April 27, 2019 • 50 mins
Have you subscribed to Robert and Joe's other podcast INVENTION yet? If not, here's a taste of what they're up to in part 1 of their look at toilet technology, from the oldest latrine pit to the modern flushing commode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday
time for a bonus episode. Normally on Saturday, you know
what you'd be getting as a rerun a classic episode
of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. But that's not what
you're getting today. Today you're getting an episode of our
other podcast, Invention. Because some of you are not subscribed
(00:25):
to Invention yet, what's going on? Well, true, So this
this is an episode of Invention, the first of two
that we did on toilets. We figured this is something
everybody can relate to. All of you use toilets of
some form or another. Even if you just go out
into a field and dig a hole, well, you are
creating a toilet. You're creating a little latrine pit. And
(00:47):
in this episode we get into the history of that.
Where did it come from? What were some of the
earliest advanced systems of using a toilet? Like when when
was the first time someone was was actively pooping into
running water? That's sort of thing now, So this is
gonna be, as we're saying, part one of our two
parter on toilets over on Invention. So if you listen
(01:09):
to this episode and you'll like it and you want
to learn more, You're you're hanging on the edge of
a cliff. You want to know where toilets go after
we leave off, you'll have to go over to the
Invention feed, check out part two there and subscribe. Yeah,
so the best way to do it you can go
to invention pod dot com. That's the website for our show.
But also you can just look for Invention on any
(01:32):
service that you happen to use to get your podcasts.
Be at say Apple podcast sort of the I Heart
radio app. Uh. Look for the kind of labyrinth like
sun uh emblem that we've created to go along with
our title. That's right, gorge onto Dailian imagery. Uh, learn
about toilet's, think about pooping, think about pooping way too much,
(01:53):
and have a wonderful weekend. Hey, welcome to Invention. My
name is Robert lamp and I'm Joe McCormick. And Robert
I got a question for you. Have you ever been
to like a festival or big public event where the
(02:14):
organizers did not get enough porta potties? Probably so probably so. Um,
it's I mean, it's it's a weird. It's a weird
equation you have to work out right because you need
to have the approximate number of porta potties for a
given event. And at the same time, like I've definitely
I've been to events where people care more for the
(02:35):
porta potties, like there's more of a communal effort to like,
let's let's look after these porta potties. Let's even go
in there and clean the porta potties right to ensure
that things don't get too vile too fast. Like if
there's if it's a multi day event, people might be
more respectful of the fact that people will need to
continue to use these over a period of time. Then
if it's just like a it's you know, this is
(02:56):
going on for a few hours, let's just go total
war on these facility teas I've been to a one
time went to a beer tasting festival in North Carolina
where they did not get nearly enough porta potties, and
I remember feeling like this is the closest thing I've
ever felt to like a Mad Max type scenario in
real life. People were losing their minds, Like when when
(03:19):
you don't have a place you've been drinking beer, and
then you don't have a place where you can legally
and uh in, uh in, in a polite way, go
to the bathroom. Things start to get dire really fast. Yeah,
and I'm guessing there's probably a lot of indiscriminate aiming
from male urinators at this these particular events. Yeah, there
was also a you could tell just like this all
(03:41):
over the place, frantic search like ants foraging about looking
for other places they could go apart from the far
too few porta potties that were swarmed by people waiting.
But you start doing some very odd math if you're
in a situation like that, or even if you're not,
even if it's not that bad, you're just waiting in
line to use a porta potty, it least I find
I do. And one of the questions that I think
(04:02):
you inevitably start pondering is how much exactly do people
poop in a lifetime? Like how much do I poop
in a year? How much do does does my whole
household poop in you know, in twenty years? Yeah, though
these are not necessarily factors that are going to help
you out, for you know, weekend music festival no, no,
(04:23):
But I mean you have to imagine that there's some
kind of rough math along those lines going in. I
guess it's less for the festival. It's probably less thinking
about the total mass of poop and more about, like,
I don't know how many people and how often they'll
need to go, because it's not like the things are
going to be filled up and overflowing, at least hopefully not.
But yeah, that is the thing that you can start
(04:44):
wondering about, and it's a weird question once you actually
get the answer. I found an article that addresses this.
It was a article on Live Science by Mindy Weisberger
addressing exactly this question full on with an interview with
a like health p fessional who had the dirt. So
it's impossible to answer this question exactly how much you
(05:06):
poop in a lifetime, because of course everybody's different, there's
different average fecal mass production, there's different lifespan and all that.
But it's actually fairly easy to get some average figures.
So the article sites Kim Barrett, a professor of medicine
at You See San Diego, and Barrett says, on average,
men and women have roughly one bowel movement per day. Though,
if you have more than that or less than that,
(05:27):
don't panic. There's a normal range that's more and less.
It's okay. But the daily average amount of feces produced
by mass by a person an adult is usually about
fourteen to seventeen ounces or about four hundred to five
hundred grams, And from their Weisberger does some simple math
quote starting with an average daily amount of about fourteen
(05:48):
ounces or four hundred grams, the total poop production in
a week's time would be about six pounds or two
point eight ms. In a year, a single person would
yield about three hundred and twenty pounds or a hundred
and forty i've kilograms of poop, just a little more
than an adult panda. Ways. Al Right, So when when
one here's the sort of drill sergeant cliche of like
I've I've craped bigger than you, that's probably true. If
(06:11):
you're looking at a like a year's worth of defecation,
well that starts to call to mind this thing that
It got me thinking about it. It got me thinking
about how as people get older, often their bodies shrink. Right,
you know, after adulthood, your body can actually physically shrink.
You don't continue getting bigger and bigger as life goes on.
And yet there's this invisible phantom of biomass following every
(06:35):
person around throughout the years, and no matter what, it's
always getting larger and larger the older you get. It
is the phantom mountain of combined mass of all the
feces you've ever produced. Like like a big poop golem
following you around, you have an invisible phantom poop golem
that follows you everywhere and only gets bigger with age.
(06:56):
So so this means that like if you live to
the age of seventy six, Weisberger does the math, on average,
you'll produce like twenty four thousand, three hundred and twenty
pounds or eleven thousand and thirty kilograms of poop in
your lifetime. If you live to eighty one, it's more
like it's close to twenty six thousand pounds are close
to twelve thousand kilograms. Quote, So a lifetime of a
(07:18):
woman's poop, because the average female lifespan is about eighty
one years in the United States, UH, the average lifetime
of a woman's poop weighs as much as three adult
male hippos. But if you follow the same averages we've
mentioned a minute ago, think about those people who lived
like a hundred and twenty, you know, the super supercentenarians. Uh.
One of these people who lives to like a hundred
(07:39):
and twenty has created, by the end of their life
a phantom poop mountain, or one of these poop golems
of thirty eight thousand, four hundred pounds or about seventeen thousand,
four hundred and twenty kilograms. I was trying to find
an object to compare this to. It's close to the
weight of a number of lighter combat vehicles like the
M twenty four Chafee light tank, the first used by
(08:00):
the Americans in World War Two. Just imagine this. If
you live to a hundred and twenty, over the course
of your life, you can, on average, poop a tank.
All right, Well, uh, let's think about these poop golems.
Obviously they cannot live with us. They must live elsewhere.
And that's why that's where we get to the subject
(08:21):
today's episode and the episode to follow this, because this
is gonna be a two parter and we think you'll
love this one. But episode number two is going to
be a real doozy. Yes, so, yeah, that's that's the
subject of our episodes. It brings us to the technology
of the toilet and ultimately the concept of the flush toilet. Um. So,
I think in today's episode, we're gonna be focusing primarily
(08:42):
on sort of the history of toilet technology, what we
what we were dealing with, like the problems faced by
disposal of human waste and and toilets before the flush
toilet was invented, And then the next episode we'll meet
the power of the flush. But so, I think one
of the things to think about is that the problem
(09:03):
of what to do with human waste only really becomes
a huge issue once you have sedentary lifestyles and civilization,
like once you get a lot of people living in
roughly the same place and not constantly moving right absolutely, uh,
you know. I was looking back at one of my
favorite books on hygiene clean A History of Personal Hygiene
(09:23):
Impurity by Virginia Smith, and she points out that making
sure that your poop is somewhere other than your immediate
living environment has always been just a universal human behavior.
It's just part of our our species, and certainly you
see this in any number of species as well. Um,
I mean you see, like dogs would rather go poop
somewhere far away from where they live. You know, they
(09:45):
don't want to poop in their den right, and they're
they're even you know, we've talked about coprophagia. There even
like some ideas and science about like when a dog
ends up pooping in its house. This may come from
like an instinct to the fact that sometimes dogs will
then eat it, which seems gross to us, is actually
something to like prevent possible parasite eggs from hatching in it,
(10:06):
because there can be a health risk from poop staying
around in your living areas. Yeah, and if you want
to hear more about this Stufforable in your Mind has
an entire episode about animals eating poop. That's right. We're
not going to be focusing on eating poop today, except
in the sense the toilet eats poop if you will, Yeah,
you can. You can look at it that way for sure.
So but you know, back when we were just nomadic creatures,
(10:28):
we didn't have to worry about this is so much.
You you poop where you had to poop, You did
whatever you needed to do to to hide the feces.
But then you're going to be moving on. You're not
going to stay in that immediate area, and you're probably
there aren't that many of you anyway, like any given
group of human nomads. Uh, it's not going to be
(10:49):
the size of of a of a village or the
stuff certainly the size of a large metropolitan area. Now
that doesn't mean there are no dangerous associated with defecation
at this stage. Even you're not gonna have nearly as
much of a problem with what to do with the excrement.
You are still like when you when you go to
go to the bathroom, you're putting yourself in a vulnerable state. Absolutely.
(11:10):
I mean, poop itself opens up vulnerabilities. You see this
in any number of animals that have various methods for
hiding their own poops. Sometimes it's essentially self hiding, such
as the way a goat's poop will rolled away. Goats
often would favor hilly environment so that the poop rolls
away hides itself. Cats, on the other hand, of course,
(11:33):
or are known for their uh, their their skillet, bearing
their poop and thus hiding it from from larger predators
because that's the fear, right, is that your fecal matter
is h is a signal. Uh, it's an it's a
it's an odor that is letting anyone with a nose
to smell it know where you are and perhaps what
degree of healthier in as well. Yeah, if you are
(11:55):
a prey animal, it shows you where a predator can
come get a meal. If you're a predator, it can
scare off prey animals. Uh. There's a paper that looked
into into some of this. It's a two paper called
the Control of Defecation in Humans and Evolutionary Advantage. The
question mark part of it there by Italian bowel experts G.
