[MUSIC PLAYING] Everybody poops and
almost always in a toilet. But it wasn't always the
glamorous, solo activity it is today. It used to be a
weird group thing in some places and
very disturbingly, pig food in others. So how did we go from wildly
defecating in the streets to sitting comfortably
on a piece of art? Today, we're going to look
at the history of toilets. But before we plop down, be sure
to subscribe to Weird History and let us know about what
modern-day conveniences you would like to
hear more about. Now let's go see a
man about a horse. [MUSIC PLAYING] The first known toilet
and sewer system showed up on the scene in
2500 BC in Northern India and Pakistan. Way, way ahead of their time,
houses in the Indus Valley could, in theory, list a
bathroom in the home listing with rooms dedicated solely for
numbers one and two, sometimes three. These rooms
contained drain pipes that led to a central
sewage system, which could be flushed by simply
dumping water into the toilet. Sounds like a very
familiar process so far. Nothing weird yet. Sewage was carried
through a simple grid system in pipes made of
brick and terracotta or all the necessary components to
build a house in Florida. This allowed the
waste to be carried from multiple floors
of the home and dumped into the nearest body of water
or what we today call Florida. These pipes were
relatively sophisticated with accessible utility holes
that led from the street to the main drainage line
and wooden screens built into the end of the drainage
lines to block solid waste. Both of these were
crafted to make maintaining the sewers as easy
and less gross as possible. While many of the elements of
this ancient infrastructure do strongly resemble
what we use today, it would take thousands
of very messy years before Western
societies would catch up with this sanitation system. [MUSIC PLAYING] For a society that
worshipped cats, it's only appropriate
the Egyptians also used a bathroom like one. Ancient Egyptian toilets
were designed specifically with water conservation in mind. They, in general,
went hard on saving, believing in only using H2O
with the intent to reuse it. With no running water
in Egyptian homes, even with dedicated
rooms in which to bathe, Egyptians would pour
water onto themselves at bath time, which
was collected in jars and reused for
agriculture and gardening. The Egyptian 1% would
perch their rich behinds onto limestone seats
to relieve themselves into containers filled
with sand, which would be cleaned
out by the servants or what today is
called owning a cat. The lower plebeian class
would also relieve themselves in pits of sand. But their poor garbage
butts had to settle for a dumb wooden
stool with a hole cut in the middle, instead
of a more glorious, non-splintery limestone. What a dump for a dump. [MUSIC PLAYING] If you weren't hungry
before watching this video, you're about to be starving,
particularly for a bacon treat. During the Han Dynasty
in China, farmers constructed toilets
that were directly fed back into their pig pens. Though these toilets
looked similar to a traditional outhouse,
there was one small difference. Rather than the waste feeding
into a hole in the ground, it fed into the hole
of a pig's face. The waste was routed
into the pig pen, which the pigs, being
pigs, would then consume as a light snack. Once this was
digested, the waste from this human waste
turned into pig waste, would be used as fertilizer,
thus eliminating the need for a sanitation system. Include that in a verse of
the circle of life, cowards. [MUSIC PLAYING] Roman bathrooms sounded
like quite the social scene. Their bathrooms consisted of
long stone or wooden benches with holes scattered
about for users to take care of their business,
while in a comfortable sitting position. These elevated bench
toilets were purposely built to hover 1 to 2
feet above the ground to make it easier to
flush the water through, using the sewage system that
ran throughout the city. And, no, there were no
dividers between bench holes, making going to the
bathroom more of a group social activity than a
private moment to oneself. Running water directed
from Rome's aqueducts flushed out the troughs
beneath the toilets. While a great way
to flush away waste, it was a bad way to
prevent rat attacks from open sewer lines
and occasional fires from built-up methane. But when it comes to ancient
toilet systems, you win some and you lose some. A bunch of potential
rats on fire, however, can probably
go in the losing column. [MUSIC PLAYING] Medieval castle toilets relied
on the magical power of gravity to do most of the heavy
lifting of taking waste to a more desirable place
away from the castle. Castles were equipped with
rooms dedicated for answering the call of nature. But they were called
garderobes, not bathrooms. Garderobes were nothing to write
home about, with very few bells or whistles. The humble garderobe
was a small room with chutes that led to a
moat or communal cesspit for the dung to float
away or around the castle. If the point of the moat is to
keep enemies out of the castle, a good addition to one
would be floating poo as a deterrent for crossing. [MUSIC PLAYING] Before the indoor
flushing toilets were popularized in
the 20th century, most people had to wander
down to local cesspools in order to relieve themselves,
a pretty nifty inconvenience for something where a
convenience is paramount. This could also be a
potentially hazardous trip to take at night. So rather than march down
to a lovely sounding, local cesspool, people would
have chamber pots in the room. Chamber pots were small
metal or ceramic containers designed to hold waste that
were later emptied into pools or just sort of casually thrown
out the window, a fun thing to be on the lookout
for when walking underneath a window, surely. They remained a popular
