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Posted on: 07/12/2000; Publication date: July 2000
Toilets Through The Ages
c Plumbing & Mechanical 1989
Telltale outlines of limestone seats, primitive channels and gouged-out crevices
in ancient, crumbled palaces belie early attempts at producing a viable privy or
latrine. Rudimentary toilets have been found in the ruins of Mesopotamia and
along the ancient trade routes of the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas. Whose
or which technique developed first, as opposed to that borrowed from other
cultures, probably will never be determined. Forces of nature and the savage
brutality of ancient conquerors left few full-fledged privies intact.Safe to say, the earliest toilet in the land-locked areas was a "squat" hole in the
sand or earth. As civilizations advanced, so did the need for means of disposal,
especially for the comfort of the rulers. Toilets have been discovered in such
divergent areas as ancient Babylonia and the 12th century B.C. harem of an
Egyptian pharaoh. These royal toilets had a seat over a hole or pit dug out in the
sand or clay, the deposits scooped out by slaves and/or layered with lime or clay.
Close by, water from the royal bath drained off into a basin below. "Running water" toilets appeared sporadically throughout the ancient world,
literally meaning elimination over a running rivulet of water from a stream or above
a drain. This "evolved" into a single seat with a contoured hole or a plank of seats
positioned over the water, "flushed" out regularly or at intermittent periods of the
day. The early Greeks refined the concept by adding marble benches and
enclosing their latrines in buildings, some architecturally styled to complement
their gymnasiums. Hundreds of years earlier, the old Minoan plumbers of
Knossos built an elaborate waste and drainage system for their kings, including
the world's first "flushing" toilet supplied by water from a nearby cistern.
The early Romans are noted for their effort to provide toilet accommodations for
the masses, not just for the citizens of means and power. Travelers were free to
use special vases along the roadways or the squatting facility of public privies
(cloacina). Rome reportedly had 144 latrines around the city. In Pompeii, users
had a choice of three cubicles in some facilities: One had a marble seat, the other
none at all, and a urinal. Water entered this privy through pipe, spilling into the
urinal and then along a gutter running under the compartments.
By 300 A.D., the Romans were pretty adept at making the closet a fine place for a
social visit, or where every man indeed could be emperor. One could sit in toilet
chairs complete with high backs, comfortable arms and carved legs and feet. In
addition, the Romans tried to make the facilities as clean as possible, and
provided a communal mop or sponge to wash off any caked areas (including
one's derriere). But any focus on cleanliness and "civilized" living disappeared under the
destructive hordes of barbarians who struck down the Western World from all
directions. When the Roman Empire fell apart, the Roman standard of plumbing
achievement gave way to chamber pots and slop pails, the contents cast aside in
the house or thrown out the window (if any) into the streets below. There were
no channels, no gutters, no engineered system of removal - no water closets.
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Medieval Manners
While the world degenerated into the Dark Ages of filthy
living, plagues and pestilence, some vestiges of toilet accommodations did
remain. At the most primitive level, the immediacy of the dirt or sand took hold
once again.Some European monasteries included water tunnels. These "secret" passages
linking a monastery and convent typically led down to water channels of the old
sewers. The monastery's privy featured a long row of seats over the drain or rill of
water. Sitting back-to-back along a double row of seats above the drain, the
monks "performed their duty" at appointed times. The sanitary arrangement of one particular monastery is credited for eluding the
Black Death in 1349. It employed an underground lead pipe that passed through
five oblong settling tanks to purify the water, each with a vent to control the
pressure. But with records lost or never written, it's hard to prove more than a few
singular instances of functional sanitation. Most castles had their own sewer - typically, the moat - the noxious smell and
ordure no doubt helping to repel would-be invaders. At Rosslyn Castle near
Edinburgh, Scotland, a seat was carved atop a vertical tunnel cut down through
the middle of a 6 foot-thick wall and connected to the moat. A 3-inch hole cut in
similar fashion served as a speaking tube from the dining hall down to the
cooking cellar. In the big English manors, the water closet was part of the building's structure. In
the "Merchant's Tale" of The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer writes of a woman
tearing up a letter and "in the privy softely it caste." (Chaucer is noted for his
earthy and robust style. There is not much else written about closets in this
period because already the closet was considered an indelicate subject.)
A 15th-century book on good manners did have good advice for closet-keepers:
Keep it clean and sweet, and cover the seat with green cloth to camouflage the
odor. But still the indoor privy was virtually nonexistent - without logical
drainage, without a means for running water, there's no place for the excreta to
disappear. From the time of the Old Romans, a common courtesy dictated warning to those
below that the contents of the chamber pot were on the way. Up and down the
streets the wary pedestrian stepped aside upon hearing the French expression,
gardez l'eau. (Pronounced "loo," became an English slang word for the toilet.)
