era, was a different world.
(06:20):
There at the time was a man named James Elvis Sloan and his young wife Rosalie Armstrong.
In the years after the Civil War, these two had their son, William Elvis Sloan.
William or Little Billy, if you will, which I do.
(06:43):
His name wasn't Little Billy.
That's a me thing.
That's a hunter joke.
Very funny.
know.
But Little Billy grew up in the expanding and growing city of Chicago approaching the endof the 1800s.
It would have been a different place to grow up.
The city was growing in many ways.
(07:07):
One of the changes which occurred before little Billy's birth was the raising of Chicago,which we talked a bit about that back when we talked about Chicago sewers, but they raised
physically lifted the city of Chicago up so as to further improve the plumbing of the cityas it was built down.
(07:29):
into the swamp of the water plane of Lake Michigan.
William and his family would have been in the city during the Great Chicago Fire of the1870s and the further water development that ensued after the fire and the destruction
which laid in its wake.
(07:50):
The landscape or biome for all the Minecraft kids out there
This is a little public service announcement for Minecraft kids.
First of all, if you're listening to this while you are watching Minecraft, welcome.
Second, go touch grass, not square grass in your Minecraft world.
(08:11):
Go touch real God-given grass, like cow grass.
Go put foot hoof to grass, like now.
Leave it in your ear.
Take your pear pod with you and just go touch some grass right now, you iPad kid.
But the landscape for Chicago was described as kind of like a prairie bog.
(08:40):
Now this prairie bog, as people began to move into the city,
began to resemble more of a bog and less of a prairie.
There's something about adding water usage and waste from hundreds to thousands of morepeople that are really bog up your works.
(09:04):
But this also meant that it was a tough spot because there was widespread communicabledisease, both from insects who carried disease breeding in the bogs
as well as the plumbing and infrastructure trouble leading to cholera and other problems.
(09:28):
In the 30 years that would have been William Sloan's childhood, teenage years, and youngadulthood, Chicago, his hometown, would have grown from about 240,000 people, which is a
lot, by the way, to over 1.2 million.
(09:48):
That's like a 500 % increase in 30 years.
This is rapid growth.
And with this growth, there was a number of industries that popped up at the turn of thecentury, both to make life more livable and to improve social life in the city.
(10:12):
A development in the city, which played multiple roles, were the updates to water, sewer,and other infrastructures there.
It's a good update.
It's a good, great update.
If you like to poo in a toilet and flush it and it goes goodbye, you like those updates.
There was a big push, get it, cause of turds, you push them out.
(10:37):
There was a big push for there to be water directly piped into people's homes and livingspaces throughout many people's homes in the U S throughout, during this time.
Now, this doesn't have a direct connection to the Chicago fires as fires would break outin major cities.
(10:58):
And they realized that.
If we have the water connected directly to where people live, it might be easier to likenot have and put out these fires.
We got to get water to them for use quicker.
It's a problem for sure.
And one that we don't really think about today.
(11:20):
Like from where I'm sitting, there's one, two, three, technically four places where with aflip of a switch, I can make water come out of a vessel.
Very good.
It's very cool.
But back then, that was not the case.
Running water was for the elite and the very upper class.
(11:41):
And as growing population centers increased, they began to tackle the question, how do weproduce and get this water for a wider selection of people more readily?
In short, they wanted to increase access to clean water in these
(12:02):
early American cities.
With all the people often living very close together, it's not as practical to haul waterin the way that they once did.
Having communal and standing water sources or water sources too close to an ever-growingcity isn't sanitary.
And the infrastructure for this running water was also becoming a growing necessity.
(12:26):
You can't just wake up, snap your fingers and have running water.
You got to lay pipe.
You gotta lay all sorts of infrastructure to make it a reality.
I want a note here.
As a person who, when I want to do one of the many things that I do with water, I justturn on a knob and there's fresh, clean water.
(12:48):
So you had another reminder of all I have to be thankful for specifically related to thebathroom.
Just today, I was in a friend's house and he was not in the house.
He was in their next door neighbor's house and I was there and I needed a drink of water.
And I found a cup in his cupboard and I just turned on the
sink faucet and got some water.
(13:14):
It's a very good thing.
I wasn't at all worried about whether the water was safe to drink.
I assumed it was.
There's parts of our world that aren't so lucky.
And at one point in our history, we were not so lucky.
