Ken Weiss of the architectural channel, This House, explained how people accommodated the call of nature without the benefit of indoor plumbing.
Have you ever wondered how people used the bathroom before bathrooms were invented? The toilet we take for granted is barely a hundred and fifty years old, and For the vast majority of human history, going to the bathroom was not the private, sanitary affair we now consider standard.
Weiss looks at the history of the porcelain throne, from ancient Greece and Rome through to the work of John Crapper, who did not invent the flush toilet, but refined its design to make it accessible for home use.
Crapper is the figure everybody vaguely remembers as the inventor of the flush toilet. But he did not invent the flush toilet. The myth traces almost entirely to a satirical biography published in 1969 by a writer named Wallace Reyburn, who was essentially trolling the reading public. The real Thomas Crapper was a Yorkshire-born plumber who founded Thomas Crapper and Company in 1861, held nine patents for various drainage and fittings improvements, refined the floating ballcock…
