The toilet. The latrine. The commode. The privy. The water-closet. The closed-stool.

Whatever you call it, for centuries, mankind has always needed a place to get away from it all. Since the dawn of time, man has required the use of a place or contraption for the peaceful, if not always quiet, ejection of bodily waste. These days, that place is the modern flushing, sit-down toilet. But where did it come from?

Before the Toilet

Damn near every house on earth…has a toilet. It’s that one indispensible invention that none of us could do without. Fridges, TVs, computers, telephones…even electrical lighting…but not the toilet.

But the toilet is an amazingly modern invention. What happened before then?

Primative Toilets

For centuries, a toilet was little more than a hole that you dug in the ground. Toilet-paper was whatever you could lay your hands on…usually leaves.But to give the ancients some degree of credit on hygeine, various ancient societies have had their own lavatorial inventions over the centuries. Civilisations such as the Ancient Eygptians and the Ancient Romans had toilets that worked with running water and which served to keep the populous clean, satisfied and healthy. In Ancient Rome, public bathhouses usually had toilet-chambers available for public use. Ejected matter would end up in the channel beneath the communal toilets, which would then be flushed away periodically by large volumes of water expelled from the public bathhouse nearby.

Medieval Toilets

Societies such as the Ancient Greeks, Eygptians and Romans all had rather sophistocated ideas and inventions to deal with the issue of human waste. However, with the fall of the Roman Empire, the Western World went back to shitting in a hole.

In the Medieval Era, concepts about personal hygeine were virtually nonexistent. A total lack of understanding about how disease was spread, and the dangers of untreated sewerage, caused sanitation nightmares that would send all those Health-and-Safety officers running for cover…sometimes literally!

In the great cities of Europe, such as London, Paris, Prague and Rome, toilets took several steps backwards from the Roman era several hundred years before. In a typical medieval town or city, a toilet was a seat with a hole cut into it that projected out of the side of the building. Any released feculence would just drop into the streets below…bad luck if you were out for a walk. Streets of medieval cities were often filled with several feet of compacted, mashed up, mushed up, foot-trodden weeks of sewerage. The smells were naturally abominable…but at the time, no link was made between this, and any sort of danger to public health.

If your toilet didn’t eject out the side of the building into the street, then it might eject out into a river or stream. Or the muck in the streets would end up being dumped into the nearest river anyway. This led to incredible and unspeakable pollution…and poisoning! Because people used to drink that water, too! And wash their clothes in it. And bathe in it…and cook with it…Water in medieval times was so polluted and foul-tasting that almost everyone drank wine or beer instead. Even kids! In fact, kids would drink ‘Small Beer’ (with a lower alcoholic content), while their parents would drink ‘Big Beer’ (which naturally, had a stronger taste and higher alcohol content).

Cesspits

But what if you couldn’t get your toilet to jut out over the street? Or over a river or stream? Or down into one of the few sewers that would have existed in the medieval world? What then?

Well, then you would make use of the cesspit.

A cesspit is basically a medival septic tank. It’s the huge chamber or room underneath your toilet into which all your bodily waste would be dumped into. Every few weeks…or months…you had to get the thing emptied, just like with septic-tanks today. And to get it emptied, you had to go out and find the chap with quite possibly the worst job in history.

The gong-scourer.

‘Cess’ and ‘gong’ are old English words for sewerage and dung. The gong-scourer was the poor bastard who emptied out your cesspit.

Although in all honesty, he wasn’t that poor. Being a gong-scourer was a job that was literally swimming in shit. It was a filthy, hazardous, dangerous, backbreaking job. You would have to shovel out tons of excrement from all the toilets and cesspits all over town and you had to do this every single night. Because the work was so obviously revolting, not many people would do it. So wise-thinking city-authorities would pay gong-scourers a pretty princely wage in return for their vital and revolting job. How much?

18d for every 1 ton of waste removed.

That’s 18 pence (A shilling and a half) for every ton of waste.

This in an era when the average wage of a working man in London was sixpence a day.

Of course, for some gong-scourers, even money wasn’t enough. A chap named Samson, royal gong-scourer to Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth I of England, was paid half in money, half in rum!

Privies and Closed Stools

In the medieval world, there were two toilets available to you. The most common one ws the privy. Coming from the Latin word for ‘Privacy’, the privy was a removable seat over a cesspit. Any business-transactions done in a privy would end up in the cesspit below. To clear out the pit, the gong-scourer would remove the seat and climb down into the muck to shovel or bucket it out. Not a fun job.

The other, slightly more comfortable and dignified toilet was the Closed Stool. If you’ve ever wondered where we get the word for feces meaning ‘stool’ from…well…take a guess.

The Closed Stool was similar to a modern toilet-chair. It was a box with a hole in it. Inside the box was a large bucket. After the daily interaction with the stool, the bucket was removed, emptied, washed and replaced inside the stool. An altogether cleaner and more comfortable toiletry eperience…what you did with the waste when the bucket was full was another matter.

Inventing the Modern Toilet

As you may have guessed, after the downspiral from the Ancient world, mankind was living in a world of muck and filth. From the Dark Ages up to the 1800s, almost all toilets were of the kind described above. And they only provided temprorary relief from one of our oldest problems.

Where do you put it?

The big problem was that sewers…really effective sewers…simply did not exist. Even into the 1800s, big rivers such as the Seine and the Thames, were little more than huge open drains! What few public sewers there were, would be choked, blocked, overflowing and completely unable to handle the waste of the millions of people who flooded into the cities and towns of Europe during the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, the idea of modern sewers wasn’t given any serious, practical thought until the 1860s, in London. It was then that Sir Joseph Bazalgette designed and helped to build the world’s first modern sewerage-system underneath the city of London.

