Why Is It Called a Crapper? (And Other Astonishing Facts About Your Toilet)

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we continue with our American Stories. This is the unspoken story about the small, unmentionable seat in the corner of all of our lives. Or said another way, this is how we have been shaped by our grossest national product. Take it away, Greg Hengler.

00:00:33
Speaker 2: Elvis died in one, and Charles the Fifth, Holy Roman Emperor, was born on one. Although we use them every day, most of us know very little about toilets. Here’s author of “The Porcelain God,” Julie Horin, and public health historian David Rossner.

00:00:53
Speaker 3: Not only did civilization start with the onset of writing, but it also started with man actually coming and getting a hold of his sanitation needs.

00:01:05
Speaker 4: Creation of sanitary systems were, in some sense, the basis for creating great cities and great communities.

00:01:12
Speaker 2: The earliest written reference to the disposal of human waste is more than thirty-six hundred years old and is found in the Bible. In Deuteronomy 23:12-13, God instructs the Hebrews to do their exodus in a holy fashion: “You are to have a place outside the camp. Go there to relieve yourself. You are to have a digging tool in your equipment. When you relieve yourself, dig a hole with it, and cover up your excrement.” For hundreds of thousands of years before this was written, human beings simply squatted when they had the urge to go. As the world became more populated, disposal of human waste became a bit more difficult. In ancient Egypt, cities began to spring up from the desert. By twenty-five hundred BC, the Egyptians solved the waste disposal dilemma, constructing bathrooms with latrines, which were flushed by hand with buckets of water. The latrines emptied into earthenware pipes, many of which are still functional today. The Roman Empire also had a public sewage system. Here’s David Rossner and sociologist Steven Seyfer.

00:02:28
Speaker 4: Rome was not built in a day, but it was built around its water supply system and its ability to get rid of its material without polluting itself or polluting people downstream.

00:02:38
Speaker 5: Their development of the bathroom was incredible. Middle-class Romans in their homes were able to hook up a private bathroom to the public sewer system that Rome had developed, and actually half the waste carried away to the main sewage disposal plant.

00:03:00
Speaker 2: Like Rome’s private lavatories, their public latrines, which were seat holes carved into stone. Benches were erected over channels of water that came from distant mountain streams that flowed through aqueducts for over two hundred miles. Here’s poet Eva Up Glynn visiting some Roman restroom ruins.

00:03:20
Speaker 6: This was a communal privy. You’d have sat here, the seat has disappeared, and your waste would have dropped into this drainage channel. Here the water flushed the waste away. Nobody had to touch it, and of course as it dropped into the water, that minimised smell. Now, then this second water channel running in front of us here was what you would have used to wash yourself. Afterwards, you’d have had a stick with a piece of sponge on the end. Did that in the water, wash behind yourself, thus giving rice to the phrase “the importance of not getting hold of the wrong end of the stick.”

00:03:53
Speaker 2: But the privy, which takes its name from the Latin word for privacy, couldn’t save the Roman Empire. And when it finally fell, the water-fed toilet fell into the lavatorial Dark Ages, clogging up toilet innovation for more than a thousand years. During these medieval times, castle dwellers would strengthen their defenses by dumping waste into their moats. The raw sewage discouraged invaders from crossing it. Here’s physicist Charles Penetti, author of “Extraordinary Origins.”

00:04:28
Speaker 7: The only thing that you had indoors for the next really one thousand years was the chamber pot, which was really something of a horror story. It was a convenience in one way when you needed to go in the middle of the night.

00:04:39
Speaker 3: At nighttime was the time when people would dump the contents of the chamber pot outside their windows into the streets below. And the idea that a man walks on the left side of the female dates back to this time. It was polite for him to get hit by the contents of the chamber pot and to spare the woman.

00:05:02
Speaker 2: In the sixteenth century, the flushing toilet made its debut in England.

00:05:07
Speaker 7: The first nearly modern toilet was made for Queen Elizabeth I in fifteen ninety-six. It was made by her godson, Sir John Harrington. He made it to get back in her good graces because she had banished him from court for using foul language. He came up with a really clever device. It had a tank at the top, it had a valve you open to let water down, and there was a trap door that you could close after you use the toilet.

00:05:35
Speaker 2: Harrington’s primitive toilet had a critical design flaw. One, the flushing sound was ear-piercing, and number two, the pipe beneath the bowl was vertical. Waste went straight down, and sewer smells came straight up.

00:05:52
Speaker 7: The queen complained that fumes came up from the cesspool, but it was a problem that her godson was never able to solve. You realize how bad the situation was. If you look at the Palace of Versailles. A fortune was spent in constructing. It had these wonderful Hall of Mirrors, elaborate chandeliers, and you might have a thousand people being entertained, eating and drinking copiously.

00:06:15
Speaker 8: But where did they go to the bathroom?

00:06:17
Speaker 7: There was not a single bathroom in the entire elaborate palace. And the answer is they went in the stairwells. And one of the reasons the French applied so much perfume during that period was to overcome all of the indoor odors from people relieving.