Massotti and V. Villainacci, And they did something interesting here.
(12:20):
They ran a human fecal sample. Uh. They were they
use both a modern and an ancient example through complex
gas uh chromatographic mass spectro spectrometric analysis, and they discovered
that quote, human feces are rich in volatile compounds likely
to be identified by potential predators. And so they went
(12:41):
on to argue that the high predation risk for ancient
hominids by large carnivores suggests something rather amazing about our
pooping powers. Quote. We hypothesize that the voluntary control of
defication by our ancestors, together with greater brain volume, the
rex stature, opposable things, and other changes may have contributed
(13:02):
to the successful march of hominids along the road of evolution.
In fact, by deciding when, how and where to defecate
may have several advantages in the complex prey predator relationship
because spores are left in places undetectable by predators, or
there are no fecal tracks who sent maybe easily individualated
by prey. So they propose that choosing carefully where to
(13:25):
poop maybe an important part of what kind of animal
we are exactly so. But but even from an early
point um, as Virginia Smith points out, Neolithic people's they
made use of midden piles. So you would have an
area in which you're living, and if you need to
to poop, you're either pooping beyond the area in which
(13:45):
you're living, or you're taking your poop and dumping it
out there in in the midden pile. And there are
you know, a few different systems that that one can
use here, one of course, is the dry sewer system.
And uh and this is this will remind probably a
lot of people of a hat box because a cat's
litter box is a dry sewer system. Uh that this
(14:05):
would have been an indoor bucket of sand, ash or
dirt that one would defecate into, and then you could
take that dirt, sand or ash outside, take it to
the mid and bile dump it out and you're done.
Or you could do it in the inverse. I mean
this is actually still a common method and dry pit
latrines around the world. Like if you've got an outhouse
and it's just a pit latrine. UM, a common thing
(14:28):
to do to help prevent smells and and help keep
things from getting too nasty is after you do your
business in the pit, you've got a bucket of like
old coal ash or something like that, or lime or
something in the uh in the out house, and you
scatter that on top, and that helps contain smells and
so forth. Now, of course, the wet sewer system, We're
gonna get more into that in a bit, but that,
(14:49):
of course is ultimately what we have today in much
of the world where you certainly a flush toilet is
an example of this, right, and that simply derives from
sort of the the ingenious mechanical action of water flow. Right.
If you have to if you want to say, poop
in a chamber pot or in a bucket or something
like that, you've got to physically remove it yourself from
(15:10):
where you are. If you are to poop into moving water,
then the moving water can remove your waste for you
and you don't have to do that, right Or I
guess one could poop into a container of water that
is not moving and then you would remove that yourself.
That's also a possibility, I guess it is now the
other They are all kinds of things you can poop into,
and I imagine people have tried all of them at
(15:32):
one point or another. Now, beyond this dry wet distinction,
there's another important one that Smith points out, and she
says that toilet culture divides sharply into wiper and washer culture. Yeah,
and this is, of course, is just how one cleans
one's bomb toilet defecation. Yeah, like toilet paper versus like
a b day or wet wipes or something like that. Yeah. Now,
(15:56):
most ancient culture, she points out that they were wipers,
so they would have used certainly paper if it was available.
Of course, for the longest paper was um, it was
a rarity. So you're gonna probably depend on things like grass, leaves, sticks,
corn cobs, mud balls, and of course stones I've commonly
seen sided. I'm trying to imagine this. I just see
it pop up in like articles about ancient toilets, that
(16:19):
people would use bits of broken pottery to clean themselves.
That I see that sited. But I'm just trying to
picture it, and it will not picture it. But you
know it, it seems it seems a little little risky.
Well it it drives down just the ridiculousness I think
of any wiping culture, because I feel like ultimately washing
culture has the stronger argument. Um. And washing culture is,
(16:42):
of course, instead of using even paper, what have you
simply depended more or exclusively on running water or spraying
water or water poured from an apparatus. That the the
sort of lubricant power of water. It's taking the principle
of the flush toilet to your own skin, right. And
you know this is the standard in many parts of
the world, you know, particularly say in Islamic and Hindu cultures. Um.
(17:06):
I mean you'll even find this. Uh, if you've ever
traveled abroad, you may have encountered this. But I have
also I know people who like purchased a house in
the Atlanta area and they're like, I don't know why,
but there's a vegetable sprayer installed next to my toilet. Well,
that is, it's a bi day sprayer. That's that's simply
a means of of washing one's bum after one has defecated,
(17:28):
and it's a rather elegant solution. I would, in my opinion,
hard to argue there. I mean, yeah, water gets things
cleaner than than without water. I mean it's not a
perfect analogy, but imagine if I gave you the option
of would you rather be able to take showers or
just wipe yourself down with some paper towels to clean
your body? Absolutely, I think most of us would probably
(17:48):
choose the running water if it is an an option. Uh.
That being said, for many of these cultures, running water
was not an option. You know that, then that's one
of the main reasons that you're seeing the wiping method
is the primary method in these in among ancient peoples. Now,
for the most part, this this worked right. They were
able to sort of roll with very simple um sewage systems.
(18:13):
Just simply get up and move on. Because you're nomadic
or if you're living in a small area, just keep
it on the outside of your your living environment. But
the thing about humans is that we inevitably did a
number of things. We overcame all of our predators. We
we conquered the natural world and innovented to agriculture, and
then we started more move and then we started building cities.
(18:35):
We started building just increasingly large cramped complex um just
accretions of human population, which of course is one of
the reasons we have I have so many wonderful things
in our culture. But also it created a lot of problems. Yeah,
of course the city comes with many wonders for good
and ill, and it just I mean, obviously, how to
(18:58):
deal with human waste is a major one of the ills,
right is one of the biggest problems that you immediately
face as soon as you decide to create crowded, sedentary civilization.
Cramming a bunch of people close together and having them
all live there and not leave, and what to do
with human waste has long been I think one of
the single most important and consequential problems in the design
(19:19):
of human civilizations. Like think about okay, if we go
with those numbers earlier, like the you know, fourteen ounces
or whatever. Average a day, a household of five people
is producing on average, like thirty pounds of feces a week.
An apartment building of fifty people produces like three hundred
pounds a week. Obviously, people don't want that stuff hanging around,
(19:41):
So where does it go? And how does it get there?
If you Okay, so if you're in a city, you
can't walk outside the outskirts of the city every time
you need to go to the bathroom and go to
like a midden pile, that's you know, where nobody is.
I mean, we'll come back to it. To a certain extent,
you can, but that's only going to scale for so long, right,
Like residents of New York City cannot go to New
(20:03):
Jersey to poop. It's it's you can't leave. If you
have to leave Manhattan to poop, then I mean, why
you can't really live in Manhattan. And even then that's
not a good idea, especially when you've got lots of
people crowded around open defecation, even if it's in in
a place separated from you, if it's often a midden
pile or something like that, that can lead to negative
(20:24):
health outcomes. And we'll talk about that in a bit um.
But so, yeah, so you don't want all that stuff
hanging around. And it's not just because we don't esthetically
like the idea of feces piling up in the streets
and alleys around our homes because it's gross. It can
actually be dangerous to be exposed to untreated human waste,
like untreated sewage getting into water sources is especially dangerous.
(20:46):
This can spread water borne diseases like diarrhea, which you
know is one of the biggest killers of children around
the world in terms of infectious disease, and then like
a cholera. I mean, cholera has been just one of
the most awful diseases in human history, and it still
kills tens of thousands of people every single year, I
mean even today. And this generally is it's the fecal
(21:07):
oral route of disease transmission. It's kind of gross to
talk about, but it's when sewage contaminates sources that end
up going into people's mouths, like drinking water, like soil
that you know that ends up on food um. And
so for this reason, like you know, I was reading
this the thing by the United Nations about the sort
of their toilet initiatives, trying to get toilets and clean
(21:28):
sewage sewage disposal systems to people around the world, and
they say, bluntly, toilets save lives. We should think about that,
because obviously the toilet is a nice thing to have.
It's a good convenience that makes life more esthetically pleasing.
But it's also like a life or death question, right,
And and it is so easy to take it for
granted just because it's this it's this thing that we're
(21:50):
we're grateful for it when we have it and when
we need it, but we're also very willing to forget
it and and and probably not plan our life around
it too much unless we absolutely have to. Yeah, And
and one way to definitely know that you shouldn't take
it for granted is to think about all the people
who are around the world who are deprived of these amenities.
Like according to the World Health Organization and UNI SEF,
(22:12):
about sixty percent of the global population either don't have
a toilet in their home or they don't have one
that's safely removes uh removes human ways. So they might
have one, but it doesn't Maybe it just goes into
a place where it re enters drinking water areas and stuff.
Among the facts they said also is that like almost
nine dred million people worldwide still regularly practice open defecation
(22:36):
just out you know, they have to go wherever, like
in a latrine field or or something like that. Yeah,
it just means somewhere that is not being captured or treated.
Like if you had if you had a properly dug
pit latrine, that would not count. But so you're going
somewhere in the open, like an open pit or something.
And then this was crazy. So the they say globally,
about eight percent of waste water generated by human civilization
(23:01):
flows back into the ecosystem without being treated. Without being treated. Yeah, um,
I mean it's just ramping around the world that this
obviously is going to have be having lots of negative
environmental consequences but also negative health outcomes for humans. And
then another thing that we shouldn't take for granted is
like just the idea of you know, people don't like
(23:21):
the idea of fly is getting into their their stuff. Right,
So like if if people have an outhouse or a
pit latrine, they tend to want to keep a lid
on it. And one thing that does It helps keep
flies from getting down in there and buzzing around, and
of course that would be an annoyance when people are
trying to use these facilities. But that's also not just
an esthetic concern when when human feces are left uncovered
(23:43):
their breeding ground. For for like the fly um Musca
sorbins known as the bizarre fly, which there's some evidence
or a disease vector for the bacterium Chlamydia trachomatis, which
can cause an infection in the eye, is called trachoma,
which is a leading cause of blind us around the world.
It's it leads to hundreds of thousands of people being
(24:03):
blind worldwide. So again we have we have real life consequences,
actual hygiene public health consequences UH to lack of efficient
UH toiletry and sewage technology. I can't emphasize this enough.
The toilet and I want to be very clear about this,
and not just the toilet in your house, but the
toilet paired with a waste disposal and sewer infrastructure. That's
(24:26):
really important. UH. Those things together are not just esthetically nice,
they save lives. This is a life and death issue. Yeah.
