The Long, Unglamorous History of the rest room [Toilets]

Nobody is entirely sure who first had the privilege of sitting on a restroom. Evidence of advanced plumbing systems inside the ancient world abounds, however it’s an odd, meandering path from antiquity to checking your inbox on the can.

Ancient cultures were surprisingly adept at moving water around in a means that kept people from having to walk through pools of their own feces. (That was really more of a Medieval European thing.) Cultures as far back as 3000 BC were flushing away their problems-so who you callin’ primitive? Members of the Harrappa civilization in what is now India had toilets in their homes that drained into subterranean clay chambers. The residents of Skara Brae, a 31st century BC settlement in what’s now Scotland, were even clever enough to take advantage of a draining system that exploited a nearby river to automatically sweep out their dirty business.

Fast forward a couple of thousand years, and the Romans were at the leading edge of whooshing away waste. Massive aqueducts-engineering feats in themselves-brought massive volumes of clean water into Roman cities. Rome’s famed public baths were well stocked with urinal-style toilets that drained into its meticulous sewage system-though private commodes were a rarity reserved for elites.

With the fall of the Roman Empire, the rudimentary latrine (and notions of public sanitation) were widely lost within the west. If being chased down by roaming Visigoths was the worst thing that happened to you on a given day, not less than you didn’t step in an open cesspool or have a chamberpot emptied to your head from above. At that point, the best end of the defecation spectrum was the usage of ornamental chamber pots, disguised to seem like a stack of books or decorative box. But the elemental bedpan-deposit remained the establishment-a decidedly low-tech approach.

So who ended the stinky terror of the Dark Ages? Many historians believe credit is because of John Harrington, godson of Queen Elizabeth I. Harrington, a notorious royal troublemaker, published a satirical pamphlet in 1596 that served as both a social critique against his peers and a detailed guide for the assembly of the first flush toilet. Talented guy! Harrington’s toilet (found only in a couple of royal homes) included a mechanical valve to seal off the bathroom, in addition as a tank of water to flush it-basic components still used in our modern thrones. It wasn’t until several hundred years later, in 1775, that the first patent for the flushing toilet was granted to Scottish inventor Alexander Cummings. Cumming’s coup was the addition of a relentless pool of water within the toilet, to be able to suppress, um, really, really bad smells.

From here, the lavatory’s path is a gentle mixture of small innovations-no great breakthrough to the toilet we all know so dearly now. 18th century inventors refined the flushing mechanism and flow of water, with their 19th century successors adding better drainage and valves that (thankfully) leaked less. English plumber Thomas Crapper-a coincidence, I promise-did much to popularized the non-public flushing toilet in Europe, leading many to falsely believe he invented it. The one great toilet innovation of the twentieth was that of integrating the water tank into the seat itself, in preference to attaching it to a wall. Beyond that, a hundred years of slight tinkering haven’t advanced the fundamental design beyond this point.

So where’s the bathroom heading? It’s hard to claim they’re progressing much farther than where they may be now-unless you concentrate on lavish design concepts and Twitter integration progress. And admittedly, if I must choose from the Dark Ages and an era when everyone is tweeting their poop, I would choose the former.

On the alternative hand, it’s possible most of these centuries of development were leading us astray. While it’s unimaginable for most of us to contemplate doing anything as opposed to sitting on a bathroom, Slate investigates a growing body of study shows that the squatters of the Dark Ages (and, oh yeah, the 1.2 billion forgotten people too poor to own a bathroom) are pooping the manner we were meant to. And us upright snobs, auto-tweeting our flushes? We’re possibly doing our bodies harm. Some scientists believe that merely sitting on the loo bends our innards in a technique we were never meant to be while relieving ourselves, leading to hemorrhoids, and other gastrointestinal maladies.

To make the experience more palatable for those of who find the assumption of squatting over a bathroom type of, well, gross, a budding market of loo adapters-including the wonderfully euphemistic ” Lillipad” -has popped up to assist us poop better. Squatting proselytizer Jonathan Isbit has patented his own approach, after getting back from a meditation tour with an enlightened perspective on the bathroom. Isbit hopes his ” Nature’s Platform,” crafted from powder coated steel tubes, will ” convert the Western world back to the natural squatting position.”

So perhaps 4,000 years of inventing have just led us back where we began. Irrespective of your stance (har!) on the matter, the loo remains an object of both continuous invisibility (what else could we take more with no consideration?) and consistent tinkering. Most of us are just happy to be done with it and have an opportunity to play Angry Birds for ten minutes, but perhaps we’ll live to work out the following evolution of the standard toilet.

Photo by cloneofsnake

Illustration by our contributing illustrator Sam Spratt . Inspect Sam’s portfolio and become partial to his Facebook Artist’s Page .

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This post is tagged: History, rest, room, toilets, Unglamorous