It's a reminder that we have much to be thankful for.
(13:37):
During the Civil War, only the wealthiest could afford and have indoor plumbing.
But by 1885, Chicago residents had spent over $2.5 million on water and hooking water,running water, to their homes.
(13:58):
In a half century, by 1930, the Chicago housing standards that a home without runningwater was substandard and less finished.
It was so widely accepted by the 1930s that if you didn't have running water, your housewas considered not a house yet.
(14:21):
Another increasing trouble for a growing city like Chicago and getting running water toeveryone was water pressure.
Getting enough to flush and wash, especially in more populated and public areas wasdifficult.
This was exacerbated by another architectural development that raised the bar for theseinfrastructure challenges and pushed the need for further renovation and revolutionizing.
(14:50):
Skyscraper.
Chicago not only got its first skyscraper, it had the world's first skyscraper.
The home insurance building was designed after the Chicago fire of 1871 in a response tothe need for new urban planning.
(15:19):
Why build out when you can build up?
This skyscraper
was a 10-story building with a steel frame.
It's noted that the water technology at the time only let water reach the bottom fourfloors, while there was some updates which sought to collect water on the roof for use
(15:40):
below.
You want to know what else the building didn't have?
Elevators, freaking elevators.
It's stairs all the way up, 10 floors of stairs.
Not sure.
You know what?
I'm not sure I need to go more than four stories high at that point anyway.
You know, if there's not an elevator to haul my death up, I don't really know if I need togo more than four stories high.
(16:06):
Cause if you go four stories up, you gotta go four stories down.
And God forbid you live or work on the 10th story.
Like you're doing 20 stories of stairs every time you come and go from your house.
It's absurd.
But this skyscraper, which in many ways was the first of what is going to be many like it,paved the way.
(16:29):
And as you can tell with the developing city, the influx of people, the clusteringpopulations, a higher demand on water, these led to a number of modern advancements coming
out of the city during this period.
some of them which would be recognized today.
was an invention by the now in his thirties William Elvis Sloan.
(16:54):
He developed a device that he called the flushometer, which would coincidentally be thefounding device and the flagship piece of hardware for the Sloan Valve Company.
William Sloan invented the flushometer in 1906.
(17:17):
If you hear that name and you think, that sounds interesting.
You have definitely seen one as they're often still employed in many, if not mostcommercial and public bathroom settings today.
The next time you go to spray brown or let Willy fly in a public bathroom, if you see thatit is a Sloan
(17:41):
branded operating device or fixture, you have William Elvis Sloan to thank for.
We need to take a brief note to figure out like what the heck even was this flushometer?
While most toilets flush via gravity when water is released, thus the flush is triggeredby the water coming down, a flushometer differs as it doesn't necessarily store water in a
(18:14):
tank, but uses the building water pressure to push and flush the toilet.
From the main water supply, a narrow tube leads to the pressure chamber of theflushometer.
And because the passage narrows so much as it gets to the flushometer fixture, itincreases the pressure of the water as it does so.
(18:40):
And so when you flush, that increased pressure forces the water out and then flushes
And then as it stops, it is allowed to build up again for when the next flush is needed.
It's really pretty simple and straightforward.
It'll also help control the amount of water that is used, pretty much allowing it todispense the amount of built up water that is there and no more before pressurizing again.
(19:08):
With all the new toilets and plumbing and infrastructure that is popping up in Chicago atthis time.
You'd think the flushometer would be a hit.
Like everybody would be falling over themselves to get a hold of one of these new piecesof tech.
But in the year of his invention, William Elvis Sloan only sold one flushometer.
(19:34):
Like your mom's always going to buy one.
So, I mean, technically I think he sold none.
Like here's what I know, here's what I know.
You sell something, your mom's gonna buy one.
That's facts.
And thank God for good moms that do.
(19:54):
Your mom is always going to buy one.
Thanks, moms.
You're real ones out there.
I remember this one time.
I remember this one time we had to like sell so many like jumpy things, jumpy rope things.
like, you know, sales were, sales were tough for me.
And my mom was like, here's what we're going to do.
(20:15):
We're going to give a little boost.
And she was like, you know, here's, here's enough to get you up to this next level of,it's like, that's what mom's, that's what moms do.
My son and my daughter had a
had a lemonade stand and, you know, my wife paid like 10 bucks for some glasses oflemonade.