And but just to bring it back to a joke. Uh,
this is exactly why the sign at a Kia and
the model apartment says, do not use this toilet. It's
not hooked up to anything. The toilet in and of
itself will do nothing exactly. And we'll revisit this theme
(24:48):
throughout these episodes. But so without a flush to I
guess we should sort of consider the history of toilet
technology in in in consider some broad categories. Right, So,
without a flush toilet connected to a safe disposal system
like a sewer or a well contained septic tank, what
options do you have for disposing of human waste? There
(25:09):
are a few main categories, and they pretty much all
have some major disadvantages. One of course, as we've discussed,
is open defecation. That's just anywhere in the environment. We
know now that's that's dangerous, that can lead to disease
risks um. Another option is pit latrines is like an outhouse,
you go in a hole, you know, and uh, these
these are better than open defecation because they can be
(25:30):
covered up and they can keep stuff separating contained. But
also they're outside your home, you lose the convenience and
the privacy. If they're inside your home, there can be
problems with smells and exposure to waste, so they might
be better from a health perspective than just open defecation
or defecation and to say water sources, but they're also
(25:50):
that their problems with them that make people not prefer
them generally. And then you've got like chamber pots and buckets.
Historically these are very common. These were often emptied by
pouring the contents out of windows into city streets, which
is obviously unsanitary. Even though it's more convenient like you
do your stuff indoors, the impact is sort of the
(26:11):
same as like open defecation on city streets and can
lead to unsanitary conditions and disease and all that like
immediately right outside your your your building. So ideally, what
you'd want, given the limitations of all these things, is
some kind of appliance that allows you to do your
thing inside the privacy and comfort of your own home
(26:31):
and then removes the waste automatically to somewhere that it
can be safely stored or treated that doesn't allow unpleasant
sights and smells to bother you, and doesn't allow the
waste to pollute the surrounding environment or get into drinking
water and soil. Obviously, this is a recipe that a
that a flush toilet could meet very nicely if it's
paired with the right kind of like sewer system. But
(26:52):
I think maybe we should take a quick break and
then come back and discuss some of the solutions that
ancient civilizations came up with for for toilets and sewer designs.
All right, we're back. So we're talking about ancient complex
latrine systems. I was reading about this in a book
(27:14):
by Brian Fagan that I've mentioned on the show before,
the seventy Great Inventions of the Ancient World, and he
points to one of the earliest examples we have of
of latrine technology being that of a latrine drainage system
in the Neolithic period. Uh one example being uh Scara
Bray on the Orkney Islands of Scotland from roughly one
(27:37):
hundred to b C. And the site featured six houses,
each with a buried duct that drains from small toilet
rooms to a single duct that removed waste from the houses.
So it's it's simple, but basically in that you have
the roots of modern sewage technology. Yeah, and uh, so
(28:00):
we see things kind of like this in other ancient
civilizations like for example, one of the great UH ancient
civilizations in terms of civic design and UH and technological
advancement in the way cities are put together is the
Indis River Valley civilization like including sites like Mahinjo Daro
and Harapa, where they had buildings with these sort of
(28:21):
toilet holes that rested over an underground brick drainage pipe
and these sewer drains could be washed out with water
to carry the waste away to cess pits. Right, this
would have been about And another interesting bit about the
Mahinjo Daro site is that they appeared to be channel
junctions in the sewage system so that you could it
(28:41):
could be easily be cleaned, You could go in there
to prevent blockage. So it would seem to be in
an advancement from from earlier designs. Yeah. And another advancement,
of course, comes if you have a good source of
flowing water, like the ancient Romans made use of their
aqueduct supplied water to power a sort of flush toilet.
(29:03):
I think it's not quite a flush toilet because it
depends on how you define it, but it consisted of
in ancient rome basically a bench with multiple holes in it,
So this would have been a very communal affair. These
holes are just like right next to each other, so
you'd go and sit next to a whole bunch of
people and I guess just sit around talking while you
were pooping. And uh. These holes in the bench were
(29:26):
suspended over a drainage ditch with running water, and the
flowing water below the toilet bench would remove the waste
and would also help limit smells. So this is great, Like,
you don't you know, it doesn't stink in there because
stuff skinting. Well, it might stink a little bit, but
it's not as bad as it could be because it's
all getting washed away immediately by the running water. Yeah,
there's running water. There's there's there, there's their mosaics and frescoes,
(29:49):
there is there's probably live music at some of these. Yeah.
I didn't know that. Yeah, that that was a detail
I was reading in I believe it was Smith's book.
Um put pointing out that, Yeah, this would have been
just kind of a fun place to hang out and
have a poop. Yeah, I mean it does seem like
it was a thing that Uh, it's it's hard to
(30:10):
like with modern Western sensibilities about like embarrassment. You know,
you know, when you when you have to go to
the bathroom. It's just hard to imagine sitting around talking
to people while you're all pooping on the same bench.
But when in Rome, you know, poop poop on the bench.
But of course this this had some limitations also because
it relied on a certain kind of infrastructure, right, it
(30:32):
relied on the constant running water supplied by the aqueduct system,
and it had to be done at the end of
the water supply system or else you would of course
foul the water sources downstream of you. So this sort
of had to you know, you wouldn't want to put
this toilet side at like the first place the aqueduct
water supplied water gets to in the city. Right now,
(30:53):
and now, certainly we're going to talk some more about
Roman toilets here, because just the Roman plumbing situation was fabulous.
It was really it was a wonderful creation. They were
really proud of it too. Oh yeah. But at the
same time, there's a problem with thinking too much about
ancient toilets in light of our you know, our modern concepts,
(31:15):
because you know, we're standing at the end of a
long journey in which innate, uh, you know, sensibilities about
cleanliness are confused with concepts of purity and they're augmenting,
augmented to varying but hopefully significant degrees by public health concerns. Right, So,
like you know for a fact that exposure to human
feces can actually be a public health risk. But there's
(31:37):
also like this weird kind of primal thing where you
think of feces as morally bad or something. Yeah, And
that's one of the major trends. And in a Smith's
book about hygiene is that these two things just become
interwoven and it's hard to to to to take them apart.
But the ancient understandings of public health, we're very unlike
our own we've discussed before, are unstuff to blow your mind.
(32:01):
How Roman civil engineer Vitruvius advised against building towns near
marshes because of the fear of the miasma, right, which
which there's some truth to that, and also just like
he seems the fund truth, but at the same time,
there's no magical fog that's going to come out and
give you an illness. Well, he was right for the
(32:21):
wrong reason. Right, Like, so, the idea that you might
get malaria because there are bad smells and vapors coming
off of the marshes is wrong, but it might actually
be correct, so that you don't want to be too
close to the marshes because the standing water produces disease
vectors the mosquitoes that are the vector for the malaria. Now,
he also advised that latrine should be positioned so that
(32:42):
odor is directed away from public spaces. Sounds reasonable, but
as Brian Fagan um at All point out in the
seventy grade Inventions of the Ancient World, quote, such purely
practical measures need not reflect they generalized concern for public
health as we understand it. Uh, you know. But for all,
for all the the Roman feats of plumbing, you know,
it all says little about what they necessarily thought about hygiene.
(33:05):
For instance, Fagan points out that many private toilets and
pompeii were positioned right next to the kitchen. Right. Yeah,
it makes me think about Simpson's episode where they building
at Flanders a new house and the toilet is just
in the middle of the kitchen. Because they're like, you
haven't tried lugging a toilet up a flight of stairs.
Another fact about how these Roman toilets don't necessarily like
(33:28):
completely interlocked with common ideas about hygiene. So you wonder,
what are the ancient Romans used for toilet paper? Right
like when when they were sitting around by the dozens
for social pooping, where they wipers or where they washers,
there was sort of in between, there were well, I
guess you call them washers because there was water elements.
So they apparently wiped themselves with a kind of wetted
sponge on a stick, which they So you'd be sitting
(33:51):
there on the toilet, and then in front of you
there'd be a separate stream of fresh water washing in um,
and then everybody would sort of dip their sponges at
the end of their sick in this water to like
wet it and wash it off, and then they'd wipe
themselves with that and then dip it in there to
wash it off again, and everybody like you would you know,
people would share these things obviously, uh, I mean, imagine
(34:12):
an alternate version of our present world and which instead
of using toilet paper or any kind of sprayer or
what have you, instead it's single use disposable sponges on sticks.
You know, like we're very we're hygienic about it, but
we're just so extra wasteful about it. I came across
I think, what is a false factoid that I'm I
(34:32):
wonder if I should even repeat because I don't want
to spread it via the illusory truth effect. But I'll
say it anyway. Uh. There there are people out there
saying that the phrase getting the wrong end of the
stick comes from this Roman experience. But I did not
find good evidence so that is true. I do not
think that is the origin of that phrase in English. Yeah,
and really what which what end is the wrong end?
(34:54):
It kind of depends on what you're doing, right, Yeah.
I mean if they were like, if it's good enough
for your butt, why isn't it good enough for your hand? End? Um?
All right, we're gonna come back to the Romans, but
but real quick, I want to touch base again on
some of these these older settlements, Um, because we don't
want to give the false impression that like from a
very early point, from say again UT B C onward,
(35:19):
people were just all on board with some sort of
primitive sewage system because that's not the case, because there
are plenty of other advanced settlements in the ancient world.
They just didn't seem that concerned with the latrine technology.
Cattle Hook, I believe I'm attempting to pronounce that correctly.
This has been abrout seven thousand b C. In modern Turkey.
(35:40):
So they had mud brick houses for thousands of people.
And one of the interesting things about this settlement is
that most of these buildings were accessible by like sometimes
like apertures in the sides of the buildings, but often
ceiling holes. And they had no proper streets. The rooftops
were the streets um so so so so that's fascinating.
(36:01):
But but then they also had they had cooking hearts,
they had ovens, they had storage rooms, uh. And yet
they seemed to have been just content with carrying all
of their trash and ratrine latrine waste out to dumping sites,
out to middens beyond the limits of their uh, their
their town. Well. I wonder if the fact that the
streets were positioned above the dwelling spaces actually would have
(36:22):
discouraged them from dumping all of their waste out on
the streets as often happened in other cities because they
would quickly and easily run into people's homes. Yeah, it
could be another big example. Classical Athens may do just
open sewers. Fagan adds that although the water supply was
taken care of, the fifth century BC drainage system consisted
(36:45):
of a single large duct in the marketplace, and everybody
else just had to make do. But let's get back
to Rome, Okay, So obviously a lot of time, energy
and money went into the sewage system, into the overall
plumbing infrastructure. We've mentioned the Acqua ducks already, but we
haven't mentioned Rome's great central sewer, the Cloaca maxima. Cloaca maxima,
(37:07):
that's like a body part on a Tyrannosaurus reaxident. But
cloaca means sewer, So yeah, it's the So it's the
maximum sewer, the great sewer, I mean. So to clarify
the cloaca in the uh, in the animal world, I think,
I'm I think it's basically like a single passage way
that serves the function of like a rectum and a
(37:28):
urethra and a birth canal and all that. It's all
sort of in one right and so but but here
we're talking about a great central sewer, and accounts vary
on when this was built. There's there's a tradition that
says that it was built in the sixth century BC,
but Fagin stresses that it likely came later and may
have remained an open sewer until about second century BC.
