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 makers for royal butts since King George III. 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 product to 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 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 that 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 on 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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TOILET HUMOR Chapter Four

I think the best way to describe the graveside ceremony  was short and sad. But mostly short. It was held Tuesday noon, 21 July, 1858, in London's park-like Brompton Cemetery. There was not a cloud in the sky. The temperature was in the mid-nineties Fahrenheit, and the formalities for the dearly departed Doctor John Snow, who had died of a stroke the week before, were as brief as decorum would allow. 

Many admired the “austere and painfully shy” man who would one day be called the “greatest physician of all time”, who founded not only anesthesiology but epidemiology as well. But on this day the stench overwhelmed grief and respect.

The stench wafted from the river which snaked through the capital of the British Empire, 300 yards from Brompton Cemetery. In an average year, the river's current was dwarfed by the twice daily 23 foot tides. But in 1858 the last rain in the Thames valley had been in March - over three months ago – and Old Man Thames had become a warm stagnant open air cesspit, it's swelling twice a day merely rearranging the human and animal waste piling up across the 700 foot wide 6 foot deep tidal flats, crossed by the new London Bridge.

Twelve years before, in 1842, the city had outlawed the municipal cesspits that were overflowing into the streets and polluting the 17,000 wells used by the 2 ½ million residents of London for drinking and cooking. Civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette would report: 'Within a period of about six years, thirty thousand cesspools were abolished, and all home and street refuse was turned into the river'" Now 250,000 tons of sewage was being poured directly into the Thames every day. Then, at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851, some 827,000 curious paid a penny each to use a flush toilet for the first time. These proved so popular they were kept open for a year, earning over £1000 at a penny a flush. The public's apatite for indoor plumbing accelerated the transfer of poo from human bottoms to river bottom, which is why Dr. John Snow had opposed closing the cesspits.

Dr. Snow had identified the source of an August, 1854 Cholera outbreak that killed over 600 people, as a cesspit contaminated public pump in the poverty crippled Soho section of London. “I found that nearly all the deaths had taken place within a short distance of the pump...that the deceased persons used to drink the pump water from Broad Street, either constantly or occasionally.” But even after identifying water as the means of transmission, Dr. Snow had cautioned against the outlawing of cesspits, because he knew without a sewer, that would merely postpone the problem.  His stand had earned him the enmity of most of the socially progressive scientists of the day, such as Dr William Murdoch and the great chemist Michael Faraday, who still ascribed the source of pestilence to mal-aria, or “ bad air”, and miasmas, disease carrying odors.

In July of 1855, Faraday wrote to the London Times, describing a boat trip down the Thames. “The whole of the river was an opaque pale brown fluid....I tore up some white cards...and then dropped some of these pieces into the water...before they had sunk an inch below the surface they were indistinguishable...Near the bridges the feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface, even in water of this kind.” In June of 1858 “blackish-green” water was reported by Health Officer Dr. Murdoch. “It is quite impossible to calculate the consequences of such a moving mass of decomposition... as the river at present offers to our senses”  Dr. Snow had warned about turning the river into an open sewer, but even in sewers the waster flows. The eight weeks of June-July 1858, when the Thames stopped flowing, came to to be called “The Great Stink”

Solutions to the problem of air or water born disease had been debated for almost two decades, through five Prime Ministers, two of them Edward Smith-Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby. Whatever solution was offered, there were always objections to paying for it. In 1848 the conservative editors of “The Economists” turned to the Old Testament:: “Suffering and evil...cannot be gotten rid of: and the impatient attempts of benevolence to banish them from the world by legislation... have always been more productive of evil than good”. No proof was offered for this contention. But the defenders of doing nothing went further. It was claimed new sewers would be an invasion of person freedom, a big government intrusion, a tax and spend liberal fraud. Filthy water was not the problem. And even the revered Dr. Snow was against big government sewer projects, claimed the opponents.

The latter argument was not quite true, but Snow's position was nuanced enough to be obscure  In fact he suggested it would be a good idea to end "that form of liberty to which some communities cling, the sacred power to poison to death not only themselves but their neighbors” Still the opponents confused enough of the public as to muddy the already filthy waters.  In 1855 Charles Dickens had satirized the opponents by describing a mythical pro-stink campaign rally. “Ratepayers... Health is enormously expensive. Be filthy and be fat. Cesspools and Constitutional Government! Gases and Glory! No insipid water!!” Dickens was kidding, but even to him the stench was no joke. He wrote a friend, “I can certify that the offensive smells...have been of a most head-and-stomach-distending nature” And still the opponents cautioned delay after delay, spreading confusion and misinformation much like modern day climate change deniers do – proving again that we have not changed since leaving our Garden of Eden toilet.