It's just moms.
(20:36):
So mom's got going on.
Your mom's always gonna buy one.
In his second year, William Elvis Sloan sold two.
Flush on.
Not the booming business I'm sure he wanted, but it seems word began to spread because twoyears later he sold over 150 flushometers.
(21:03):
There was concern, however.
Because of the changes the flushometer device introduced to plumbing fixtures, there wassome apprehension about buying and adopting these flushometers
to common use.
Some plumbers, looking at you Mario, you know Mario, likes a really big, really wide,really fat pipe.
(21:31):
He doesn't like flushometers narrow pipes.
He likes those thick, girthsome pipes.
But some plumbing fixture manufacturers actually boycotted Sloan's flushometer.
They would not allow his design to be used with their manufacturing products and designedtheir products to be incompatible with Sloan's flushometer or refused to sell at locations
(22:03):
that intended to sell and or use Sloan's new device.
It sucks.
It's a bummer for William Elvis Sloan.
But it turns out the joke's on them.
As of 2012, there are still parts being manufactured and sold to repair original 1906Sloan flushometers.
(22:35):
They're over 100 years old.
and there's still manufacturing parts to repair them.
It's a design that has stood the test of time.
It's amazing.
And as Chicago and other cities began having greater reserves of water for larger andever-growing buildings, as the infrastructure got better, as the pressure needed for
(23:00):
Sloan's flushometer was getting better and better, he was in many ways
at the threshold of the modern plumbing era.
He changed the game for commercial plumbing.
No needed storage tank for the water.
The water is merely the building's water that uses its own pressure, manipulated by theSloan's flushometer to give a powered flush.
(23:34):
If you ever use a bathroom at a school or a community place or a public location, I'mconfident you've seen a Sloan picture.
Since the creation of the flushometer and the founding of the company, Sloan has developeda piston-type flushometer, which includes the crown and gem, too, those are the names.
(24:04):
A special version was made for ships and other naval vessels called the naval flushometer.
In the 1970s, a sensor-operated Sloan flushometer, which triggers when you break the laserconnection,
were made and first installed right at home in Chicago's O'Hare International Airport.
(24:29):
They are truly a Chicago company.
And when William Elvis Sloan passed in 1960s, his grandson took over the company andserved as CEO for 20 years.
Now, the Sloan Valve Company is run by a fourth generation of great grandkids.
(24:54):
Graham, Jim, and Kirk Allen co-run the company.
They have taken much care and effort to keep the company a family company while expandingit and being at the front runners of their field, the Sloan Valve Company.
(25:14):
Notably, they even began creating more commercial fixtures in 2008 and have moved intomore water conserving practices and strategies in recent years.
In 2015, the Sloan Valve Company
became the sponsor partners of the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field.
Back home in Chicago again, their training facility in Mesa, Arizona is called Sloan Park.
(25:42):
Personally, I feel like Sloan is everywhere.
It's an American company, family owned, and it's long overdue.
covered it.
I hope that in doing so Sloan, if you're hearing this, you know, our allegiances are notwith the Centus Corp.
(26:03):
I don't even think you guys are competitors, but Centus has really made me mad.
And I think you're a cool company Sloan.
Keep doing what you do.
keep making good quality bathroom fixtures and improving bathroom technology that many, ifnot all of us have benefited from in some way or another.
Thank you so much for joining me for another episode of privy.
(26:25):
As always, share the show with a friend.
Word of mouth is very important.
Social media helps, but one of the biggest ways that you can help us, September's likenational podcasting something, I don't know.
But you leave us a rating or review.
The five star options are preferred and you can leave those reviews on Apple podcasts andSpotify podcasts.
And for every rating and review you leave, we will donate at least a dollar, if not morefor written reviews to the Wounded Warriors International and Living Water.
(26:54):
As a reminder to keep pooping in the free world, that free world was not always free andto pursue cleaner water for all because not everybody has it.
Some people are still living in the bog that Chicago once was.
It's no good.
You can check out the show, follow us at privycast on all your social media, send us anemail, questions, comments, concerns, feedback, stories, what have you, privycast at
(27:17):
gmail.com.
Visit our website privy-cast.com.
We've got some articles and some also, we're always trying to put some new stuff on there.
Go check those things out.
We wanna thank Kevin and Pottington for the use of their music.
You can check out the links to their music in the ding dong down below.