(37:50):
But but it was a pretty impressive sense system. For instance,
our old friend Plinity Elder was absolutely bonker balls. I
want to read a quote here. This is from the
Rackham translation that we've used before on the show. You
mean of the natural history. Yes, this is from the
Natural history quote. But at that time elderly men still
(38:10):
admired the vast dimensions of the rampart, the substructures of
the capital, and furthermore, the city sewers, the most noteworthy
achievement of all, seeing that hills were tunneled, and Rome,
as we mentioned a little earlier, became a hanging city
beneath which men traveled in boats during Marcus Agrippa's term
as Edile after his consulship. Through the city, there flows
(38:35):
seven rivers meeting in one channel. These rushing downwards like
mountain torrents, are constrained to sweep away and remove everything
in their path, and when they are thrust forward by
an additional volume of rain water, they batter the bottom
and sides of the sewer. So yes, in case anyone
missed it, there plenty is telling us that Marcus Agrippa
(38:56):
took a sailing vessel through the sewers. That's how amazing
they were. That there's a sin actually a river uh
that runs through Rome, and it is the fabulous sewer.
So this sort of toilet technology. You find this throughout
the Roman Empire. Uh. And yet at the same time
they still had to post warnings against public defication. So
(39:17):
I want to touch on some of these, but I'm
gonna stress here that apparently in translating these, the word
poop is not always sufficient. So I am going to
go ahead. We're gonna go ahead and use the stronger
S word for excrement, but we're going to come up
with the delightful ways to bleep the profanity. This is
a show of family values, folks, right, But but it
(39:38):
also has a show about about history, and apparently these
these bits of often graffiti cannot be properly translated without
using some vulgar terminology. Let's give vulgar alright. So one
this was a graffiti on a wall in Pompeii that says,
again translated with comfort and good cheer, so long as
(40:00):
you don't do it here. So it's a warning, please
please don't poop here. Don't poop here. There are places
to poop, but not here. There's a kind of beautiful
irony about that being on a house at Pompeii. They
want to keep all nice and clean. Yeah. Uh, there's
another one. This was on a wall of a Roman amphitheater.
Uh that is what is it? Cassatur cave mallum. I
(40:25):
think it would be hard season in Latin. I think
it would be cocatour cocatur cave mallum, which means roughly
translated as sure beware the evil eye, which is which
is a delightful thing. I actually actually saw a website
where someone had had taken this thing in Latin and
they framed it above their modern toilet in their apartment,
(40:48):
which is a nice, a nice, a nice twist. So
Christina Kilgrove actually wrote a wonderful article on Forbes about
these inscriptions, titled Uh, scatological graffiti was the Roman version
of Yelp and Twitter, and she points out that you know,
even with with latrines, pooping was still something you were
exposed to a lot. Again, they were very communal, these
(41:09):
Roman toilets. Now, she points out that these bits of
for grel graffiti were generally not found in actual latrine zones.
They were found elsewhere in the city. And part of that,
of course is warning against inappropriate defecation. Please go usual trine,
don't do it here. But then she said, there are
other such inscriptions that were essentially Yelp reviews, like one
(41:29):
that is translated as we pete in the bed. I
confess we have aired innkeeper. If you ask why there
was no chamber pot, that's a good excuse, except why
in the bed? Why not somewhere else in the room? Well,
I mean yeah, I mean you could just use the corner.
I guess. It's like it would be the most destructive
thing you could do, right, And since you can't, you can't.
(41:52):
Actually you leave a Yelp review. You can just say
I peet in this bed, but the reason is because
you didn't provide a latrine of media used. So yes,
graffiti artists of Rome had some fun with with defecation
in general, and with the use of latrines. Um the
whole books have been written on Roman graffiti. It's it's
(42:13):
a wonderful topic. But still at the same time, we
stressed that the latrines of ancient Rome, they do represent
a major contribution to public health. Uh, you know, even
if they didn't have the science down perfectly on everything,
and even if there were a few rogues who didn't
appreciate any of it. Okay, I think we need to
take one more break and then we will come back
to finish up our discussion about toilet history. All right,
(42:41):
we're back. Are we ready to get into some medieval
toilet technology here? Joe, Yeah, we've talked about some pit latrines.
We've talked about some uh some ancient sewer systems sort
of with toilets suspended over them. I wanted to talk
about guard robes. So guard robes are a common solution
later in like sole building periods in Europe, And there's
(43:02):
a simple principle at work here. Why not let gravity
flush for you? Uh So, a garden robe would generally
be like a small room with holes that you could
sit over, suspended up high over a pit or over
an exposed area outdoors, so there could be multiple ways
you would do this, but the waste would generally fall
down into a pit where it would be stored and
(43:23):
then could be removed by workers at some point, or
it would fall into a moat this was pretty common
for castles, or it would just fall down to the
ground along the exterior wall of the castle or manor house.
Uh And because of exposure to like cold winter winds.
A sixteenth century poet named John Harrington, who we will
revisit in the next episode, called this quote sitting on
(43:46):
the draft, so you can imagine it was like, you know,
there's just a hole that's exposed to outside, and I
guess your your stuff falls down along the castle wall
and and you've got the winter winds biting at your butt. Ye,
your hole is exposed to the outside. Think this, yeah, exactly.
So of course the waste would either end up in
a water source and that's not great, or it would
pile up below and have to be removed by workers.
(44:09):
And I'm not positive, but I think a guarterobe type
structure is the central UH architectural feature. In a story
that I loved about a castle, I've actually been to
in Slovenia. Uh. So, there's a castle called Prajamsky Grod
and Slovenia also known as Prajama Castle, and I've got
a picture of it here. It's it's so. It's a
(44:30):
castle that was built in the thirteenth century in the
mouth of a cave. Yeah. And Slovenia just generally has
awesome caves and like karst geological features. But here's somebody
decided to be super bad and build a castle right
on a cliff at the entrance of a cave system.
I like the way they think. So, You've got this
guy named erism Luger or Erasmus of Lugue, who is
(44:54):
a so called robber baron. He's a bad dude who
owns a castle, though I guess most of the people
who own castle are bad. Yeah. It's kind of a
red flag. Yeah. Oh, and that's something we'll get to
again in a minute. Uh So. Uh he's a he's
a so called robber baron, and he and his family
Arizon Luker. Uh. They take over the Progama Castle by
(45:14):
the end of the fifteenth century, and at one point
Luger gets in trouble because he murders a relative of
the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick the Third, and the Holy
Roman Empire comes to collect and they end up laying
siege to his castle here at the Cave Mouth. But
the siege went on and on because the castle had
a secret weapon for siege survival. It had a tunnel
(45:38):
leading into the cave system, which had other openings to
the countryside, so it allowed occupants occupants of the castle
to secretly sneak out and get supplies while they were
under siege. And this of course means the siege can
go on for a really long time. For all I know.
You know, it could go on forever. While the army
is waiting outside to starve you out, you're sneaking off
(45:58):
to the snack bar. So apparently somebody within the castle
got sick of this after about a year or so,
and the insider decided to betray Lugar, the master of
the castle. And I guess they must have coordinated a
plan with the army outside. But however they arrived at
this plan. What happened is they waited until Luger himself
had to go up to the garter robe. It was
(46:20):
this little room overhanging the outside wall of the castle,
and then they raised a red flag to let the
army outside know, and the army blasted the garter robe
with a cannon and killed Luger in one shot. And
that should have been adapted to a Game of Thrones scene.
Maybe it still will be. That's right. The Game of
(46:40):
Thrones did have a death on the toilet scene. They
also had the moon door, which was not a toilet,
but was. It was very much like what we're describing here. Yeah,
a hole that opens up onto the the expanse below
the castle or along the castle walls. No One more
note about medieval toilets. Generally, there were two ways to
do your business in the medieval bedroom. There was a
(47:03):
jerry which you simply pushed under the bad so this
would be just like a standard chamber pot. But then
there was also the closed stool, which is like a
toilet box. And you'll you'll find some examples in the cushion.
It's like satin cushion. It's the fancy little box. It's
like imagine the fanciest um, you know, enclosure for a
(47:23):
litter box you can purchase and it's essentially that for
human defecation, you know, I find. So you look at
a lot of this like medieval royal toilet technology, you know,
the stuff that kings and queens of Europe would poop in,
and in these times there's an awful lot of like
cloth in the elements involved. It just seems like a
bad idea, like you don't want you know, when you
(47:45):
see people who have like toilet like toilet seat covers
that are like fuzzy cloth stuff, and I'm always just like,
what are you doing? A toilet should be all like
hard surfaces that are easy to clean off. You know,
my god, it just seems wrong to like be putting
cushions and fabric and all that are all over your toilet.
(48:06):
That just seems like a recipe for disgusting nous. Oh yeah.
An example of this, my family wants rented a home
that had a white carpet in the bathroom all the
way up to the toilet. Is ridiculous. Oh my god,
that's horrible, like brown shag carpet. Fine, but you don't
want white carpet. It's just a terrible idea. I mean,
(48:29):
why don't you If you're gonna do that, why not
just have like cloth dinner plates and stuff hard non
porous surfaces people though, yeah, you gotta be able to
clean it all right, So we're gonna go and close
out this episode right here, but we will be back
because the next episode we're going to really get into
what you probably think of as the modern toilet. We're
(48:51):
gonna talk more about the modern flush toilet, where it
came from, uh, and what it's it's impact has been.
In the meantime, if you want to check out more
episodes of invent S, head on over to invention pod
dot com. That's our website. That's where we'll find all
the episodes, links out to social media accounts you name it.
