The Toilet

In today's excerpt - the toilet. Thomas Crapper became very wealthy by inventing
the Marlboro Silent Water Waste Preventer:


"Perhaps no word in English has undergone more transformations in its lifetime than
'toilet'. Originally, in about 1540, it was a kind of cloth, a diminutive form of
"toile", a word still used to describe a type of linen.


"Then it became a cloth for use on dressing tables. Then it became the items on
the dressing table (whence 'toiletries'). Then it became the dressing table itself,
then the act of dressing, then the act of receiving visitors while dressing, then
the dressing room itself, then any kind of private room near a bedroom, then a room
used lavatorially, and finally the lavatory itself. Which explains why 'toilet water'
in English can describe something you would gladly daub on your face or, simultaneously,
'water in a toilet.' ...


"Most sewagestillwent into cesspits, but these were commonly neglected and the contents
often seeped into neighbouring water supplies. In the worst cases they overflowed.
The people who cleaned cesspits were known as nightsoil men, and if there has ever
been a less enviable way to make a living I believe it has yet to be described.
They worked in teams of three or four. One man - the most junior, we may assume
- was lowered into the pit itself to scoop waste into buckets. A second stood by
the pit to raise and lower the buckets, and the third and fourth carried the buckets
to a waiting cart. Workers ran the risk of asphyxiation and even of explosions since
they worked by the light of a lantern in powerfully gaseous environments.


"In St Giles, the worst of London"s rookeries - scene of Hogarth's Gin Lane - 54,000
people were crowded into just a few streets. Such masses of humanity naturally produced
enormous volumes of waste - far more than any system of cesspits could cope with.
In one report, an inspector recorded visiting two houses in St Giles where the cellars
were filled with human waste to a depth of three feet. The river was a perpetual
'flood of liquid manure,' as one observer put it. The streams that fed into the
Thames were often even worse than the Thames itself. The river Fleet was in 1831
'almost motionless with solidifying filth.'


"Into this morass came something that proved, unexpectedly, to be a disaster: the
flush toilet.Flush toilets of a type had been around for some time. The very first
was built by John Harington, godson to Queen Elizabeth I. When Harington demonstrated
his invention to her in 1597, she expressed great delight and had it immediately
installed in Richmond Palace. But it was a novelty well ahead of its time and almost
200 years passed before Joseph Bramah, a cabinet maker and locksmith, patented the
first modern flush toilet in 1778. It caught on in a modest way. Many others followed.
But early toilets often didn't work well. Sometimes they backfired, filling the
room with even more of what the horrified owner had very much hoped to be rid of.
Until the development of the U-bend and water trap - that little reservoir of water
that returns to the bottom of the bowl after each flush - every toilet bowl acted
as a conduit to the smells of cesspit and sewer. The backwaft of odors, particularly
in hot weather, could be unbearable.


"This problem was resolved by one of the great and surely most extraordinarily appropriate
names in history, that of Thomas Crapper (1837-1910), who was born into a poor family
in Yorkshire and reputedly walked to London at the age of 11. There he became an
apprentice plumber in Chelsea. Crapper invented the classic and still familiar
toilet with an elevated cistern activated by the pull of a chain. Called the Marlboro
Silent Water Waste Preventer, it was clean, leak-proof, odor-free and wonderfully
reliable, and their manufacture made Crapper very rich and so famous that it is
often assumed that he gave his name to the slang term "crap" and its many derivatives.


"In fact, 'crap' in the lavatorial sense is very ancient and 'crapper' for a toilet
is an Americanism not recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary before 1922. Crapper's
name, it seems, was just a happy accident."


Author: Bill Bryson
Title: "The history of the toilet," (from the upcoming book At Home: A Short History
of Private Life, Doubleday)
Publisher: guardian.co.uk
Date: May 17, 2010