TOILET HUMOR Chapter Five

 

I am told the difference between basic pottery (first developed about 20,000 years ago) and porcelain pottery (first created about 1,000 years ago) is silicate Kaolinit clay in the slurry and an additional 500 degrees Fahrenheit in the firing process. The cost of achieving that temperature is worth the effort because porcelain is impermeable to water throughout its structure and thus, with glass, the only truly hygienic human made material. 

That meant porcelain was ideal for making “chamber pots”, resistant to staining and easily cleaned. Every potter in England who could, made chamber pots. And the top of the blue blood bottom market was claimed by Wedgwood, chamber pot maker for royal butts since King George III (above). But there were dozens of porcelain potters in England, clawing and scratching for chamber pot market share, like the Twyford family - “Fathers of the British Bathrooms”

“In days of Old, When knights were bold, And, toilets weren't invented. They laid their loads,
Beside the road, And, walked away contented”

Anonymous

Twyford's had been making pottery in Stroke-on-Trent since 1680. But when London outlawed cesspits in 1849, Thomas Twyford senior moved to London and began aggressively selling water closets for London's growing middle class. The Twyford advantage was a siphon design which came to dominate the export market. But he over expanded and by the time Thomas Twyford junior got control of the company in 1879, it was almost bankrupt. Thomas had to do something big. He did it in 1884, when he released his “Unitus”, billed as a “trap-less toilet.”

“In Cologne, a town of monks and bones, And pavements fang'd with murderous stones

And rags, and hags, and hideous wenches; I counted two and seventy stenches, All well defined, and several stinks! Ye Nymphs that reign o'er sewers and sinks, The river Rhine, it is well known,
Doth wash your city of Cologne; But tell me, Nymphs, what power divine, Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine?”

Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1834

It wasn't actually trap-less of course – the trap was still there just concealed inside the porcelain. But the “Unitius” was the arrival of the modern can, the everyman and every woman's throne, the feces and forget privy, the dump and deny water closet, the my-poop-don't-stink lavatory, the head, the John, the loo, the shit can, and most recently and famously, the Crapper.

“I come here to sit and think, I usually don't mind the stink, But when it gets bad, I am really glad,

That quick out of here I can slink.”

Anonymous

The etymological of crap begins with the Latin “crappa” meaning the chaff, or the unusable portion of wheat. In old Dutch this became “krappe”, an inedible fish or other food. And that was the origin of the family name of Thomas Crapper. The word didn't come to mean what it means today until Thomas began to express his business philosophy of slapping his name on everything that came out of his factory, from personal product to his employee's inventions.

Draw out yere sword, thou vile South'ron! Red wat wi' blude o' my kin! That sword it crapped the bonniest flower, E'er lifted its head to the sun!

Poet Allan Cunningham 1847

At 14 years of age Thomas Crapper was apprenticed to his brother George, who was already a master plumber in the wealthy London suburb of Chelsea. By the time he was 25 the proud Thomas had been awarded nine patents for plumbing innovations. He was no longer a mere plumber. He now billed himself as a “Sanitary Engineer”.

“The flush toilet, more than any single invention, has 'civilized' us in a way that religion and law could never accomplish.”

Poet Thomas Lynch - 1997

One of Thomas' nine patents was for a fully automated water closet. The pressure of the user sitting down compressed a pair of springs under the seat. When the client arose from their effort the springs lifted the seat and via rods released flush water from the reservoir tank above. Unfortunately it became known as the “Bottom Slapper”. The heavier the user the faster the springs rebounded, in a Catholic punishment for all who soiled the system.  Users found them selves unable to relax during their commodious visits for contemplation of the test that was to come the instant the pressure was off.. Needless to say the auto toilet had few repeat customers. .And in fact, only two of Thomas' the nine patents proved of any lasting value.

“Men who consistently leave the toilet seat up secretly want women to get up to go the bathroom in the middle of the night and fall in.”

Comic Rita Rudner

In 1866, at 30, and filled with a self confidence that would never leave him, Thomas Crapper opened his own plumbing business in Chelsea (above), complete with an on-the-premises brass foundry. He began every business day by joining his brother George for a champagne breakfast at a pub convenient to both their shops. And this practice might explain his decision to install windows in the front of his factory on Marlborough Road (above, left & right of door) to display his product, as if his “flush down” toilets were shoes or ladies frocks. There were reports that Victorian matrons occasionally grew faint at the impropriety of all those lavatories, the function of which  dare not speak its name, stacked up in full public view. But it must have increased worker moral. It clearly increased Thomas'. And it also increased his sales.

“What is toilet training if not the first attempt to turn a child into an acceptable member of society?”