00:06:29
Speaker 2: Themselves. Outside Versailles, people were relieving themselves in indoor cesspits. They were simply benches or seats perched over holes lined with wood, stone, or brick. Their main drawback, aside from the smell, was that you had to pay nightmen called scavengers wielding a bucket and a shovel to clean them out and carry them on a horse-drawn cart to local streams and rivers. This is why it pays to be upstream. And if you ventured into town and nature called, a man called a Johnny offered his customers privacy. He wore a large black cape and carried a chamber pot. The customer would pay a half a cent and squat over the pot while Johnny covered him with the large cape. Fast forward to eighteenth century America, colonists modified the cesspit by taking it outside and constructing a small wooden shack over it. The outhouse was born.

00:07:31
Speaker 3: They would place the outhouses far enough from the house where there would not be a problems with smell or with seeping into the water supply of the house.

00:07:42
Speaker 2: In seventeen seventy-five, while America was embroiled in the Revolutionary War, back in the Mother Country, another revolution was taking place. British watchmaker Alexander Cumming filed for the first ever patent on a toilet with a twist. Literally, the pipe beneath Cumming’s toilet bowl curved backward in a distinctive S-shaped bend. This allowed water to pool in the U-shaped part of the pipe, cutting off the explosive and stinky sewer gas from below.

00:08:16
Speaker 7: It actually is the modern toilet because we still have that water separating us from the cesspool today.

00:08:24
Speaker 2: Long before President Lyndon Johnson held meetings with Robert Kennedy while sitting on the ‘john’, the toilet played a leading role in governing our nation. America’s first owner of this modern toilet was Thomas Jefferson, who had three of these elite oddities installed at Monticello. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, one important factor was still missing. Without working sewers, waste was just too big a load for the cesspits of the city and seep deep into the ground.

00:08:56
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to our own Greg Hengler tell the story, the history of the toilet, and it’s something we all take for granted. It reminds me of a story we did about horses and cities right up until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Horses, well, they powered everything, and the streets were dirt and the horses had manure, and it became a real problem. Diseases spread the stench, until Henry Ford invented the car, and then of course paved roads. The story of the toilet continues here on Our American Stories, and we continue with Our American Stories and the story, the history of the toilet. Let’s pick up where we last left off with Greg Hengler.

00:09:48
Speaker 2: By the dawn of the nineteenth century, one important factor was still missing. Without working sewers, waste was just too big a load for the cesspits of the city and seeped deep into the ground. Here’s David Rossner and scientist Adam Hart Davis.

00:10:05
Speaker 4: If you have a privy and it’s not too far away from your pump, you’re going to have a real problem. You may literally be drinking the excrement that you are dumping the day before.

00:10:16
Speaker 8: Absolutely disgusting. And when they had drains, the drains simply went out into the street, so all the streets were running with sewage.

00:10:24
Speaker 2: Toilet technology could only go so far until engineers could construct water delivery systems like the Roman aqueducts able to service entire cities. In eighteen forty-two, continuing with the sudden rise of population due to an influx of immigrants, New York City paved the way. The systems designers harnessed a fundamental law of nature that water always flows downhill. That water in your city follows the same principle. Water is pumped to the top of giant towers that are linked to pipes beneath the streets. Since the tower is higher than the water’s final destination, gravity maintains pressure and forces the water through the pipes to your tap and toilet. After water is used, gravity is rendered once again and carries it away through sewer pipes angled downhill. During the nineteenth century, more and more cities followed New York’s example. At the turn of the twentieth century, plumbing was an exploding business in America, much like web search engines are today, and by the nineteen thirties, America’s entire urban population at access to running water. About three-quarters of feces is water and ten percent is undigested food, but the remaining fifteen percent is all bacteria. Billions of them, and it’s these bacteria that give feces its distinctive smell. Most of the bacteria are harmless and spend their lives processing the food inside our intestine, but some are lethal.

00:12:03
Speaker 8: Feces contain all the fiber that we can’t digest that comes in the breakfast cereal and in fresh fruits and vegetables and so on. They contain the remains of dead blood cells, which is why it’s brown, because that’s what the remains are. It’s stuff called bilirubin, which comes from broken down blood cells, and it contains enormous contes of bacteria. And if you ingest those bacteria, if you eat them, then you’re going to get.

00:12:26
Speaker 4: Very. Historically, the two great diseases that are associated with human waste are, of course, cholera. People can be perfectly healthy in the morning and be dead, literally dead, in the evening, and typhoid.

00:12:44
Speaker 2: Between eighteen thirty-one to eighteen thirty-two, fifty thousand Brits died from cholera. In Paris, cholera killed eighteen thousand in a single summer. The U.S. was next.

00:12:57
Speaker 4: Cholera had been moving east. We never expected to hit here, and then eighteen thirty-two, it hit Boston, it hit Philadelphia.

00:13:07
Speaker 2: More than one hundred fifty thousand Americans died during the two cholera pandemics between eighteen thirty-two and eighteen forty-nine. With the help of the new toilet, the Westernized world was drowning in its own excrement. The smell, germs, and death finally led politicians to an effective solution: high-capacity sewers that carried the waste far away from town.