So, where did that leave the modern toilet?

Ancestors to the Modern Toilet

The first truly modern toilet, of a kind that we might possibly recognise today, was actually invented in the 16th Century, to be precise, in 1596.

The chap who invented it was a man named Sir John Harington. Being godson to Queen Elizabeth I, he probably had the time and money to invent what was effectively the world’s first modern toilet. He called it the ‘Ajax’. He installed such a toilet in his house and then built another one for the Queen. The Ajax wasn’t perfect, but it did work…kinda.

The toilet was installed over a sewer-drain. The cistern behind the seat was filled with water from buckets. At the end of the episode, a plug was pulled. Water flooded from the cistern into the bowl. Then, another plug was pulled and the entire contents of the toilet-bowl were flushed out into the drain below. Effective, but without running water, the cistern had to be refilled manually each time.

The next instance of a modern-style commode does not make its appearance until the 1700s. And just like back in the 1590s, this fantastic new invention, the flushing toilet, was to be used only by a queen. But this time, not a queen of England, but of France.

Marie Antoinette, wife of King Louis XVI.

The setting is the royal palace of Versailles, 12km south of Paris.

The famed Palace of Versailles is the last word in luxury. Huge banquets, luxurious chambers, flashy clothes, powdered wigs and the world-renowned Hall of Mirrors. Heaven on Earth! Right?

Eh…No.

The truth was that, for all its luxury and obscene opulence, the Palace of Versailles was little cleaner than a sewer! Animals were allowed to wander at will through the stately halls, and relieve themselves as they pleased. And it wasn’t just animals, either. For a place as expensive and luxurious as Versailles, there were almost NO toilets…ANYWHERE! Courtiers, servants, guests and visitors were compelled to relieve themselves where-ever they could. And I literally mean…WHERE-EVER. Underneath staircases, behind curtains, in the dead-space behind doors, or into chamber-pots, the contents of which would then be ejected out the window into the palace courtyard below.

Classy.

Amazing as it seems, there was actually a TOILET in Versailles. A real, honest-to-goodness flushing toilet. But it was for the use of ONE person ONLY. And that one person was the Queen of France herself: Marie Antoinette. The toilet (which can still be seen in Versailles today!) was one of the few plumbing fixtures in the entire palace, and was secreted away in the deepest, darkest, most private chambers of the queen’s royal apartments. Apartments which only her most trusted and intimate of servants would ever have seen. Most people didn’t even know the toilet existed!

Over the next two hundred-plus years, mankind improved on Sir John’s design. Eventually, in 1851, the world’s first public…flushing…toilets, were unveiled!

Where?

In the Crystal Palace in London during the Great Exhibition. Although the toilets were public, they were not free – For the privilege of emptying your bowels in the latest modern conveniences, you had to give the bathroom attendant one penny before he granted you access to the newfangled ‘flushing toilet’.

Probably the most famous names associated with the history of the toilet, however, is that of an American. A plumber with the unfortunate name of Thomas…

…Crapper.

Contrary to popular belief, Thomas Crapper’s name did not lead to the coinage of the term ‘crap’ meaning to take a dump. The word ‘crap’ actually comes from the Latin word ‘Crappa’, meaning ‘chaff’, the leftover husks from stalks of wheat (as in “to separate the wheat from the chaff”). So literally, “Crap” is the leftovers. The stuff we leave behind. The stuff we reject and ignore. Crap.

Why is it called a Toilet?

The word ‘Toilet’ comes from France. Originally, “toilet” referred to one’s personal hygiene and grooming. To “attend to one’s toilet”, meant to keep oneself clean. This ranged from bathing, brushing your teeth, combing your hair, shaving, washing your face, and relieving bodily waste. The utensils and products used in the execution of these procedures were known as “toiletries”. Even today, when you go on holiday, you still take a “toiletry bag” with you.

With the invention of the modern commode, the word ‘Toilet’ moved from the more general term meaning grooming, to the more specific one, meaning a receptacle for bodily waste. And that has been its main definition ever since.

The Victorian Toilet

The toilet as we know it today really came into its own during the second half of the 1800s. In big cities with new, enlarged, free-flowing sewer-systems which were now capable of handling large volumes of waste on a daily basis, plumbed toilets were finally practical. And with this practicality, came a surge of toilet-manufacturers.

Designs varied slightly from maker to maker, but all toilets were made up of a bowl, a C, U, or S-bend, to trap water and prevent the rise of sewer-gas, a seat, and a cistern for the storage of flush-water. For something that was essentially a self-emptying chamber-pot, the Victorian toilet was decorated with surprising artistry, and both the exterior and interior of a toilet-bowl were just as likely to be covered in blue-glaze paint, flowers, forest-scenes, water-scenes and nature scenes as the plates of your finest bone china dinner-service.

Because modern toilets descend from the toilets of the Victorian era, you can still install a Victorian loo in your house today. And it would function just as well as a modern one. It’s the same technology, after all. Just a little bit fancier.

There’s been little change in toilets since the Victorian era. There are now more water-efficient ones, ones which are easier to clean, more comfortable, even those insane Japanese ones that do everything for you, and then some, but the toilet as we know it, has essentially reached the end of the road, when it comes to development.

Want to Know More?

A lot of the information gleamed for this article were taken from the Dan Snow documentaries “Filthy Cities” (“London”, “Paris”, and “New York”), and the Dr. Lucy Woslery documentaries “If Walls Could Talk”. You can find these on YouTube.