This brings us to the end of another episode of Privy.
(27:39):
Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you for joining us.
Keep pooping in the free world.
Own your stank.
And now, as always, don't forget to flush.
You want to know what else the building didn't have?
Elevators.
Freaking elevators.
It's stairs all the way up.
10 floors of stairs.
Not sure.
You know what?
I'm not sure I need to go more than four stories high at that point anyway.
(00:21):
Welcome back to privy privy is a podcast about bathrooms recorded from my home bathroomI'm your host hunter Hoover.
I love bathrooms Welcome back everyone.
Thank you again for being here and joining me in my home bathroom Couple of confessions atthe start of the episode.
(00:42):
want I want to get this out.
I want to air some laundry speaking of laundry.
I Recently was showing the show to a colleague
at the high school.
One of which, by the way, nothing breaks the ice like, yeah, I've got a podcast.
Do you mean the one about the Bible or the one about the bathroom?
(01:05):
Cause those both exist.
And they always for some reason mean the bathroom.
I don't know.
Here we are.
I showed him the YouTube and one of the things he noticed is like, you're always wearingthe same shirt.
You're always wearing a red shirt.
And I was like, I mean, no, I'm not.
And I proved him wrong, but like I was wearing a red shirt quite frequently.
(01:27):
So I've made a new endeavor.
This episode is being recorded, a mere minute after the last episode, but I did change myshirt to give.
And now that I've said it, the whole shtick is shot.
But like it's to give some semblance that I'm not some weird
(01:47):
same shirt wearing Street Urchin.
I'm not, I promise.
But, so that's confession number one.
I changed my shirt.
If anything to make you think that it's been longer in time, that I had a different, Idid, I changed my shirt for you.
But the second confession I have is this episode has been written for some time and it'sactually been written for well over a month.
(02:16):
This episode, and I tagged it in here, was written on August 4th.
Now you might look at that and you might be like, well, shoot, what's this dude recyclingstuff for?
But as of August 4th, the Cintas Corporation had yet to release the finalists forAmerica's Best Restroom.
This is back when I'm still living super triggered in the world where the CintasCorporation hasn't told me who the finalists for America's Best Restroom was.
(02:46):
And as such, slated this episode, this episode was slated to release on August 25th.
Now, I noted in my notes that this episode will only come out in September if Cintus getstheir act together between now and then and allows us to do full coverage of America's
(03:08):
Best Restroom.
Now, as we saw, they did sort of.
They released the finalists over a week into the month of August, even though they saidthey would be out by the end of July.
And so we bumped our coverage of America's Best Restroom up, even up past its normalrelease window, so as to tell y'all so you could be informed voters on the America's Best
(03:35):
Restroom.
Now, as of right now, voting is closed.
And as of the release of, or the recording of this episode, yes.
As of the recording of this episode, America's Best Restroom has not been announced.
They've got their nine finalists listed, but they have not announced the winner.
(03:56):
And so this episode got pushed down in the hopper and I wanted Byron's episode and hisvery many good bathrooms from his trip to Uganda.
Go check out Byron's episode.
It was a treasure and exploration of bathroom.
Yeah.
oh
enjoyment.
It's little things that we track here on privy.
(04:17):
And so, but back in August 4th, when I was very annoyed with the Cintus Corporation, Idecided, you know what?
Cintus isn't the only name out there that's dealing in and selling bathroom wares andservices.
And so I figured, hey, Cintus, you've made me mad every year for the last handful ofyears.
(04:43):
every time during the America's Best Restroom Competition and your release window for thefinalists.
And so.
I decided to cover another prominent bathroom company, one which has sat in my notes appfor some time and which may prove to be even more influential than selecting a best
(05:05):
restroom here in America every year.
In the 1860s and in the years after the Civil War, the United States underwent a hugecultural and social change.
One of these was the relocation of many peoples.
(05:30):
This led many areas to undergo rapid growth and the need for further industrializedexpansion in these areas.
Illinois.
A large supporter and player in the Union side of the war underwent a huge economic andindustrial boom in the years after the war.
(05:56):
In Chicago, what was once a small town started the process of growing into a large urbancenter and in time, metropolitan city it is today.
Living in Chicago, just shortly after the Civil War era, was a different world.
(06:20):
There at the time was a man named James Elvis Sloan and his young wife Rosalie Armstrong.