And I should really stress if you want to support
the show, the best thing you can do is make
(49:12):
sure you've subscribed, and then if you have the ability
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please do so because that that helps us out, helps
the algorithm, helps us continue to bring you week after
week uh new amazing, mundane and world changing inventions. That's right, So,
as always, thanks so much to our excellent audio producer,
(49:34):
Torre Harrison, And if you would like to get in
touch with us with feedback about this episode or any
other to suggest a topic for the future, or just
to say hello. You can email us at contact at
invention pod dot com, se
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday
time for a bonus episode. Normally on Saturday, you know
what you'd be getting as a rerun a classic episode
of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. But that's not what
you're getting today. Today you're getting an episode of our
other podcast, Invention. Because some of you are not subscribed
(00:25):
to Invention yet, what's going on? Well, true, So this
this is an episode of Invention, the first of two
that we did on toilets. We figured this is something
everybody can relate to. All of you use toilets of
some form or another. Even if you just go out
into a field and dig a hole, well, you are
creating a toilet. You're creating a little latrine pit. And
(00:47):
in this episode we get into the history of that.
Where did it come from? What were some of the
earliest advanced systems of using a toilet? Like when when
was the first time someone was was actively pooping into
running water? That's sort of thing now, So this is
gonna be, as we're saying, part one of our two
parter on toilets over on Invention. So if you listen
(01:09):
to this episode and you'll like it and you want
to learn more, You're you're hanging on the edge of
a cliff. You want to know where toilets go after
we leave off, you'll have to go over to the
Invention feed, check out part two there and subscribe. Yeah,
so the best way to do it you can go
to invention pod dot com. That's the website for our show.
But also you can just look for Invention on any
(01:32):
service that you happen to use to get your podcasts.
Be at say Apple podcast sort of the I Heart
radio app. Uh. Look for the kind of labyrinth like
sun uh emblem that we've created to go along with
our title. That's right, gorge onto Dailian imagery. Uh, learn
about toilet's, think about pooping, think about pooping way too much,
(01:53):
and have a wonderful weekend. Hey, welcome to Invention. My
name is Robert lamp and I'm Joe McCormick. And Robert
I got a question for you. Have you ever been
to like a festival or big public event where the
(02:14):
organizers did not get enough porta potties? Probably so probably so. Um,
it's I mean, it's it's a weird. It's a weird
equation you have to work out right because you need
to have the approximate number of porta potties for a
given event. And at the same time, like I've definitely
I've been to events where people care more for the
(02:35):
porta potties, like there's more of a communal effort to like,
let's let's look after these porta potties. Let's even go
in there and clean the porta potties right to ensure
that things don't get too vile too fast. Like if
there's if it's a multi day event, people might be
more respectful of the fact that people will need to
continue to use these over a period of time. Then
if it's just like a it's you know, this is
(02:56):
going on for a few hours, let's just go total
war on these facility teas I've been to a one
time went to a beer tasting festival in North Carolina
where they did not get nearly enough porta potties, and
I remember feeling like this is the closest thing I've
ever felt to like a Mad Max type scenario in
real life. People were losing their minds, Like when when
(03:19):
you don't have a place you've been drinking beer, and
then you don't have a place where you can legally
and uh in, uh in, in a polite way, go
to the bathroom. Things start to get dire really fast. Yeah,
and I'm guessing there's probably a lot of indiscriminate aiming
from male urinators at this these particular events. Yeah, there
was also a you could tell just like this all
(03:41):
over the place, frantic search like ants foraging about looking
for other places they could go apart from the far
too few porta potties that were swarmed by people waiting.
But you start doing some very odd math if you're
in a situation like that, or even if you're not,
even if it's not that bad, you're just waiting in
line to use a porta potty, it least I find
I do. And one of the questions that I think
(04:02):
you inevitably start pondering is how much exactly do people
poop in a lifetime? Like how much do I poop
in a year? How much do does does my whole
household poop in you know, in twenty years? Yeah, though
these are not necessarily factors that are going to help
you out, for you know, weekend music festival no, no,
(04:23):
But I mean you have to imagine that there's some
kind of rough math along those lines going in. I
guess it's less for the festival. It's probably less thinking
about the total mass of poop and more about, like,
I don't know how many people and how often they'll
need to go, because it's not like the things are
going to be filled up and overflowing, at least hopefully not.
But yeah, that is the thing that you can start
(04:44):
wondering about, and it's a weird question once you actually
get the answer. I found an article that addresses this.
It was a article on Live Science by Mindy Weisberger
addressing exactly this question full on with an interview with
a like health p fessional who had the dirt. So
it's impossible to answer this question exactly how much you
(05:06):
poop in a lifetime, because of course everybody's different, there's
different average fecal mass production, there's different lifespan and all that.
But it's actually fairly easy to get some average figures.
So the article sites Kim Barrett, a professor of medicine
at You See San Diego, and Barrett says, on average,
men and women have roughly one bowel movement per day. Though,
if you have more than that or less than that,
(05:27):
don't panic. There's a normal range that's more and less.
It's okay. But the daily average amount of feces produced
by mass by a person an adult is usually about
fourteen to seventeen ounces or about four hundred to five
hundred grams, And from their Weisberger does some simple math
quote starting with an average daily amount of about fourteen
(05:48):
ounces or four hundred grams, the total poop production in
a week's time would be about six pounds or two
point eight ms. In a year, a single person would
yield about three hundred and twenty pounds or a hundred
and forty i've kilograms of poop, just a little more
than an adult panda. Ways. Al Right, So when when
one here's the sort of drill sergeant cliche of like
I've I've craped bigger than you, that's probably true. If
(06:11):
you're looking at a like a year's worth of defecation,
well that starts to call to mind this thing that
It got me thinking about it. It got me thinking
about how as people get older, often their bodies shrink. Right,
you know, after adulthood, your body can actually physically shrink.
You don't continue getting bigger and bigger as life goes on.
And yet there's this invisible phantom of biomass following every
(06:35):
person around throughout the years, and no matter what, it's
always getting larger and larger the older you get. It
is the phantom mountain of combined mass of all the
feces you've ever produced. Like like a big poop golem
following you around, you have an invisible phantom poop golem
that follows you everywhere and only gets bigger with age.
(06:56):
So so this means that like if you live to
the age of seventy six, Weisberger does the math, on average,
you'll produce like twenty four thousand, three hundred and twenty
pounds or eleven thousand and thirty kilograms of poop in
your lifetime. If you live to eighty one, it's more
like it's close to twenty six thousand pounds are close
to twelve thousand kilograms. Quote, So a lifetime of a
(07:18):
woman's poop, because the average female lifespan is about eighty
one years in the United States, UH, the average lifetime
of a woman's poop weighs as much as three adult
male hippos. But if you follow the same averages we've
mentioned a minute ago, think about those people who lived
like a hundred and twenty, you know, the super supercentenarians. Uh.
One of these people who lives to like a hundred
(07:39):
and twenty has created, by the end of their life
a phantom poop mountain, or one of these poop golems
of thirty eight thousand, four hundred pounds or about seventeen thousand,
four hundred and twenty kilograms. I was trying to find
an object to compare this to. It's close to the
weight of a number of lighter combat vehicles like the
M twenty four Chafee light tank, the first used by
(08:00):
the Americans in World War Two. Just imagine this. If
you live to a hundred and twenty, over the course
of your life, you can, on average, poop a tank.
All right, Well, uh, let's think about these poop golems.
Obviously they cannot live with us. They must live elsewhere.
And that's why that's where we get to the subject
(08:21):
today's episode and the episode to follow this, because this
is gonna be a two parter and we think you'll
love this one. But episode number two is going to
be a real doozy. Yes, so, yeah, that's that's the
subject of our episodes. It brings us to the technology
of the toilet and ultimately the concept of the flush toilet. Um. So,
I think in today's episode, we're gonna be focusing primarily
(08:42):
on sort of the history of toilet technology, what we
what we were dealing with, like the problems faced by
disposal of human waste and and toilets before the flush
toilet was invented, And then the next episode we'll meet
the power of the flush. But so, I think one
of the things to think about is that the problem
(09:03):
of what to do with human waste only really becomes
a huge issue once you have sedentary lifestyles and civilization,
like once you get a lot of people living in
roughly the same place and not constantly moving right absolutely, uh,
you know. I was looking back at one of my
favorite books on hygiene clean A History of Personal Hygiene
(09:23):
Impurity by Virginia Smith, and she points out that making
sure that your poop is somewhere other than your immediate
living environment has always been just a universal human behavior.
It's just part of our our species, and certainly you
see this in any number of species as well. Um,
I mean you see, like dogs would rather go poop
somewhere far away from where they live. You know, they
(09:45):
don't want to poop in their den right, and they're
they're even you know, we've talked about coprophagia. There even
like some ideas and science about like when a dog
ends up pooping in its house. This may come from
like an instinct to the fact that sometimes dogs will
then eat it, which seems gross to us, is actually
something to like prevent possible parasite eggs from hatching in it,
(10:06):
because there can be a health risk from poop staying
around in your living areas. Yeah, and if you want
to hear more about this Stufforable in your Mind has
an entire episode about animals eating poop. That's right. We're
not going to be focusing on eating poop today, except
in the sense the toilet eats poop if you will, Yeah,
you can. You can look at it that way for sure.
So but you know, back when we were just nomadic creatures,
(10:28):
we didn't have to worry about this is so much.
You you poop where you had to poop, You did
whatever you needed to do to to hide the feces.
But then you're going to be moving on. You're not
going to stay in that immediate area, and you're probably
there aren't that many of you anyway, like any given
group of human nomads. Uh, it's not going to be
(10:49):
the size of of a of a village or the
stuff certainly the size of a large metropolitan area. Now
that doesn't mean there are no dangerous associated with defecation
at this stage. Even you're not gonna have nearly as
much of a problem with what to do with the excrement.
You are still like when you when you go to
go to the bathroom, you're putting yourself in a vulnerable state. Absolutely.
(11:10):
I mean, poop itself opens up vulnerabilities. You see this
in any number of animals that have various methods for
hiding their own poops. Sometimes it's essentially self hiding, such
as the way a goat's poop will rolled away. Goats
often would favor hilly environment so that the poop rolls
away hides itself. Cats, on the other hand, of course,
(11:33):
or are known for their uh, their their skillet, bearing
their poop and thus hiding it from from larger predators
because that's the fear, right, is that your fecal matter
is h is a signal. Uh, it's an it's a
it's an odor that is letting anyone with a nose
to smell it know where you are and perhaps what
degree of healthier in as well. Yeah, if you are
(11:55):
a prey animal, it shows you where a predator can
come get a meal. If you're a predator, it can
scare off prey animals. Uh. There's a paper that looked
into into some of this. It's a two paper called
the Control of Defecation in Humans and Evolutionary Advantage. The
question mark part of it there by Italian bowel experts G.
Massotti and V. Villainacci, And they did something interesting here.