Author Rose George 2004

A big part of Thomas' business was the installation of public lavatories. And in each shinny porcelain Crapper urinal was painted a buzzing bee. It was an inside joke among the public school boys standing to relieve themselves, which they had learned from their Latin instructions.  In Latin a bee is called an “apis”.  A piss. Very funny.

“If you do the toilet scenes well and commit to them, they can be really, really powerful.”

Actress Sandra Bullock

By the 1880's Thomas broke the Wedgwood monopoly on royal crap, establishing a personal connection with the long suffering Prince of Wales, forced to put up with his mother's crap until Queen Victoria finally died in January of 1901. After that the aging Prince became King Edward VII, and Thomas Crapper became “Sanitary Engineer” to the royal bottom. Thomas retired in 1904, turning the business over to his nephew George Crapper (lower right) and his old business partner Robert Wharam (lower left). And in late January 1910, Thomas Crapper (below) , the man with the self confidence to market crap, and do so successfully, passed quietly into that great cistern in the sky.  The company survived, sans any actual Crappers, until it was swallowed by a competitor in 1963.

“Crap has always happened, crap is happening, and crap will continue to happen.”

Author Chuck Palahniuk

But with human populations expanding, it was increasingly difficult to avoid all that crap humans had flushed away.

“The average human being spends three years of life going to the toilet, though the average human being with no physical toilet to go to probably does his or her best to spend less.”

Author Rose George  - 2004

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UNDER PRESSURE cutting diamonds

 

I bet the the man who actually first laid eyes on the legendary jewel was not Frederick Wells (above). It seems unlikely that in South Africa in 1905 a white man would have been at the dig’s face, where the danger of a cave in was greatest.

Still, the legend has it that Frederick spotted the rock embedded in the stone wall just above his head (above, reenactment), reached up and pried what he first thought was glass out of the stone with his pen knife. And if that seems as unlikely to you as it does to me, we should both remember that everything about this particular rock is unlikely.

The nursery where this carbon crystal grew was an odd place. First, the surface above it had to have been stable for 1 to 3 billion years – maybe three fourths of the age of our planet. And for all of that time 90 to 120 miles below this stable surface the temperature had to be a constant 1,000 degrees centigrade, and the pressure about 653,000 pounds per square inch. The longer a carbon crystal remains under that pressure and temperature, the larger the crystal grows. And this one grew to weigh one and a half pounds. 

There are only a few spots in the earth where the temperature and pressure has remained consistent for so long; beneath the Canadian Shield, beneath Russian Siberia, beneath the Baltic Shield, beneath the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent,  beneath the Brazilian Shield, beneath northwest Australia, Beneath West and South Africa.

The heat allows the molecular bonds of carbon atoms to become plastic, while the immense pressure squeezes them into an eight sided crystal. Over eons such carbon crystals grow slowly and they must be fairly common in regions of the mantle where the carbon bonds with water. But then something unlikely happens. The earth burps.

If one of these carbon crystals rises to the surface slowly, over years or even decades, the atoms binding its carbon molecules together return to their fail-safe state, which is graphite – pencil lead. 

For carbon to remain a crystal, it must reach the surface in a burst, over no more than a few minutes. To travel from the nursery to the surface, then, the stone must reach speeds of several hundred miles an hour. Supersonic.

Such a speed can only be reached if the capping pressure is suddenly punctured by a narrow fissure, at which point the temperature and pressure produces a powerful volcanic explosion at the surface. For that to happen is unlikely. But over four billion years unlikely becomes inevitable.

The first European who “owned” the surface above this particular jewel was a white immigrant farmer named Cornelis Minnaar.  His farm was in the southern part of Africa, north of the River Valaal, 25 miles east of the city of Pretoria (Tshwane).  The Boers, as these Dutch transplants called them selves, had made the trek to this region to avoid the British, who were intent on stealing their colony. 

In 1861 Cornelis sold a section of his land to his brother, Roelof , who in 1896, sold an even smaller part to Willem Prinsloo (above) who was just starting a family. The sale price was 570 English pounds, and it was William who owned the land when another Dutchman named Fabricus arrived looking for buried treasure.

Being experienced in this sort of thing, Fabricus first inquired as to where the Prinsloo households had dug their “sanitary pits”. This was a euphemism for the holes used to bury the products of your outhouse, politely known as “night soil”. Why dig a hole when a hole had already been dug? Because it was easier to break the surface. But since nothing unusual had been found in the sanitary pits, Fabricus assumed he would have to look elsewhere. 

Once he had located some “virgin dirt”, he scrapped away the thin red top soil, and then hacked his way through ten feet of yellow limestone gravel (above), the bi-product of primordial coral reefs...

