Toilet Humor - Chapter One

 

“I advise you, if you are anxious to be read of, to look for some boozy poet of the dark archway who writes verses with rough charcoal or crumbling chalk which folk read while they shit”.

“Marcus Valerius Martialis” Rome, 70 C. E.

I am assured the average healthy human produces an ounce of poo for every 12 pounds of body weight, dropping a log anywhere between 3 times a day to once every three days. Our foul, stinking meadow muffins are so putrid a blind leopard with a head cold could track a human through a stink weed swamp. The only reason we were not hunted to extinction is that we used to live in the trees, where our “stinkies” magically disappeared when dropped.

“What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before?’ Answer: A key.”

Sumarian joke, 2, 500 B.C.

This “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” hygiene worked until about 3 million years ago when we started to spend time on the ground. It must have been a short transition, as proved by our still smelly merde. But as long as our populations remained mobile we could usually outrun the lions and tigers and bears, and defecate away from where we hunted and gathered. When the ice ages restricted our outings, our Cro-Magnon siblings filled so many sheltering caves with aromatic and putrescent paleo-feces, we drove our Neanderthal roommates to prefer the cold outdoors to our proximity.

Strepsiades ; “Do you see this little door and little house?...This is a thinking-shop of wise spirits....

These men teach, if one give them money, to conquer in speaking, right or wrong.....They are minute philosophers, noble and excellent.”

Act I, Scene I. The Clouds by Aristophanes 424 B.C.

Then, about 10,000 years ago, humans settled down in settlements and started farming. Human populations mushroomed, as did our fecal matter. This led to the first great invention to deal with scheisse – sewage. 

Whoever was running things in the palace at Knossos on Crete 3,000 years ago, could pass a BM without ever having to see or smell it, as the constantly running water in the palace pipes instantly removed the royal turd from proximity to the royal nose. This may be the origin of the Robert's Supreme Court legal precedent that rich people's poop don't stink.  But, of course, the palace pipes had to end somewhere, and the property values just downstream must have plummeted, along with the the owner's odor and ardor.

“Eat lettuce and soft apples eat: For you, Phoebus, have the harsh face of a defecating man."

Marcus Valerius Martialis 70 C.E..

It was King Tarquin in 600 B.C.E. who first mixed socialism and sewage, when he built Rome's 16 foot wide Cloaca Maximum, aka the central sewer, aka “the big poop hole”, atop the cities' 100 foricae, public latrines, where King and commoner alike could discharge a brownie without having to give it a second thought. 

This sanitation reduced the city's death rate to a mere 30,000 a year, allowing the population to top one million during the first millennium. But that didn't last. After the Romans threw out the Etruscan Kings, they privatized new additions to the sewer system, producing some very rich crap merchants – from the Latin “crappa” meaning chaff, or rejected material. But squeezing every ounce of profit from the poop populi left the sewers leaky and often in disrepair and disconnected. Thus Rome suffered a series of plagues that killed over half the population every few decades. Where upon the patricians took their money and fled to the suburbs, like Ravenna and Constantinople, where they didn't have to smell poor people's poop.

“Apollinaris, doctor to the emperor Titus, had a good crap here.”

Graffitti on a wall in Herculaneum, Italy 79 C.E.

The fall of Rome brought on the dark ages, which meant even royalty were reduced to making night deposits in a chamber pot, a sort of portable latrine. Of course the wealthy had servants to dump their “cacha” (Latin profanity for poop) , usually in the nearest street, which became a sewer, from the old French “seuwiere”, meaning a drain cut in the ground. This was also the origin of the “High Street”, as the most valuable address, because, as any populist will tell you, shite runs downhill.

“With your giant nose and cock, I bet you can with ease When you get excited, check the end for cheese.”

Marcus Valerius Martialis 70 C.E.

By the 16^th century, the 200,000 subjects living in the fetid putrid sewer of London, then the largest city in Europe, were dropping dead daily from anthrax, measles, whooping cough, strep throat, syphilis, child bed fever, malaria, polio, tetanus, and cholera, to name but a few of the infectious endemic illnesses. In addition there was an epidemic of influenza from 1557 to 1559 that killed 5% of  the city. The first half of the century saw five waves of the “Dreaded Sweats” or “English Sweats” that killed tens of thousands within 24 hours of affliction. The Black Death or Bubonic Plague swept through London in 1563 (17,000 dead), 1578 (3,700 dead), 1582 (3,000 dead) and 1592 (11,000 dead). And the cause was obvious, even without a viable germ theory.

“This Nicholas just then let fly a fart, As loud as it had been a thunder-clap, And well-nigh blinded Absalom, poor chap; But he was ready with his iron hot, And Nicholas right in the arse he got.  Off went the skin a hand's-breadth broad, about, The coulter burned his bottom so, throughout, That for the pain he thought that he should die, And like one mad he started in to cry, "Help! Water! Water! For God's dear heart!”

The Millers Tale – The Cantabury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer 1478

By 1600, the largest tributary of the Thames, the Fleet River (old Anglo-Saxon “fleot”, a tidal inlet), once called “The river of wells”, had been an open sewer for two centuries. Ben Johnson, Shakespeare's contemporary, penned a tribute “On the Famous Voyage”, praising two lads who dared to boat down the 100 yard wide “ merd-urinous” stream. In the stone lined channel “Hung stench, diseases, and old filth, their mother...pills and eke in potions, Suppositories, cataplasms and lotions...the grave fart, late let in parliament.” At last a dead cat floats to the surface and curses the travelers. “How dare Your dainty nostrils (in so hot a season, When every clerk eats artichokes and peason, Laxative lettuce, and such windy meat) Tempt such a passage? When each privy's seat, Is filled with buttock, and the walls do sweat Urine and plasters?” But the waters of the Thames barely noticed the Fleet's filth, so contaminated were its own. The only thing more dangerous than being a child raised in sewage soaked Elizabethan London, was being Elizabeth in the the same place.

“In vain, the Workman showed his Wit, With Rings and Hinges counterfeit, To make it seem in this Disguise, A Cabinet to vulgar Eyes...So Strephon lifting up the Lid, To view what in the Chest was hid...So Things, which must not be expressed When plumped into the reeking Chest; Send up an excremental Smell, To taint the Parts from whence they fell. The Petty coats and Gown perfume, Which waft a Stink round every Room.”

Jonathan Swift “The Lady's Dressing Room” 1732

After years of living under the constant threat of a charge of treason, Elizabeth Tudor put on the crown in 1558 as a 25 year old paranoid anorexic, subject to panic attacks. Living just above the level of common sewage, the nobility survived eating slightly spoiled food, prepared by unwashed hands, unevenly cooked in polluted water. This lead to repeated bouts of stomach cramps, mild fevers, headaches, watery diarrhea and vomiting, which lead to dehydration. This gastroenteritis would rarely prove fatal to an otherwise healthy adult like Elizabeth, but it killed one in four of all infants and a quarter of all surviving children by the age of 10. However salvation from this rising tide of poo was offered in 1595 when a member of Elizabeth's court invented “The John”. Except he called it the “Ajax”, for a very punny reason.

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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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