(12:20):
They ran a human fecal sample. Uh. They were they
use both a modern and an ancient example through complex
gas uh chromatographic mass spectro spectrometric analysis, and they discovered
that quote, human feces are rich in volatile compounds likely
to be identified by potential predators. And so they went
(12:41):
on to argue that the high predation risk for ancient
hominids by large carnivores suggests something rather amazing about our
pooping powers. Quote. We hypothesize that the voluntary control of
defication by our ancestors, together with greater brain volume, the
rex stature, opposable things, and other changes may have contributed
(13:02):
to the successful march of hominids along the road of evolution.
In fact, by deciding when, how and where to defecate
may have several advantages in the complex prey predator relationship
because spores are left in places undetectable by predators, or
there are no fecal tracks who sent maybe easily individualated
by prey. So they propose that choosing carefully where to
(13:25):
poop maybe an important part of what kind of animal
we are exactly so. But but even from an early
point um, as Virginia Smith points out, Neolithic people's they
made use of midden piles. So you would have an
area in which you're living, and if you need to
to poop, you're either pooping beyond the area in which
(13:45):
you're living, or you're taking your poop and dumping it
out there in in the midden pile. And there are
you know, a few different systems that that one can
use here, one of course, is the dry sewer system.
And uh and this is this will remind probably a
lot of people of a hat box because a cat's
litter box is a dry sewer system. Uh that this
(14:05):
would have been an indoor bucket of sand, ash or
dirt that one would defecate into, and then you could
take that dirt, sand or ash outside, take it to
the mid and bile dump it out and you're done.
Or you could do it in the inverse. I mean
this is actually still a common method and dry pit
latrines around the world. Like if you've got an outhouse
and it's just a pit latrine. UM, a common thing
(14:28):
to do to help prevent smells and and help keep
things from getting too nasty is after you do your
business in the pit, you've got a bucket of like
old coal ash or something like that, or lime or
something in the uh in the out house, and you
scatter that on top, and that helps contain smells and
so forth. Now, of course, the wet sewer system, We're
gonna get more into that in a bit, but that,
(14:49):
of course is ultimately what we have today in much
of the world where you certainly a flush toilet is
an example of this, right, and that simply derives from
sort of the the ingenious mechanical action of water flow. Right.
If you have to if you want to say, poop
in a chamber pot or in a bucket or something
like that, you've got to physically remove it yourself from
(15:10):
where you are. If you are to poop into moving water,
then the moving water can remove your waste for you
and you don't have to do that, right Or I
guess one could poop into a container of water that
is not moving and then you would remove that yourself.
That's also a possibility, I guess it is now the
other They are all kinds of things you can poop into,
and I imagine people have tried all of them at
(15:32):
one point or another. Now, beyond this dry wet distinction,
there's another important one that Smith points out, and she
says that toilet culture divides sharply into wiper and washer culture. Yeah,
and this is, of course, is just how one cleans
one's bomb toilet defecation. Yeah, like toilet paper versus like
a b day or wet wipes or something like that. Yeah. Now,
(15:56):
most ancient culture, she points out that they were wipers,
so they would have used certainly paper if it was available.
Of course, for the longest paper was um, it was
a rarity. So you're gonna probably depend on things like grass, leaves, sticks,
corn cobs, mud balls, and of course stones I've commonly
seen sided. I'm trying to imagine this. I just see
it pop up in like articles about ancient toilets, that
(16:19):
people would use bits of broken pottery to clean themselves.
That I see that sited. But I'm just trying to
picture it, and it will not picture it. But you
know it, it seems it seems a little little risky.
Well it it drives down just the ridiculousness I think
of any wiping culture, because I feel like ultimately washing
culture has the stronger argument. Um. And washing culture is,
(16:42):
of course, instead of using even paper, what have you
simply depended more or exclusively on running water or spraying
water or water poured from an apparatus. That the the
sort of lubricant power of water. It's taking the principle
of the flush toilet to your own skin, right. And
you know this is the standard in many parts of
the world, you know, particularly say in Islamic and Hindu cultures. Um.
(17:06):
I mean you'll even find this. Uh, if you've ever
traveled abroad, you may have encountered this. But I have
also I know people who like purchased a house in
the Atlanta area and they're like, I don't know why,
but there's a vegetable sprayer installed next to my toilet. Well,
that is, it's a bi day sprayer. That's that's simply
a means of of washing one's bum after one has defecated,
(17:28):
and it's a rather elegant solution. I would, in my opinion,
hard to argue there. I mean, yeah, water gets things
cleaner than than without water. I mean it's not a
perfect analogy, but imagine if I gave you the option
of would you rather be able to take showers or
just wipe yourself down with some paper towels to clean
your body? Absolutely, I think most of us would probably
(17:48):
choose the running water if it is an an option. Uh.
That being said, for many of these cultures, running water
was not an option. You know that, then that's one
of the main reasons that you're seeing the wiping method
is the primary method in these in among ancient peoples. Now,
for the most part, this this worked right. They were
able to sort of roll with very simple um sewage systems.
(18:13):
Just simply get up and move on. Because you're nomadic
or if you're living in a small area, just keep
it on the outside of your your living environment. But
the thing about humans is that we inevitably did a
number of things. We overcame all of our predators. We
we conquered the natural world and innovented to agriculture, and
then we started more move and then we started building cities.
(18:35):
We started building just increasingly large cramped complex um just
accretions of human population, which of course is one of
the reasons we have I have so many wonderful things
in our culture. But also it created a lot of problems. Yeah,
of course the city comes with many wonders for good
and ill, and it just I mean, obviously, how to
(18:58):
deal with human waste is a major one of the ills,
right is one of the biggest problems that you immediately
face as soon as you decide to create crowded, sedentary civilization.
Cramming a bunch of people close together and having them
all live there and not leave, and what to do
with human waste has long been I think one of
the single most important and consequential problems in the design
(19:19):
of human civilizations. Like think about okay, if we go
with those numbers earlier, like the you know, fourteen ounces
or whatever. Average a day, a household of five people
is producing on average, like thirty pounds of feces a week.
An apartment building of fifty people produces like three hundred
pounds a week. Obviously, people don't want that stuff hanging around,
(19:41):
So where does it go? And how does it get there?
If you Okay, so if you're in a city, you
can't walk outside the outskirts of the city every time
you need to go to the bathroom and go to
like a midden pile, that's you know, where nobody is.
I mean, we'll come back to it. To a certain extent,
you can, but that's only going to scale for so long, right,
Like residents of New York City cannot go to New
(20:03):
Jersey to poop. It's it's you can't leave. If you
have to leave Manhattan to poop, then I mean, why
you can't really live in Manhattan. And even then that's
not a good idea, especially when you've got lots of
people crowded around open defecation, even if it's in in
a place separated from you, if it's often a midden
pile or something like that, that can lead to negative
(20:24):
health outcomes. And we'll talk about that in a bit um.
But so, yeah, so you don't want all that stuff
hanging around. And it's not just because we don't esthetically
like the idea of feces piling up in the streets
and alleys around our homes because it's gross. It can
actually be dangerous to be exposed to untreated human waste,
like untreated sewage getting into water sources is especially dangerous.
(20:46):
This can spread water borne diseases like diarrhea, which you
know is one of the biggest killers of children around
the world in terms of infectious disease, and then like
a cholera. I mean, cholera has been just one of
the most awful diseases in human history, and it still
kills tens of thousands of people every single year, I
mean even today. And this generally is it's the fecal
(21:07):
oral route of disease transmission. It's kind of gross to
talk about, but it's when sewage contaminates sources that end
up going into people's mouths, like drinking water, like soil
that you know that ends up on food um. And
so for this reason, like you know, I was reading
this the thing by the United Nations about the sort
of their toilet initiatives, trying to get toilets and clean
(21:28):
sewage sewage disposal systems to people around the world, and
they say, bluntly, toilets save lives. We should think about that,
because obviously the toilet is a nice thing to have.
It's a good convenience that makes life more esthetically pleasing.
But it's also like a life or death question, right,
And and it is so easy to take it for
granted just because it's this it's this thing that we're
(21:50):
we're grateful for it when we have it and when
we need it, but we're also very willing to forget
it and and and probably not plan our life around
it too much unless we absolutely have to. Yeah, And
and one way to definitely know that you shouldn't take
it for granted is to think about all the people
who are around the world who are deprived of these amenities.
Like according to the World Health Organization and UNI SEF,
(22:12):
about sixty percent of the global population either don't have
a toilet in their home or they don't have one
that's safely removes uh removes human ways. So they might
have one, but it doesn't Maybe it just goes into
a place where it re enters drinking water areas and stuff.
Among the facts they said also is that like almost
nine dred million people worldwide still regularly practice open defecation
(22:36):
just out you know, they have to go wherever, like
in a latrine field or or something like that. Yeah,
it just means somewhere that is not being captured or treated.
Like if you had if you had a properly dug
pit latrine, that would not count. But so you're going
somewhere in the open, like an open pit or something.
And then this was crazy. So the they say globally,
about eight percent of waste water generated by human civilization
(23:01):
flows back into the ecosystem without being treated. Without being treated. Yeah, um,
I mean it's just ramping around the world that this
obviously is going to have be having lots of negative
environmental consequences but also negative health outcomes for humans. And
then another thing that we shouldn't take for granted is
like just the idea of you know, people don't like
(23:21):
the idea of fly is getting into their their stuff. Right,
So like if if people have an outhouse or a
pit latrine, they tend to want to keep a lid
on it. And one thing that does It helps keep
flies from getting down in there and buzzing around, and
of course that would be an annoyance when people are
trying to use these facilities. But that's also not just
an esthetic concern when when human feces are left uncovered
(23:43):
their breeding ground. For for like the fly um Musca
sorbins known as the bizarre fly, which there's some evidence
or a disease vector for the bacterium Chlamydia trachomatis, which
can cause an infection in the eye, is called trachoma,
which is a leading cause of blind us around the world.
It's it leads to hundreds of thousands of people being
(24:03):
blind worldwide. So again we have we have real life consequences,
actual hygiene public health consequences UH to lack of efficient
UH toiletry and sewage technology. I can't emphasize this enough.
The toilet and I want to be very clear about this,
and not just the toilet in your house, but the
toilet paired with a waste disposal and sewer infrastructure. That's
(24:26):
really important. UH. Those things together are not just esthetically nice,
they save lives. This is a life and death issue. Yeah.