00:13:31
Speaker 8: They’re sort of monuments to excrement, if you like. And I’ve been down the sewers, and it’s absolutely amazing how well they were built. The stuff running through them is not fun, but the sewers themselves are utterly bredential.

00:13:45
Speaker 2: As the astronauts were to be the heroes of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, toilet inventors with the giants that walked among men. The key innovation was a water siphoning system to force waste through the base of the bowl with unpaired paralleled efficiency. What worked then still works now. Once the toilet bowl flush handle is pulled, a valve inside the holding tank called the flapper opens up, and water drains quickly into the bowl. Through a series of angled holes under the rim. The man who was often credited with inventing this flushing wonder probably had little to do with it. Thomas Crapper. Yes, he really existed. What he did patent is the pole chain that worked in conjunction with a valveless cistern, thus decreasing noise and preserving water. Due to his toilet innovations, the Victorian Era plumbing magnate earned himself a place in toilet history, if only by selling lots of them.

00:14:47
Speaker 3: During World War I, when American soldiers were stationed over in Britain, they would come across a lot of these toilets, and they started the euphemism of “‘I’m going to the crap’.” And they based on what they saw on the toilets, which said Thomas Crapper and Company.

00:15:06
Speaker 2: And the ‘john’ is derived from the toilets installed at Harvard University in seventeen thirty-five, which were emblazoned with the manufacturer’s name, Reverend Edward Johns. While Crapper and Johns were making a name for themselves, two enterprising brothers were busy inventing the toilet’s most essential accessory. Although the Chinese invented paper in the second century, it took them more than twelve hundred years to get around to using it in the bathroom. They finally did in 1391 A.D. But it was strictly for the use of emperors. Where did that leave commoners?

00:15:44
Speaker 3: People generally used their hands, and currently in many countries around the world where paper is a premium, people continue to use their left hand. That is why when you travel to parts of the Middle East, to Southeast Asia and Asia, you won’t find any left-handed people. Everyone there is right-handed because the left hand is considered unclean.

00:16:07
Speaker 2: In medieval Europe, commoners used hay, grass, and plant leaves to clean themselves. In early America, millions used corn cobs. The cobs were softened first by prolonged soaking in water.

00:16:21
Speaker 3: The corn cobs were generally given to the pigs to eat, and then when the pigs were finished with them and there was just the cob left, they would take those and use them to wipe themselves, so there was very little waste.

00:16:34
Speaker 2: When math published newspapers and catalogs became commonplace in the nineteenth century, Americans finally said goodbye to corn cobs and hello to Sears, Roebuck.

00:16:45
Speaker 3: People would take the catlog, hang it in their outhouses, and they would read from it while they were doing their business, and at the finish of the business, they would tear off a piece and use it to wipe themselves.

00:16:58
Speaker 2: Things changed in the ’20s.

00:17:00
Speaker 3: Unfortunately, Sears started using glossy print paper. The absorbing benefits of the catalog kind of lost it, so you didn’t see so many people using the Sears catalog is toilet paper from then on.

00:17:13
Speaker 2: By that time, however, consumers had another option: real toilet paper. Here’s Ken Fischberg, author of “Toilet Paper Encyclopedia,” and Charles Penetti.

00:17:24
Speaker 9: There was a man named Joseph Gaietti. He was in New Yorker and he had a paper business in New Jersey. He was the first person who actually took paper, cut it into sheets, into small sheets, and sold it through drugstores as therapeutic paper.

00:17:40
Speaker 7: The people who bought them thought the paper was too nice and ended up using it as stationary writing on it and still using their catalog.

00:17:47
Speaker 2: In eighteen seventy-nine, entrepreneurs Irvin and brother Clarence Scott began selling rolled toilet paper. It was made from tissue paper bought from other manufacturers, which they cut, up, rolled, and repackaged. Although there have been some improvements over the years, today’s toilet tissue is made basically the same way. In the nineteen forty, Scott’s competitor, Northern Paper Mills of Green Bay, Wisconsin, began using chemicals to completely dissolve wood fibers and refer to their toilet paper as splinter-free. In two thousand seven, the prestigious British medical journal’s eleven thousand medical experts and readers, mostly doctors, voted modern sanitation as the number one medical advance since eighteen forty. Not antibiotics, not vaccines, but toilets in clean water. The average human life expectancy increased nearly thirty-five years over the span of the twentieth century. Roughly thirty of those thirty-five years are attributable to improvements in sanitation. While Harrington’s godmother Elizabeth I might be baffled by a twenty-first century porcelain throne, Queen Victoria would easily recognize the seat upon which her great-great-granddaughter Elizabeth II did her sovereign business.

00:19:07
Speaker 1: Harry, are you in there?

00:19:08
Speaker 2: In this modern Game of Thrones.

00:19:10
Speaker 1: Good, right out.

00:19:11
Speaker 2: We’re all privileged members of the same royal family.

00:19:17
Speaker 1: Had a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler. And what a story he told!