Toilet

• 1. Introduction

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  A toilet is a piece of sanitary hardware that collects human waste, and 419 million people have no access to one at all. They must openly defecate and urinate instead. That single number sits at the center of a much larger story, one that stretches from clay pipes in ancient Mesopotamia to space toilets aboard the International Space Station. How did a fixture so ordinary become both a marker of class and a measure of public health? Why does one culture sit while another squats, and why do so many cultures refuse to call the thing by its plainest name? The answers run through castles, prisons, Victorian housemaids' cupboards, and a French word that once meant a little cloth draped over the shoulders during hairdressing.

• 2. Water And Its Absence

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  Flush toilets use water, while dry or non-flush toilets do not, and that single divide organizes most of the world's designs. The water in a toilet bowl connects to a pipe shaped like an upside-down U, with one side arranged as a siphon tube longer than the water in the bowl is high. That standing water is not decorative. It acts as a barrier to sewer gas entering the building, while the gas itself escapes through a vent pipe attached to the sewer line.

  Conventional flush toilets usually make up a significant portion of personal daily water usage, so designers have spent decades trimming the volume. Dual flush toilets let the user select between a flush for urine or feces, sometimes through a handle pushed up for one and down for the other, sometimes through two buttons. The pour-flush toilet, common in many Asian countries, abandons the cistern entirely and is flushed by hand from a small bucket using as little as 2-3 liters.

  Vacuum toilets push the savings further, removing waste by suction and using less than a quarter of a liter per flush, sometimes none. Passenger train toilets, aircraft lavatories, bus toilets, and ships with plumbing often rely on them, because the lower water usage saves weight and avoids water slopping out of the bowl in motion. On boats and ships the fixture is called the head, and it may be flushed with seawater.

  Dry toilets answer the same need without water at all, connecting instead to a pit, a removable container, or a composting chamber. A vault toilet seals the excreta in a buried container until it is removed by pumping, distinguishing it from a pit latrine where waste seeps into the underlying soil. Twin pit latrines alternate between two pits, giving a full one a year or two to transform into a partially sanitized, soil-like material that can be manually excavated, though there is a risk of groundwater pollution where the water table is high or the bedrock is cracked.

• 3. Sit, Squat, And Cleanse

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  In the Middle East and Asia the squatting position for urination is more prevalent, while in the Western world the standing and sitting positions are more common. The sitting toilet, often called western-style, is essential for those who are movement impaired, and more convenient than squat toilets for people with disabilities and the elderly. An accessible toilet extends that logic with more space and grab bars to ease transfer to and from the seat, including room for a caregiver if needed.

  Cleaning habits divide just as sharply. In the Western world the most common method after defecation is toilet paper, sometimes a bidet, while in many Muslim countries facilities are designed for Islamic toilet etiquette, Qaḍāʼ al-Ḥājah, with a bidet shower plumbed in. The left hand is used for cleansing, which is why that hand is considered impolite or polluted in many Asian countries.

  The bidet maps onto religion as much as geography. It is common in predominantly Catholic countries where water is considered essential for anal cleansing, and the use of water in many Christian countries traces in part to biblical toilet etiquette that encourages washing after all instances of defecation. Bidet showers are common in some traditionally Orthodox and Lutheran countries such as Greece and Finland.

• 4. Living With Livestock

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  The pig toilet consists of a toilet linked to a pigsty by a chute, and it is still in use to a limited extent. It was common in rural China and known in Japan, Korea, and India. The Han dynasty in China used pig toilets two thousand years ago. The same principle drives the fish pond toilet, where livestock, often carp, eat human excreta directly. These arrangements turned waste into feed rather than treating it as something to be hauled away, a closing of the loop that long predates the modern language of ecological sanitation.

• 5. Ancient Plumbing

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  The city of Uruk exhibits the earliest known internal pit toilet, from around 3200 BC, part of the fourth millennium BC arrival of clay pipes, sewers, and toilets in Mesopotamia. The Indus Valley Civilisation built the world's first known urban sanitation systems. In Mohenjo-Daro, around 2800 BC, toilets were built into the outer walls of homes with vertical chutes that carried waste into cesspits or street drains. At Lothal, around 2350 BC, upper-class houses had private toilets connected to a covered sewer network of brickwork held together with gypsum-based mortar.

  Skara Brae, the Neolithic village in Orkney occupied from about 3100 BC until 2500 BC, had small rooms over a communal drain, with some houses sitting directly above a drain and a cubicle built over it. Around the 18th century BC, toilets started to appear in Minoan Crete, Pharaonic Egypt, and ancient Persia. In 2012, archaeologists excavating a Neolithic village in southern Vietnam found what is believed to be Southeast Asia's earliest latrine, dating to 1500 BC. More than 30 coprolites containing fish and shattered animal bones revealed the diet of humans and dogs and the parasites each had to contend with.

  In Sri Lanka the craft grew elaborate. Toilets and baths at the Abhayagiri complex in Anuradhapura date from the 2nd century BC to the 3rd century CE, and later forms from the 5th to 13th century CE in Polonnaruwa and Anuradhapura carried decorative motifs carved around them. Urinary pits used large bottomless clay pots of decreasing size stacked one above the other, filled with sand, lime, and charcoal through which urine filtered down to the earth in a somewhat purified form.