Few would ever see the wiggling predators in a drop of Thames water under a microscope. But in the summer of 1858 everyone could smell the stench. It was, in the words of author David Barnes, “catastrophic...a devastating and even incapacitating onslaught. The stench was intolerable.” Wrote a reporter for the Illustrated London News, “The intense heat had driven our legislators from those portions of their buildings (Westminster) which overlook the river. A few members...ventured into the library, but they were instantaneously driven to retreat, each man with a handkerchief to his nose.”

The absentee tenant representing Leitrim, Ireland, John Brady, asked Lord John Manners, the Commissioner of Works and Public Buildings in Derby's second government, if anything could be done. Lord Manners replied the Thames was not under his “jurisdiction.” . Four days later another minister returned to the topic, and Lord Manners again avoided it, insisting, “Her Majesty's Government have nothing whatever to do with the state of the Thames".

Although Smith-Stanley was the Prime Minister in 1858, he sat in the House of Lords. The leader of the House of Commons was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Benjamin Disraeli, the most capable politician of his generation. And Disraeli realized the stench was growing stronger than the opposition. The desperate politicians were spending £1,500 per week to shovel 250 tons of lime across the mud flats at low tide. Under the direction of engineer Goldsworthy Gurney, curtains soaked in chloride were draped over the windows of Westminster to block the stench.  Nothing seemed to help. In mid-June Gurney had to warn the Commons, he could “no longer be responsible for the health of the house.” On 11 June, 1858 even the official diarist of the House of Commons was forced to note, “Gentlemen sitting in the Committee Rooms and in the Library were utterly unable to remain there in consequence of the stench which arose from the river.”

Finally, on 15 June, Disraeli brought the latest version of the “do something about the stench” bill up for debate, recalling the ancient river Styx, the river of death, and referring to the Thames as a “ a Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors".  The cost would be a special 3 pence tax on all London households for the next 40 years - £3 million to rebuild the sewers of London.  Noted The Times,  “Parliament was all but compelled to legislate upon the great London nuisance by the force of sheer stench” .

Wrote the London Globe, “Disgust, alarm, and reasonable precautions induced members” to finally take action. The Times wrote, “Gentility of speech is at an end – it stinks; and who so once inhales the stink can never forget it and can count himself lucky if he lives to remember it.”

The sewer plan, after almost two decades of design and redesign, was simple, as explained by Joseph Bazalgette, the man who would be responsible for building it. “The existing streams and drains all ran down to the river on both sides”, he wrote.   

First, the Thames -  that “pestiferous and typhus breeding abomination” -  was to be walled off by massive embankment, built atop new intersecting sewers (above, right center)  on either shore  “...so as to intercept those streams:”  Atop the embankments new roads could be built, and parks and open spaces. It promised a better world, a world of light and fresh air and ease of commute. But most of all it promised and end to the stench. 

The waste was not to be treated. It was merely to be dumped somewhere else, farther away, down stream, out to sea.  English humans were still searching for the Garden of Eden, where their poop would remain out of sight, sight of mind, out from under their noses and out of their drinking water.

The massive tax increase passed in just 18 days,  from creation, consideration, amendments, debate and passage. Usually only declarations of war received such quick treatment. It would have been cheaper to have fixed the problem earlier, and Lord knows most people wanted to fix it sooner. Uncounted lives would have been saved. The economy would have been improved, along with the health of the citizens, by following the simple rule of never shitting where you eat.  But it did not pass until the richest who refused to pay for the improvements, could no longer say no while holding their noses. It would take another twenty years to complete the work, but at last it was begun in August of 1858, just before the rains came back..

The London sewers did not return English men and women to the Garden of Eden. None of us ain't ever going to get back there. And yet, we never seem to stop trying.

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TOILET HUMOR Chapter Three

I have decided that people are like turtles – we can't go home again, so we carry a piece of our old home around with us. We keep 25 feet of the primitive earth's atmosphere trapped in our intestinal tracts, occupied by little buggies who die in the presence of oxygen and breath and exhale methane and hydrogen sulfide. They turn what you eat into what keeps you alive. But in order to stay healthy, you have to keep the bugs in your gut from getting above your neck, around your mouth, nose or eyes. And off your hands, because you put you fingers on your face about 2,000 times a day. Trust me. If its on your hands, it will end up in your face. Modern humans have invented a device making it harder for the bugs in your gut to get to your face too often; The flush toilet. Pull the lever and your stinky, dangerous poo vanishes, as if it were never there, just the way it used to in the Garden of Eden.

But a flush toilet is not just a hole in the floor with water running through it. The Romans built those, and the found they not only stank, they were also dangerous. Methane can explode at anything higher than a 5% concentration and hydrogen sulfide above 4%, giving a naval meaning to the term “powder room”. Both gases are lighter than air, so they tend to rise back into the place they came from.   The Romans even had a prayer asking the god of sewers to please not burn their bums in the occasional fecal flash over. So before a home toilet could be perfected, a way of keeping the stinky hydrogen sulfide and explosive methane down and out of the “lieux a soupape” had to be found.