In the years after the Civil War, these two had their son, William Elvis Sloan.
William or Little Billy, if you will, which I do.
(06:43):
His name wasn't Little Billy.
That's a me thing.
That's a hunter joke.
Very funny.
know.
But Little Billy grew up in the expanding and growing city of Chicago approaching the endof the 1800s.
It would have been a different place to grow up.
The city was growing in many ways.
(07:07):
One of the changes which occurred before little Billy's birth was the raising of Chicago,which we talked a bit about that back when we talked about Chicago sewers, but they raised
physically lifted the city of Chicago up so as to further improve the plumbing of the cityas it was built down.
(07:29):
into the swamp of the water plane of Lake Michigan.
William and his family would have been in the city during the Great Chicago Fire of the1870s and the further water development that ensued after the fire and the destruction
which laid in its wake.
(07:50):
The landscape or biome for all the Minecraft kids out there
This is a little public service announcement for Minecraft kids.
First of all, if you're listening to this while you are watching Minecraft, welcome.
Second, go touch grass, not square grass in your Minecraft world.
(08:11):
Go touch real God-given grass, like cow grass.
Go put foot hoof to grass, like now.
Leave it in your ear.
Take your pear pod with you and just go touch some grass right now, you iPad kid.
But the landscape for Chicago was described as kind of like a prairie bog.
(08:40):
Now this prairie bog, as people began to move into the city,
began to resemble more of a bog and less of a prairie.
There's something about adding water usage and waste from hundreds to thousands of morepeople that are really bog up your works.
(09:04):
But this also meant that it was a tough spot because there was widespread communicabledisease, both from insects who carried disease breeding in the bogs
as well as the plumbing and infrastructure trouble leading to cholera and other problems.
(09:28):
In the 30 years that would have been William Sloan's childhood, teenage years, and youngadulthood, Chicago, his hometown, would have grown from about 240,000 people, which is a
lot, by the way, to over 1.2 million.
(09:48):
That's like a 500 % increase in 30 years.
This is rapid growth.
And with this growth, there was a number of industries that popped up at the turn of thecentury, both to make life more livable and to improve social life in the city.
(10:12):
A development in the city, which played multiple roles, were the updates to water, sewer,and other infrastructures there.
It's a good update.
It's a good, great update.
If you like to poo in a toilet and flush it and it goes goodbye, you like those updates.
There was a big push, get it, cause of turds, you push them out.
(10:37):
There was a big push for there to be water directly piped into people's homes and livingspaces throughout many people's homes in the U S throughout, during this time.
Now, this doesn't have a direct connection to the Chicago fires as fires would break outin major cities.
(10:58):
And they realized that.
If we have the water connected directly to where people live, it might be easier to likenot have and put out these fires.
We got to get water to them for use quicker.
It's a problem for sure.
And one that we don't really think about today.
(11:20):
Like from where I'm sitting, there's one, two, three, technically four places where with aflip of a switch, I can make water come out of a vessel.
Very good.
It's very cool.
But back then, that was not the case.
Running water was for the elite and the very upper class.
(11:41):
And as growing population centers increased, they began to tackle the question, how do weproduce and get this water for a wider selection of people more readily?
In short, they wanted to increase access to clean water in these
(12:02):
early American cities.
With all the people often living very close together, it's not as practical to haul waterin the way that they once did.
Having communal and standing water sources or water sources too close to an ever-growingcity isn't sanitary.
And the infrastructure for this running water was also becoming a growing necessity.
(12:26):
You can't just wake up, snap your fingers and have running water.
You got to lay pipe.
You gotta lay all sorts of infrastructure to make it a reality.
I want a note here.
As a person who, when I want to do one of the many things that I do with water, I justturn on a knob and there's fresh, clean water.
(12:48):
So you had another reminder of all I have to be thankful for specifically related to thebathroom.
Just today, I was in a friend's house and he was not in the house.
He was in their next door neighbor's house and I was there and I needed a drink of water.
And I found a cup in his cupboard and I just turned on the
sink faucet and got some water.
(13:14):
It's a very good thing.
I wasn't at all worried about whether the water was safe to drink.
I assumed it was.
There's parts of our world that aren't so lucky.
And at one point in our history, we were not so lucky.
It's a reminder that we have much to be thankful for.
(13:37):
During the Civil War, only the wealthiest could afford and have indoor plumbing.