And but just to bring it back to a joke. Uh,
this is exactly why the sign at a Kia and
the model apartment says, do not use this toilet. It's
not hooked up to anything. The toilet in and of
itself will do nothing exactly. And we'll revisit this theme
(24:48):
throughout these episodes. But so without a flush to I
guess we should sort of consider the history of toilet
technology in in in consider some broad categories. Right, So,
without a flush toilet connected to a safe disposal system
like a sewer or a well contained septic tank, what
options do you have for disposing of human waste? There
(25:09):
are a few main categories, and they pretty much all
have some major disadvantages. One of course, as we've discussed,
is open defecation. That's just anywhere in the environment. We
know now that's that's dangerous, that can lead to disease
risks um. Another option is pit latrines is like an outhouse,
you go in a hole, you know, and uh, these
these are better than open defecation because they can be
(25:30):
covered up and they can keep stuff separating contained. But
also they're outside your home, you lose the convenience and
the privacy. If they're inside your home, there can be
problems with smells and exposure to waste, so they might
be better from a health perspective than just open defecation
or defecation and to say water sources, but they're also
(25:50):
that their problems with them that make people not prefer
them generally. And then you've got like chamber pots and buckets.
Historically these are very common. These were often emptied by
pouring the contents out of windows into city streets, which
is obviously unsanitary. Even though it's more convenient like you
do your stuff indoors, the impact is sort of the
(26:11):
same as like open defecation on city streets and can
lead to unsanitary conditions and disease and all that like
immediately right outside your your your building. So ideally, what
you'd want, given the limitations of all these things, is
some kind of appliance that allows you to do your
thing inside the privacy and comfort of your own home
(26:31):
and then removes the waste automatically to somewhere that it
can be safely stored or treated that doesn't allow unpleasant
sights and smells to bother you, and doesn't allow the
waste to pollute the surrounding environment or get into drinking
water and soil. Obviously, this is a recipe that a
that a flush toilet could meet very nicely if it's
paired with the right kind of like sewer system. But
(26:52):
I think maybe we should take a quick break and
then come back and discuss some of the solutions that
ancient civilizations came up with for for toilets and sewer designs.
All right, we're back. So we're talking about ancient complex
latrine systems. I was reading about this in a book
(27:14):
by Brian Fagan that I've mentioned on the show before,
the seventy Great Inventions of the Ancient World, and he
points to one of the earliest examples we have of
of latrine technology being that of a latrine drainage system
in the Neolithic period. Uh one example being uh Scara
Bray on the Orkney Islands of Scotland from roughly one
(27:37):
hundred to b C. And the site featured six houses,
each with a buried duct that drains from small toilet
rooms to a single duct that removed waste from the houses.
So it's it's simple, but basically in that you have
the roots of modern sewage technology. Yeah, and uh, so
(28:00):
we see things kind of like this in other ancient
civilizations like for example, one of the great UH ancient
civilizations in terms of civic design and UH and technological
advancement in the way cities are put together is the
Indis River Valley civilization like including sites like Mahinjo Daro
and Harapa, where they had buildings with these sort of
(28:21):
toilet holes that rested over an underground brick drainage pipe
and these sewer drains could be washed out with water
to carry the waste away to cess pits. Right, this
would have been about And another interesting bit about the
Mahinjo Daro site is that they appeared to be channel
junctions in the sewage system so that you could it
(28:41):
could be easily be cleaned, You could go in there
to prevent blockage. So it would seem to be in
an advancement from from earlier designs. Yeah. And another advancement,
of course, comes if you have a good source of
flowing water, like the ancient Romans made use of their
aqueduct supplied water to power a sort of flush toilet.
(29:03):
I think it's not quite a flush toilet because it
depends on how you define it, but it consisted of
in ancient rome basically a bench with multiple holes in it,
So this would have been a very communal affair. These
holes are just like right next to each other, so
you'd go and sit next to a whole bunch of
people and I guess just sit around talking while you
were pooping. And uh. These holes in the bench were
(29:26):
suspended over a drainage ditch with running water, and the
flowing water below the toilet bench would remove the waste
and would also help limit smells. So this is great, Like,
you don't you know, it doesn't stink in there because
stuff skinting. Well, it might stink a little bit, but
it's not as bad as it could be because it's
all getting washed away immediately by the running water. Yeah,
there's running water. There's there's there, there's their mosaics and frescoes,
(29:49):
there is there's probably live music at some of these. Yeah.
I didn't know that. Yeah, that that was a detail
I was reading in I believe it was Smith's book.
Um put pointing out that, Yeah, this would have been
just kind of a fun place to hang out and
have a poop. Yeah, I mean it does seem like
it was a thing that Uh, it's it's hard to
(30:10):
like with modern Western sensibilities about like embarrassment. You know,
you know, when you when you have to go to
the bathroom. It's just hard to imagine sitting around talking
to people while you're all pooping on the same bench.
But when in Rome, you know, poop poop on the bench.
But of course this this had some limitations also because
it relied on a certain kind of infrastructure, right, it
(30:32):
relied on the constant running water supplied by the aqueduct system,
and it had to be done at the end of
the water supply system or else you would of course
foul the water sources downstream of you. So this sort
of had to you know, you wouldn't want to put
this toilet side at like the first place the aqueduct
water supplied water gets to in the city. Right now,
(30:53):
and now, certainly we're going to talk some more about
Roman toilets here, because just the Roman plumbing situation was fabulous.
It was really it was a wonderful creation. They were
really proud of it too. Oh yeah. But at the
same time, there's a problem with thinking too much about
ancient toilets in light of our you know, our modern concepts,
(31:15):
because you know, we're standing at the end of a
long journey in which innate, uh, you know, sensibilities about
cleanliness are confused with concepts of purity and they're augmenting,
augmented to varying but hopefully significant degrees by public health concerns. Right, So,
like you know for a fact that exposure to human
feces can actually be a public health risk. But there's
(31:37):
also like this weird kind of primal thing where you
think of feces as morally bad or something. Yeah, And
that's one of the major trends. And in a Smith's
book about hygiene is that these two things just become
interwoven and it's hard to to to to take them apart.
But the ancient understandings of public health, we're very unlike
our own we've discussed before, are unstuff to blow your mind.
(32:01):
How Roman civil engineer Vitruvius advised against building towns near
marshes because of the fear of the miasma, right, which
which there's some truth to that, and also just like
he seems the fund truth, but at the same time,
there's no magical fog that's going to come out and
give you an illness. Well, he was right for the
(32:21):
wrong reason. Right, Like, so, the idea that you might
get malaria because there are bad smells and vapors coming
off of the marshes is wrong, but it might actually
be correct, so that you don't want to be too
close to the marshes because the standing water produces disease
vectors the mosquitoes that are the vector for the malaria. Now,
he also advised that latrine should be positioned so that
(32:42):
odor is directed away from public spaces. Sounds reasonable, but
as Brian Fagan um at All point out in the
seventy grade Inventions of the Ancient World, quote, such purely
practical measures need not reflect they generalized concern for public
health as we understand it. Uh, you know. But for all,
for all the the Roman feats of plumbing, you know,
it all says little about what they necessarily thought about hygiene.
(33:05):
For instance, Fagan points out that many private toilets and
pompeii were positioned right next to the kitchen. Right. Yeah,
it makes me think about Simpson's episode where they building
at Flanders a new house and the toilet is just
in the middle of the kitchen. Because they're like, you
haven't tried lugging a toilet up a flight of stairs.
Another fact about how these Roman toilets don't necessarily like
(33:28):
completely interlocked with common ideas about hygiene. So you wonder,
what are the ancient Romans used for toilet paper? Right
like when when they were sitting around by the dozens
for social pooping, where they wipers or where they washers,
there was sort of in between, there were well, I
guess you call them washers because there was water elements.
So they apparently wiped themselves with a kind of wetted
sponge on a stick, which they So you'd be sitting
(33:51):
there on the toilet, and then in front of you
there'd be a separate stream of fresh water washing in um,
and then everybody would sort of dip their sponges at
the end of their sick in this water to like
wet it and wash it off, and then they'd wipe
themselves with that and then dip it in there to
wash it off again, and everybody like you would you know,
people would share these things obviously, uh, I mean, imagine
(34:12):
an alternate version of our present world and which instead
of using toilet paper or any kind of sprayer or
what have you, instead it's single use disposable sponges on sticks.
You know, like we're very we're hygienic about it, but
we're just so extra wasteful about it. I came across
I think, what is a false factoid that I'm I
(34:32):
wonder if I should even repeat because I don't want
to spread it via the illusory truth effect. But I'll
say it anyway. Uh. There there are people out there
saying that the phrase getting the wrong end of the
stick comes from this Roman experience. But I did not
find good evidence so that is true. I do not
think that is the origin of that phrase in English. Yeah,
and really what which what end is the wrong end?
(34:54):
It kind of depends on what you're doing, right, Yeah.
I mean if they were like, if it's good enough
for your butt, why isn't it good enough for your hand? End? Um?
All right, we're gonna come back to the Romans, but
but real quick, I want to touch base again on
some of these these older settlements, Um, because we don't
want to give the false impression that like from a
very early point, from say again UT B C onward,
(35:19):
people were just all on board with some sort of
primitive sewage system because that's not the case, because there
are plenty of other advanced settlements in the ancient world.
They just didn't seem that concerned with the latrine technology.
Cattle Hook, I believe I'm attempting to pronounce that correctly.
This has been abrout seven thousand b C. In modern Turkey.
(35:40):
So they had mud brick houses for thousands of people.
And one of the interesting things about this settlement is
that most of these buildings were accessible by like sometimes
like apertures in the sides of the buildings, but often
ceiling holes. And they had no proper streets. The rooftops
were the streets um so so so so that's fascinating.
(36:01):
But but then they also had they had cooking hearts,
they had ovens, they had storage rooms, uh. And yet
they seemed to have been just content with carrying all
of their trash and ratrine latrine waste out to dumping sites,
out to middens beyond the limits of their uh, their
their town. Well. I wonder if the fact that the
streets were positioned above the dwelling spaces actually would have
(36:22):
discouraged them from dumping all of their waste out on
the streets as often happened in other cities because they
would quickly and easily run into people's homes. Yeah, it
could be another big example. Classical Athens may do just
open sewers. Fagan adds that although the water supply was
taken care of, the fifth century BC drainage system consisted
(36:45):
of a single large duct in the marketplace, and everybody
else just had to make do. But let's get back
to Rome, Okay, So obviously a lot of time, energy
and money went into the sewage system, into the overall
plumbing infrastructure. We've mentioned the Acqua ducks already, but we
haven't mentioned Rome's great central sewer, the Cloaca maxima. Cloaca maxima,
(37:07):
that's like a body part on a Tyrannosaurus reaxident. But
cloaca means sewer, So yeah, it's the So it's the
maximum sewer, the great sewer, I mean. So to clarify
the cloaca in the uh, in the animal world, I think,
I'm I think it's basically like a single passage way
that serves the function of like a rectum and a
(37:28):
urethra and a birth canal and all that. It's all
sort of in one right and so but but here
we're talking about a great central sewer, and accounts vary
on when this was built. There's there's a tradition that
says that it was built in the sixth century BC,
but Fagin stresses that it likely came later and may
have remained an open sewer until about second century BC.