Some of the best minds in the world tackled this problem. Benjamin Franklin thought he had “a cheap and easy” solution. “The excrement may be received in...proper cisterns. The excrement are soon dissolved in water.” If he had kept at it, Franklin might have invented the septic tank. But he got distracted by politics, leaving the problem to be attacked by a Edinburg Mr. Fix-It and a crippled Yorkshire tinkerer, both of whom thought more about money than they did about politics. Which is odd since English politics would play such a crucial role in starting this story.

In 1745 the last rebellion of the highland Scottish clans was smashed on the field at Culloden. Lowland Scotsman John Campbell, the 5^th Duke of Argyl, chose to fight for the winning side, and he was rewarded by the English King with honors and £21,000 in gold. To display his new fortune, Campbell decided his new castle at the foot of the highlands in Inverness (above), needed a new pipe organ, and he hired two mechanically inclined young Scotsmen men to build it - John and Alexander Cumming. Impressed with the younger boy's mechanical talents, Campbell bought Alexander an apprenticeship to a clock maker, and then in 1752 set him up in business in Inverary as a watchmaker.  For a cut of all his future profits, of course.

Alexander (above) was very good at making watches and watch-work driven mechanical devices for wealthy patrons, and within a few years moved his business to the fashionable Bond Street in London. 

In 1765 King George III commissioned him to build a clock that also recorded the barometric readings for an entire year (above). And it was this project that lead Alexander Cumming to the toilet problem, although he didn't entirely trust his own fix.

Now, for something over fifteen hundred years, Catholic theology had enshrined the ideas of Aristotle - the earth is at the center of the universe, the stars are fixed and unchanging, nature abhors a vacuum,  and air has no weight. People were burned at the stake for questioning the Macedonian tutor. Then in 1640, the free thinking Italian, Gasparo Berti poured water into the open end of a glass tube sealed at the bottom. He then inverted the tube in a bowl (above). When he removed his finger from the bottom opening, naturally, the water drained into the bowel. But the tube never completely emptied. This proved Aristotle wrong twice. First, the empty space appearing between the top of the tube and the new water level, was a vacuum, which Aristotle said did not exist. And secondly, the supposedly weightless air pressing down on the water in the bowl, held up the water column in the tube. Berti had invented the barometer. And a hundred-thirty years later Cumming turned Berti's invention into the world's first flush toilet. Almost.

Cumming wrote, “The advantage of this water closet, depends upon the shape of the bowl.” But that was just a sales pitch. Alexander farmed out the bowls to Wedgwood for the production models. And in most of its functions, his water closet was not so much revolution as evolution. After “doing your business”, you pulled the handle. That slid open a copper valve at the bottom of the bowl, at the same time releasing water from the storage tank, which washed your “business” down the pipe. And that was where the Cumming evolution started.

What Cumming actually invented, and what he patented, was the original “U” tube, also known as a plumbing “trap”. In his revolutionary design, just below the bowl Alexander added an “S” turned on its side in the pipe. After every flush air pressure held a reservoir of water in the bottom of the first “U” bend which blocked the lighter than air noxious gases from escaping up from the lower levels in the system, be it a latrine, a cesspit or a sewer. It was simple. It required no moving parts - the valve sealing the bowl served the customer's expectations only. Alexander Cumming's 1775 patent for a flush toilet was far more revolutionary than Franklin's American Revolution, and it was a lot quieter.

Alexander's design had just three small problems. First – if the water in the U-trap should evaporate, the gases would float back into the “water closet”. Second - below the “U” trap there was now a slight negative air pressure, which encouraged the occasional unpleasant blow back up the pipes. Third - the copper valve over the drain at the bottom of the bowl - which, thanks to the “U” trap, it didn't actually need, but the customers expected – that seal was not water or air tight. And as the copper valve was also periodically coated with crap, flushing only partially cleaned it. And the valve had a tendency to rust, and stick and stink. And fourth, the seal between the bowl and the pipes usually leaked, adding to the ordour of the powder room. And this was when the second genius arrives in our story, a crippled farm kid cum cabinetmaker named Joseph Bramah (below).

Braham was working for a London plumber, installing Cumming water closets, and dealing with angry customers. Complaint number one over the winter of 1776-77 was that the thin sliver of water left in the bowl after flushing, tended to freeze, locking the valve closed. 

Bramah fixed that by replacing it with a simple flap (above), and left more water in the bowl to prevent freezing.. Bramah got a patent for it in 1778, and another for inventing a float valve that would automatically refill the water tank after every flush. When Cumming saw what the kid from Yorkshire had done, he went back to his watches. And with the fortune he made, Joseph Bramah turned his Denmark Street water closet factory into a sideline, invested the profits into making locks, and the machinery to make locks.

And that was where toilet development got stuck until somebody dealt with the problem of what to do with your poo, after you flushed the toilet.

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