But by 1885, Chicago residents had spent over $2.5 million on water and hooking water,running water, to their homes.
(13:58):
In a half century, by 1930, the Chicago housing standards that a home without runningwater was substandard and less finished.
It was so widely accepted by the 1930s that if you didn't have running water, your housewas considered not a house yet.
(14:21):
Another increasing trouble for a growing city like Chicago and getting running water toeveryone was water pressure.
Getting enough to flush and wash, especially in more populated and public areas wasdifficult.
This was exacerbated by another architectural development that raised the bar for theseinfrastructure challenges and pushed the need for further renovation and revolutionizing.
(14:50):
Skyscraper.
Chicago not only got its first skyscraper, it had the world's first skyscraper.
The home insurance building was designed after the Chicago fire of 1871 in a response tothe need for new urban planning.
(15:19):
Why build out when you can build up?
This skyscraper
was a 10-story building with a steel frame.
It's noted that the water technology at the time only let water reach the bottom fourfloors, while there was some updates which sought to collect water on the roof for use
(15:40):
below.
You want to know what else the building didn't have?
Elevators, freaking elevators.
It's stairs all the way up, 10 floors of stairs.
Not sure.
You know what?
I'm not sure I need to go more than four stories high at that point anyway.
You know, if there's not an elevator to haul my death up, I don't really know if I need togo more than four stories high.
(16:06):
Cause if you go four stories up, you gotta go four stories down.
And God forbid you live or work on the 10th story.
Like you're doing 20 stories of stairs every time you come and go from your house.
It's absurd.
But this skyscraper, which in many ways was the first of what is going to be many like it,paved the way.
(16:29):
And as you can tell with the developing city, the influx of people, the clusteringpopulations, a higher demand on water, these led to a number of modern advancements coming
out of the city during this period.
some of them which would be recognized today.
was an invention by the now in his thirties William Elvis Sloan.
(16:54):
He developed a device that he called the flushometer, which would coincidentally be thefounding device and the flagship piece of hardware for the Sloan Valve Company.
William Sloan invented the flushometer in 1906.
(17:17):
If you hear that name and you think, that sounds interesting.
You have definitely seen one as they're often still employed in many, if not mostcommercial and public bathroom settings today.
The next time you go to spray brown or let Willy fly in a public bathroom, if you see thatit is a Sloan
(17:41):
branded operating device or fixture, you have William Elvis Sloan to thank for.
We need to take a brief note to figure out like what the heck even was this flushometer?
While most toilets flush via gravity when water is released, thus the flush is triggeredby the water coming down, a flushometer differs as it doesn't necessarily store water in a
(18:14):
tank, but uses the building water pressure to push and flush the toilet.
From the main water supply, a narrow tube leads to the pressure chamber of theflushometer.
And because the passage narrows so much as it gets to the flushometer fixture, itincreases the pressure of the water as it does so.
(18:40):
And so when you flush, that increased pressure forces the water out and then flushes
And then as it stops, it is allowed to build up again for when the next flush is needed.
It's really pretty simple and straightforward.
It'll also help control the amount of water that is used, pretty much allowing it todispense the amount of built up water that is there and no more before pressurizing again.
(19:08):
With all the new toilets and plumbing and infrastructure that is popping up in Chicago atthis time.
You'd think the flushometer would be a hit.
Like everybody would be falling over themselves to get a hold of one of these new piecesof tech.
But in the year of his invention, William Elvis Sloan only sold one flushometer.
(19:34):
Like your mom's always going to buy one.
So, I mean, technically I think he sold none.
Like here's what I know, here's what I know.
You sell something, your mom's gonna buy one.
That's facts.
And thank God for good moms that do.
(19:54):
Your mom is always going to buy one.
Thanks, moms.
You're real ones out there.
I remember this one time.
I remember this one time we had to like sell so many like jumpy things, jumpy rope things.
like, you know, sales were, sales were tough for me.
And my mom was like, here's what we're going to do.
(20:15):
We're going to give a little boost.
And she was like, you know, here's, here's enough to get you up to this next level of,it's like, that's what mom's, that's what moms do.
My son and my daughter had a
had a lemonade stand and, you know, my wife paid like 10 bucks for some glasses oflemonade.
It's just moms.
(20:36):
So mom's got going on.
Your mom's always gonna buy one.
In his second year, William Elvis Sloan sold two.
Flush on.