  Roman latrines using flowing water were sometimes part of public bath houses, probably elevated to raise them above open sewers that were periodically flushed with flowing water. Romans and Greeks also used chamber pots, which they brought to meals and drinking sessions. Johan J. Mattelaer recorded that Plinius described large receptacles in the streets of cities such as Rome and Pompeii, into which chamber pots of urine were emptied. That urine was collected by fullers, for whom it was a vital step in textile manufacture.

• 6. Pots, Pits, And Privies

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  Garderobes served upper-class dwellings through the post-classical period, flat pieces of wood or stone spanning wall to wall with holes to sit on, set above chutes that discharged outside the castle or manor house. They were placed away from bedrooms because of the smell, and often near kitchens or fireplaces to keep their enclosures warm. The other main option was the chamber pot, used for hundreds of years and carried even to the Middle East by medieval pilgrims.

  In pre-modern Denmark people generally defecated on farmland, where the waste could be collected as fertilizer, and toilets were functionally non-existent in rural areas until the 18th century. The Old Norse language kept several terms for outhouses, including garðhús, the yard house, and náða-hús, the house of rest. By the 16th century, cesspits and cesspools were increasingly dug near houses in Europe, cleaned out by tradesmen known in English as gong farmers, who pumped the liquid then shovelled the solid waste during the night. That solid waste, euphemistically called nightsoil, was sold as fertilizer for agricultural production.

  Underground pipe networks to carry waste away were only begun in the mid 19th century, gradually replacing cesspools, though cesspools remained in use in parts of Paris into the 20th century. London, then the world's largest city, did not require indoor toilets in its building codes until after the First World War. The practice of emptying one's own chamber pot, known as slopping out, continued in British prisons until as recently as 2014, and was still in use in 85 cells in Ireland in July 2017.

• 7. The Rise Of The Water Closet

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  A precursor to the modern flush toilet was designed in 1596 by John Harington, yet such systems did not come into widespread use until the late nineteenth century. The water closet, with origins in Tudor times, began to assume its known form around 1770, with an overhead cistern, s-bends, soil pipes, and valves, the work of Alexander Cumming and Joseph Bramah. A crucial advance was the S-trap, invented by the Scottish mechanic Alexander Cummings in 1775 and still in use today, using standing water to seal the bowl against foul sewer air.

  Water closets only started to move from outside to inside the home around 1850, built into middle-class homes in the 1860s and 1870s, first on the principal bedroom floor and by 1900 a further one in the hallway. The spread was uneven. In 1906 the predominantly working-class town of Rochdale had 750 water closets for a population of 10,000. It was the Tudor Walters Report of 1918 that recommended semi-skilled workers be housed in suburban cottages with kitchens and internal water closets.

  During the Victorian era, British housemaids collected the household's chamber pots and carried them to the housemaids' cupboard, which held a slop sink made of wood with a lead lining to prevent chipping the china. In America the chain-pull indoor toilet reached the homes of the wealthy and hotels in the 1890s, and William Elvis Sloan invented the Flushometer in 1906, drawing pressurized water straight from the supply line for faster recycle time between flushes. Long-established British makers include Adamsez, founded in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1880, and Twyfords, founded in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent in 1849 by Thomas Twyford and his son Thomas William Twyford.

• 8. A Word That Hides Itself

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  Toilet entered English as a French loanword, first attested in 1540, referring to the toilette or little cloth draped over one's shoulders during hairdressing. By the late 17th century it described the whole complex of grooming centered at a dressing table, and the time spent there, with friends or tradesmen received during toilet-calls. The use of toilet for a grooming room came later, first attested in 1819, then became a euphemism for rooms dedicated to urination and defecation, and finally for the plumbing fixtures themselves, apparently first in the United States.

  The word was a euphemism by etymology, but is no longer understood as such, an example of the euphemism treadmill. American manufacturers show unease with it. American Standard, the largest firm, sells toilets, while the higher-priced Kohler Company sells commodes or closets, and imported Japanese products such as TOTO are still called toilets despite their cachet. TOTO abbreviates Tōyō Tōki, meaning Oriental Ceramics.

  The slang multiplies the evasions. Crapper was already a coarse name before Thomas Crapper, who popularized flush toilets in England and held several patents on toilet improvements, lent it currency. The Jacks is Irish slang, perhaps from jacques and jakes. The etymology of loo is obscure. The Oxford English Dictionary notes the 1922 appearance of a Waterloo and watercloset pun in James Joyce's Ulysses, and proposed origins range from French l'eau for water, to the preacher Louis Bourdaloue, whose long sermons at Paris's Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis prompted parishioners to bring chamber pots that took on his name.

  Those anxieties about naming sit oddly beside the most advanced fixtures of all. High-tech toilets in countries like Japan offer water jets, heated seats, and medical monitoring of blood pressure, temperature, and blood sugar. Sega's Toylet uses pressure sensors to translate the flow of urine into on-screen video game action, while astronauts aboard the International Space Station use a space toilet with urine diversion that can recover potable water.