way to go to the bathroom until World War II and
are even used today in some parts of the world
where indoor plumbing is still not a thing. Since chamber pots
were a regular fixture in people's homes, they weren't
afraid to jazz them up a bit, turning them into less of
a pot to piss in and more of a fun little home
decoration to whiz in. Some were ornate and made
of ceramic or fine china. And others were encased
in decorative boxes. Some were designed with verses
like, use me well and keep me clean and I'll
not tell what I've seen, which now, of course,
has been reduced to simply, live, laugh, love. [MUSIC PLAYING] Sir John Harington was a
controversial writer known for his risqué poetry
and political writings. He also invented a flush
toilet in the late 16th century as one typically does
while writing poetry. In The Metamorphosis of Ajax,
Harington described the device as an elevated cistern that
dumped water into the toilet bowl and removed waste
via the pulling of a chain or what sounds remarkably
like a current day toilet. Unfortunately, The
Metamorphosis of Ajax was also a thinly
veiled criticism of the English government. So the invention of a
toilet somehow sandwiched between critiques
of the monarchy presumably got thrown
out with the bathwater, as they say, for
nearly two centuries. Queen Elizabeth I,
however, did have one built for herself,
which is probably not the takeaway
Harington was aiming for when it came
to a queen reading his anti-government pamphlet. [MUSIC PLAYING] It wasn't until the
mid-18th century when the flushable
toilet was beginning to truly have a moment. Scottish inventor Alexander
Cumming and English inventor John Brahma both developed
the advanced plumbing devices that assisted in the creation of
the modern-day flushing toilet. Cumming created the S-trap,
which allowed the water to sit in the bowl and act as a
barrier against the foul smell of sewage and gas and also,
a popular source of drinking water for bad dogs. Though Harington technically was
the first to invent the toilet, it was Cumming who
held the patent. It was during the installation
process of Cumming's design when Braham developed a
valve with a hinged flap that sealed the water in the bowl. Thanks to these two advances
in the design of the toilet, these babies began
selling like hot cakes with water closets
growing in popularity throughout the mid-18th
and 19th centuries. After World War I, all new
buildings built in the UK were required to include
an indoor toilet. We've come a long way
from throwing our dung out the window. [MUSIC PLAYING] Given his last name and
how hilarious and ironic it would be, Thomas
Crapper is often falsely credited as the
inventor of the modern toilet. In reality, Crapper was
more like the band, Kiss, of toilets. He didn't invent the
toilet, but he sure knew how to market
the crap out of it. An early sanitation
pioneer, Crapper is credited for inventing the
oddly beautiful U-bend plumbing trap that is still used in
toilets and sinks today. Crapper displayed his
toilet products in showrooms and tried to sell his sanitation
designs to the wealthy. And, yes, Crapper
was not the inventor of the flushing toilet. But when people would
draw the conclusion, he didn't go out of his
way to correct them. Why ruin it? It was better this way. Edward VII hired him to install
dozens of indoor bathrooms in several royal palaces,
which contributed to his fame. But mostly, of course, it was
that his last name was Crapper, and his whole life was toilets. [MUSIC PLAYING] George Jennings, a sanitation
engineer and autour toilet inventor, was the first to
propose the idea of installing public flush toilets
throughout London. Jennings designed a
series of toilets for use at an art exhibit in 1851
that cost a penny per use. Jennings' art toilets
that cost money for use were a big hit, especially with
poorer folk who couldn't afford a flush toilet of
their own, but could afford a penny to use one. With these toilets
being a bona fide hit, Jennings proposed to
build public facilities at the Royal Exchange, a
major commerce and business sector in London. The government ignored this idea
at first with a strange belief that nobody would want
a public bathroom, claiming the results of
several trial public bathrooms proved they were bunk. The Royal Society
of Arts, the money behind Jennings' public
toilets at the art show, installed a handful
of test pay toilets around London, soon after to
see if it was a thing people wanted. The move ended up being
a financial catastrophe, even if its heart was
in the right place. In 1885, London
officials finally came around on Jennings'
idea several years after the plumber passed away. The first facilities were
built at the Royal Exchange, but not by Jennings'
company, which seems like kind of a real jerk
move by the Royal Exchange. [MUSIC PLAYING] As the population
began to boom, so did contagious diseases
that spread like wildfire, due to widespread
unsanitary conditions. Cholera, in particular, was
the contagious disease du jour whose spreading
was aided greatly by poor sanitation systems. Because of this, the dry
toilet was invented as a way to use the bathroom without
water as the flushing mechanism. But rather, it
would divert waste or use covering material such
as peat to absorb the liquid. First invented by an
English priest named Henry Moule with
a patent in 1873, he was able to get the design
in schools and public hospitals in England and India. But despite cutting
maintenance costs and eliminating odors famously
associated with sewage systems, his design did not catch on. We can thank this failure today
for all of our wet toilets. So what do you think? Are you watching this
video from a toilet? We bet you are. Be sure to wash your
hands and check out some of these other fine
videos from our Weird History.