Not the booming business I'm sure he wanted, but it seems word began to spread because twoyears later he sold over 150 flushometers.
(21:03):
There was concern, however.
Because of the changes the flushometer device introduced to plumbing fixtures, there wassome apprehension about buying and adopting these flushometers
to common use.
Some plumbers, looking at you Mario, you know Mario, likes a really big, really wide,really fat pipe.
(21:31):
He doesn't like flushometers narrow pipes.
He likes those thick, girthsome pipes.
But some plumbing fixture manufacturers actually boycotted Sloan's flushometer.
They would not allow his design to be used with their manufacturing products and designedtheir products to be incompatible with Sloan's flushometer or refused to sell at locations
(22:03):
that intended to sell and or use Sloan's new device.
It sucks.
It's a bummer for William Elvis Sloan.
But it turns out the joke's on them.
As of 2012, there are still parts being manufactured and sold to repair original 1906Sloan flushometers.
(22:35):
They're over 100 years old.
and there's still manufacturing parts to repair them.
It's a design that has stood the test of time.
It's amazing.
And as Chicago and other cities began having greater reserves of water for larger andever-growing buildings, as the infrastructure got better, as the pressure needed for
(23:00):
Sloan's flushometer was getting better and better, he was in many ways
at the threshold of the modern plumbing era.
He changed the game for commercial plumbing.
No needed storage tank for the water.
The water is merely the building's water that uses its own pressure, manipulated by theSloan's flushometer to give a powered flush.
(23:34):
If you ever use a bathroom at a school or a community place or a public location, I'mconfident you've seen a Sloan picture.
Since the creation of the flushometer and the founding of the company, Sloan has developeda piston-type flushometer, which includes the crown and gem, too, those are the names.
(24:04):
A special version was made for ships and other naval vessels called the naval flushometer.
In the 1970s, a sensor-operated Sloan flushometer, which triggers when you break the laserconnection,
were made and first installed right at home in Chicago's O'Hare International Airport.
(24:29):
They are truly a Chicago company.
And when William Elvis Sloan passed in 1960s, his grandson took over the company andserved as CEO for 20 years.
Now, the Sloan Valve Company is run by a fourth generation of great grandkids.
(24:54):
Graham, Jim, and Kirk Allen co-run the company.
They have taken much care and effort to keep the company a family company while expandingit and being at the front runners of their field, the Sloan Valve Company.
(25:14):
Notably, they even began creating more commercial fixtures in 2008 and have moved intomore water conserving practices and strategies in recent years.
In 2015, the Sloan Valve Company
became the sponsor partners of the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field.
Back home in Chicago again, their training facility in Mesa, Arizona is called Sloan Park.
(25:42):
Personally, I feel like Sloan is everywhere.
It's an American company, family owned, and it's long overdue.
covered it.
I hope that in doing so Sloan, if you're hearing this, you know, our allegiances are notwith the Centus Corp.
(26:03):
I don't even think you guys are competitors, but Centus has really made me mad.
And I think you're a cool company Sloan.
Keep doing what you do.
keep making good quality bathroom fixtures and improving bathroom technology that many, ifnot all of us have benefited from in some way or another.
Thank you so much for joining me for another episode of privy.
(26:25):
As always, share the show with a friend.
Word of mouth is very important.
Social media helps, but one of the biggest ways that you can help us, September's likenational podcasting something, I don't know.
But you leave us a rating or review.
The five star options are preferred and you can leave those reviews on Apple podcasts andSpotify podcasts.
And for every rating and review you leave, we will donate at least a dollar, if not morefor written reviews to the Wounded Warriors International and Living Water.
(26:54):
As a reminder to keep pooping in the free world, that free world was not always free andto pursue cleaner water for all because not everybody has it.
Some people are still living in the bog that Chicago once was.
It's no good.
You can check out the show, follow us at privycast on all your social media, send us anemail, questions, comments, concerns, feedback, stories, what have you, privycast at
(27:17):
gmail.com.
Visit our website privy-cast.com.
We've got some articles and some also, we're always trying to put some new stuff on there.
Go check those things out.
We wanna thank Kevin and Pottington for the use of their music.
You can check out the links to their music in the ding dong down below.
This brings us to the end of another episode of Privy.
(27:39):
Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you for joining us.
Keep pooping in the free world.
Own your stank.
And now, as always, don't forget to flush.
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