Where there is a need, though, a smart man opens a service business. By the
time of Henry VIII, "night men" were hired to clean out the cesspools. One
entrepreneur charged 16 shillings "for makying cleane the jakes." Smart
landlords included a clause in a renter's lease that stated the tenant had to empty
the cesspool when it was full. On record is a bill in 1494 of two shillings a ton to
empty one cesspool of six tons. In Edinburgh, some Scots inaugurated a new-type specialty business. Crying,
"Wha wants me for a bawbee?" they walked the streets with a pail in hand for the
public comfort. They also provided a big cloak to cover the prospect. Yet plumbing "technology" was making headway. By 1846 almost every house
in Scotland reportedly had a water closet. Tenements, though, were building up,
and some big-size cesspools were needed to serve the neighborhood. In some
cases, three privies for 60 houses was the norm.
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Whatchamacallits
In 1718, one amazed fellow wrote: "I saw a pretty machine
to cleanse an House of Office; viz. by a small stream of water no bigger than
one's fingers, which ran into an engine made like a bit of fire-shovel which hung
upon its centere of gravity so that when it was full, a considerable body of water
fell down with some force and washed away the filth." Yes! Despite false starts
and gaps in history, the invention of the water closet was finally on its way.Back in 1596, Sir John Harington contrived the first toilet ever in England.
He built a "necessary" for himself and one for his godmother, Queen Elizabeth I.
Castigated and ridiculed by his peers for the absurd invention, he never made a
third one. Instead his legacy are the English slang words for toilet, such as
"Harington the jacks," "Ajax," "latrine Jake," and so forth. Two hundred years
later, Harington's silly notion became a logical idea. The early inventers were tinkerers, watchmakers and cabinet makers, for the
early water closets contained many mechanical parts and gadgetry. Years later
some inventers would be specialists as plumbers and sanitary engineers. Alexander Cummings received the first English patent in 1775 for a
forerunner of the siphonic action toilet. His "S-trap," essentially a sliding valve
between the trap and the bowl, was the first to use a trap under a water closet.
Two years later, Samuel Prosser received a patent for a plunger closet,
followed by Joseph Bramah's closet one year later. Becoming a standard on
ships and boats, Bramah's closet had a valve (an early form of the ballcock) at the
bottom of the bowl that worked on a hinge. A Frenchman received his country's first patent in 1796, but it wasn't until 1833
and 1835 that patents in the United States were issued. By then inventions and
variations were appearing right and left. Early closets were combined with a wooden surround, as naturally as
automobiles have roofs and bumpers. Until close to the 20th century, closets
were encased in a cabinet to appear like a furniture item. Toilet surrounds
caused terrible problems of filth and contamination by overflowing and leaking
closet bowls and lavatory.
The pan closet was one of the earliest toilets in the United States. It appeared in
the 1830s and stayed around for almost 40 years. Quite unsanitary, it consisted
of a bowl seat on a lead pot with a hinged pan. The top part of the tinned copper
receiver pan usually could be scoured clean and bright, but there was no way of
cleaning below the pan. William Paul Gerhard, a prominent sanitary engineer, is credited with a
hopper-type water closet that stood on its own metal legs. It had an iron tank high
overhead that supplied the water, used a lead flush pipe, and was outfitted with
an "elegant and ornamental seat, supported on bronzed, galvanized or gilt iron
legs." The Americans Henry and Campbell built a trapless plunger closet with a tank
in 1857. A solid plunger closet with a conical-shaped bowl followed a few years
later. Jos. Zane & Co. of Boston produced a "sanitary closet," with a porcelain
bowl, attached to a galvanized plunger chamber. In 1881, A. G. Meyers of New
York patented a solid plunger closet made in one piece of earthenware and
flushed from a tank. The list goes on and on. They all lost their preeminence to England's Thomas Twyford, who
developed a closet without metal parts. In 1885, Twyford's trapless toilet in a
one-piece, all-china design effectively set the stage for the 20th-century
standard of simple design, a water seal and deep trap seal, and a fair amount of
water in the bowl. Around the turn of the century, a new feature of "quiet" operation threatened
the Victorian "thunder-box" toilet that flushed with a deafening cascade.
Architect and sanitary engineer J. Pickering Putnam ushered in a new era
with his "Sanitas Jet Closet." Operated by water pressure, the flush was quick
and quiet in comparison. An estimated 350 patents on water closet construction inundated the U. S.
Patent Office between 1900 and 1932. While most were considered
insignificant, some featured new developments we now take for granted: a
wall-mounted closet with a blow-out arrangement; a tank that rests on the bowl;
reverse trap toilets and improvements to speed up siphonic action; concealed
jets; the centrifugal rotation of water in the bowl; flushometer valve; backflow
preventer. All in all, the 20th century marks the boundary of the modern
plumbing industry.
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