...before reaching a blue slate gravel (above) peppered with tiny red garnets. This rock was called Kimberlite.  And when he saw it, Fabricus realized he had struck pay dirt

Fabricius was working for an Englishman named Henry Ward, who had paid for the option to search on Prisloo’s land.  But Ward didn’t have the money to make the buy, and besides William Prisloo (above) was not interested in selling to an Englishman, since it looked like war was about to break out between the Boers and the English. 

Which it did.  Two of them, in fact.  After the second war was finally settled in 1904 – The British won – Ward now sold out his options to Thomas Major Cullinan.  

By then Willem Prinsloo was dead. So Thomas Cullinan (above) made an offer to William’s widow, Maria Prisloo.  Broke and defeated, she sold the farm for 52,000 pounds. Not a bad profit.

Cullinan and partners named their new venture "The Premier Mine". Production started at the end of April 1903, and in a year 2,000 people, mostly local Africans were blasting, chopping, digging and hauling blue Kimberlite out of the open pit. They were looking for diamonds.

Most diamond mines start out as open pits. A Kimberlite Pipe is famously “carrot shaped”, wide at the top, narrow towards the bottom. And after less than a year of digging, on 25 January, 1905, this new mine is credited with producing the largest gem quality diamond ever found.  

Diamonds are not rare, but gem quality diamonds are. On average two hundred tons of ore must be culled for every 1 caret of gem diamond, (there are 141.7 carets in every ounce) and only one out of every five million diamonds weighs two carets or above. 

The one and one half pound diamond Mr. Wells claimed to have pulled out of the rock face that January afternoon, was rated at 3,106 carets. In the name of good publicity, it was named after Mr, Cullinan.

After a nondescript voyage to England via the royal mail in an unmarked plain brown box, The Cullinan, as it was now known, was presented to King Edward VII. He asked as many experts as he could find - geologists, gemologists and even the physicists Sir William Cookes (above) -  how to cut this hunk of rock so it would be as pleasing and valuable as possible.

Cookes noted that around a small black spot in the interior of the stone the colors were very vivid, changing and rotating round that black spot.  "These observations indicated internal strain…there was a milky, opaque mass, of a brown color, with flakes of what looked like iron oxide trapped as the crystal formed around it.  There were four cleavage planes of great smoothness and regularity.” At issue was how to turn this indescribably rare nondescript lump into something indescribably rare and beautiful.

Diamonds had been known by Europeans since the tenth century, but it was not until the 17th century that they became popular amongst the aristocracy, not until the first “Brilliant Cut” by Italian jeweler Jules Mazarin, really showed the beauty that was hiding inside. His diamonds sparkled with 17 facets, or faces, each one reflecting light back out at the viewer. By 1900 the skill of the diamond cutter had increased the possible reflections to 57 facets.

The general consensuses was that the best cutter for this job was Joseph Asscher (above), ironically another Dutchman. He studied the Cullinan for six months in his shop in Amsterdam, surrounded by a small crowd of bankers, experts and royal representatives, laying out a plan of attack.

As the London Evening News reported in mid-January, of 1908, “…a special model of the diamond in clay was made…It was cut into pieces to give an idea of what would happen if the genuine stone were treated in the same way. After several experiments a definite plan was arrived at…”

Finally, on Monday, 10 February, 1908, at 2:45 pm, Joseph was ready. Surrounded by a small crowd of anxious interested third parties, Joseph poised his hammer over the chisel (above), the blade of which was lodged against the precise point which he had calculated the first strike had to be made. If he missed, or struck a glancing blow, the one-of-a-kind diamond worth a million pounds would be rendered damaged and might end up being worth a few thousand. Joseph drew a breath, and sharply struck the chisel….which cracked apart against the diamond.

Immediately Joseph ordered the room cleared, except for the notary republic for the bankers, who were financing this entire thing. Joseph checked the Cullinan and found it, thankfully, undamaged. He checked his tools (above), re-examined his plans and announced a week's delay while he fashioned a new, larger, chisel. And recovered his neve.

So it was that on 17 February, 1908, alone in the room with the diamond and the notary, Joseph lined his hammer up for a second time over The Cullinan. He struck the precise strong blow, directly above the dark inclusion...

...And the diamond fell apart into three perfectly clear pieces. Despite legends to the contrary, Joseph did not faint. He did, however, drink a glass of Champagne.  Eventually the Cullinan was cut into nine large stones (above)....

....and 96 smaller diamonds, so many that it took 8 months just to polish them all. 

And if you ever get to the Tower of London, you might make a note that the Crown Jewels of England on display there, (including the Queen Mother's broach, above)   might be literally billions of years old, but they have only been in the English royal families’ possession for a little over a hundred years. And they will always be a testament to the creation of timeless beauty under pressure.

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