(37:50):
But but it was a pretty impressive sense system. For instance,
our old friend Plinity Elder was absolutely bonker balls. I
want to read a quote here. This is from the
Rackham translation that we've used before on the show. You
mean of the natural history. Yes, this is from the
Natural history quote. But at that time elderly men still
(38:10):
admired the vast dimensions of the rampart, the substructures of
the capital, and furthermore, the city sewers, the most noteworthy
achievement of all, seeing that hills were tunneled, and Rome,
as we mentioned a little earlier, became a hanging city
beneath which men traveled in boats during Marcus Agrippa's term
as Edile after his consulship. Through the city, there flows
(38:35):
seven rivers meeting in one channel. These rushing downwards like
mountain torrents, are constrained to sweep away and remove everything
in their path, and when they are thrust forward by
an additional volume of rain water, they batter the bottom
and sides of the sewer. So yes, in case anyone
missed it, there plenty is telling us that Marcus Agrippa
(38:56):
took a sailing vessel through the sewers. That's how amazing
they were. That there's a sin actually a river uh
that runs through Rome, and it is the fabulous sewer.
So this sort of toilet technology. You find this throughout
the Roman Empire. Uh. And yet at the same time
they still had to post warnings against public defication. So
(39:17):
I want to touch on some of these, but I'm
gonna stress here that apparently in translating these, the word
poop is not always sufficient. So I am going to
go ahead. We're gonna go ahead and use the stronger
S word for excrement, but we're going to come up
with the delightful ways to bleep the profanity. This is
a show of family values, folks, right, But but it
(39:38):
also has a show about about history, and apparently these
these bits of often graffiti cannot be properly translated without
using some vulgar terminology. Let's give vulgar alright. So one
this was a graffiti on a wall in Pompeii that says,
again translated with comfort and good cheer, so long as
(40:00):
you don't do it here. So it's a warning, please
please don't poop here. Don't poop here. There are places
to poop, but not here. There's a kind of beautiful
irony about that being on a house at Pompeii. They
want to keep all nice and clean. Yeah. Uh, there's
another one. This was on a wall of a Roman amphitheater.
Uh that is what is it? Cassatur cave mallum. I
(40:25):
think it would be hard season in Latin. I think
it would be cocatour cocatur cave mallum, which means roughly
translated as sure beware the evil eye, which is which
is a delightful thing. I actually actually saw a website
where someone had had taken this thing in Latin and
they framed it above their modern toilet in their apartment,
(40:48):
which is a nice, a nice, a nice twist. So
Christina Kilgrove actually wrote a wonderful article on Forbes about
these inscriptions, titled Uh, scatological graffiti was the Roman version
of Yelp and Twitter, and she points out that you know,
even with with latrines, pooping was still something you were
exposed to a lot. Again, they were very communal, these
(41:09):
Roman toilets. Now, she points out that these bits of
for grel graffiti were generally not found in actual latrine zones.
They were found elsewhere in the city. And part of that,
of course is warning against inappropriate defecation. Please go usual trine,
don't do it here. But then she said, there are
other such inscriptions that were essentially Yelp reviews, like one
(41:29):
that is translated as we pete in the bed. I
confess we have aired innkeeper. If you ask why there
was no chamber pot, that's a good excuse, except why
in the bed? Why not somewhere else in the room? Well,
I mean yeah, I mean you could just use the corner.
I guess. It's like it would be the most destructive
thing you could do, right, And since you can't, you can't.
(41:52):
Actually you leave a Yelp review. You can just say
I peet in this bed, but the reason is because
you didn't provide a latrine of media used. So yes,
graffiti artists of Rome had some fun with with defecation
in general, and with the use of latrines. Um the
whole books have been written on Roman graffiti. It's it's
(42:13):
a wonderful topic. But still at the same time, we
stressed that the latrines of ancient Rome, they do represent
a major contribution to public health. Uh, you know, even
if they didn't have the science down perfectly on everything,
and even if there were a few rogues who didn't
appreciate any of it. Okay, I think we need to
take one more break and then we will come back
to finish up our discussion about toilet history. All right,
(42:41):
we're back. Are we ready to get into some medieval
toilet technology here? Joe, Yeah, we've talked about some pit latrines.
We've talked about some uh some ancient sewer systems sort
of with toilets suspended over them. I wanted to talk
about guard robes. So guard robes are a common solution
later in like sole building periods in Europe, And there's
(43:02):
a simple principle at work here. Why not let gravity
flush for you? Uh So, a garden robe would generally
be like a small room with holes that you could
sit over, suspended up high over a pit or over
an exposed area outdoors, so there could be multiple ways
you would do this, but the waste would generally fall
down into a pit where it would be stored and
(43:23):
then could be removed by workers at some point, or
it would fall into a moat this was pretty common
for castles, or it would just fall down to the
ground along the exterior wall of the castle or manor house.
Uh And because of exposure to like cold winter winds.
A sixteenth century poet named John Harrington, who we will
revisit in the next episode, called this quote sitting on
(43:46):
the draft, so you can imagine it was like, you know,
there's just a hole that's exposed to outside, and I
guess your your stuff falls down along the castle wall
and and you've got the winter winds biting at your butt. Ye,
your hole is exposed to the outside. Think this, yeah, exactly.
So of course the waste would either end up in
a water source and that's not great, or it would
pile up below and have to be removed by workers.
(44:09):
And I'm not positive, but I think a guarterobe type
structure is the central UH architectural feature. In a story
that I loved about a castle, I've actually been to
in Slovenia. Uh. So, there's a castle called Prajamsky Grod
and Slovenia also known as Prajama Castle, and I've got
a picture of it here. It's it's so. It's a
(44:30):
castle that was built in the thirteenth century in the
mouth of a cave. Yeah. And Slovenia just generally has
awesome caves and like karst geological features. But here's somebody
decided to be super bad and build a castle right
on a cliff at the entrance of a cave system.
I like the way they think. So, You've got this
guy named erism Luger or Erasmus of Lugue, who is
(44:54):
a so called robber baron. He's a bad dude who
owns a castle, though I guess most of the people
who own castle are bad. Yeah. It's kind of a
red flag. Yeah. Oh, and that's something we'll get to
again in a minute. Uh So. Uh he's a he's
a so called robber baron, and he and his family
Arizon Luker. Uh. They take over the Progama Castle by
(45:14):
the end of the fifteenth century, and at one point
Luger gets in trouble because he murders a relative of
the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick the Third, and the Holy
Roman Empire comes to collect and they end up laying
siege to his castle here at the Cave Mouth. But
the siege went on and on because the castle had
a secret weapon for siege survival. It had a tunnel
(45:38):
leading into the cave system, which had other openings to
the countryside, so it allowed occupants occupants of the castle
to secretly sneak out and get supplies while they were
under siege. And this of course means the siege can
go on for a really long time. For all I know.
You know, it could go on forever. While the army
is waiting outside to starve you out, you're sneaking off
(45:58):
to the snack bar. So apparently somebody within the castle
got sick of this after about a year or so,
and the insider decided to betray Lugar, the master of
the castle. And I guess they must have coordinated a
plan with the army outside. But however they arrived at
this plan. What happened is they waited until Luger himself
had to go up to the garter robe. It was
(46:20):
this little room overhanging the outside wall of the castle,
and then they raised a red flag to let the
army outside know, and the army blasted the garter robe
with a cannon and killed Luger in one shot. And
that should have been adapted to a Game of Thrones scene.
Maybe it still will be. That's right. The Game of
(46:40):
Thrones did have a death on the toilet scene. They
also had the moon door, which was not a toilet,
but was. It was very much like what we're describing here. Yeah,
a hole that opens up onto the the expanse below
the castle or along the castle walls. No One more
note about medieval toilets. Generally, there were two ways to
do your business in the medieval bedroom. There was a
(47:03):
jerry which you simply pushed under the bad so this
would be just like a standard chamber pot. But then
there was also the closed stool, which is like a
toilet box. And you'll you'll find some examples in the cushion.
It's like satin cushion. It's the fancy little box. It's
like imagine the fanciest um, you know, enclosure for a
(47:23):
litter box you can purchase and it's essentially that for
human defecation, you know, I find. So you look at
a lot of this like medieval royal toilet technology, you know,
the stuff that kings and queens of Europe would poop in,
and in these times there's an awful lot of like
cloth in the elements involved. It just seems like a
bad idea, like you don't want you know, when you
(47:45):
see people who have like toilet like toilet seat covers
that are like fuzzy cloth stuff, and I'm always just like,
what are you doing? A toilet should be all like
hard surfaces that are easy to clean off. You know,
my god, it just seems wrong to like be putting
cushions and fabric and all that are all over your toilet.
(48:06):
That just seems like a recipe for disgusting nous. Oh yeah.
An example of this, my family wants rented a home
that had a white carpet in the bathroom all the
way up to the toilet. Is ridiculous. Oh my god,
that's horrible, like brown shag carpet. Fine, but you don't
want white carpet. It's just a terrible idea. I mean,
(48:29):
why don't you If you're gonna do that, why not
just have like cloth dinner plates and stuff hard non
porous surfaces people though, yeah, you gotta be able to
clean it all right, So we're gonna go and close
out this episode right here, but we will be back
because the next episode we're going to really get into
what you probably think of as the modern toilet. We're
(48:51):
gonna talk more about the modern flush toilet, where it
came from, uh, and what it's it's impact has been.
In the meantime, if you want to check out more
episodes of invent S, head on over to invention pod
dot com. That's our website. That's where we'll find all
the episodes, links out to social media accounts you name it.
And I should really stress if you want to support
the show, the best thing you can do is make
(49:12):
sure you've subscribed, and then if you have the ability
to rate and review the show wherever you get it,
please do so because that that helps us out, helps
the algorithm, helps us continue to bring you week after
week uh new amazing, mundane and world changing inventions. That's right, So,
as always, thanks so much to our excellent audio producer,
(49:34):
Torre Harrison, And if you would like to get in
touch with us with feedback about this episode or any
other to suggest a topic for the future, or just
to say hello. You can email us at contact at
invention pod dot com, se
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