Flush what you heard about Thomas Crapper inventing the toilet.
Although Crapper filed nine toilet-related patents from 1881 to 1896, the aptly named gent isn’t the father of the modern flush toilet.
Sir John Harington beat Crapper to the punch nearly 300 years earlier with his revolutionary water closet design, which he illustrated in his 1596 treatise A New Discourse upon a Stale Subject: The Metamorphosis of Ajax.
Harington peddled his newfangled commode to his godmother, Queen Elizabeth I, who had the first one installed in Richmond Palace.
The flushing mechanism consisted of a pulling a knob to empty a water cistern, which sat above the toilet bowl. A rudimentary valve then released the water and the waste from the stool pot into a collection vault beneath the floor, which had to be routinely emptied.
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Prior to Harington’s invention, people relieved themselves in chamber pots and tossed the contents outdoors and into nearby waterways.
Long before then, civilizations devised similar ways to dispose of human waste products. One of the earliest bathroom relics goes back to around 1700 B.C.at the Palace of Knossos on the island of Crete, where the Minoans installed wooden toilet-like seats attached to piping.
Archaeologists also have discovered ruins indicating that the ancient Chinese may have engineered a kind of flush toilet by 206 B.C.
But it was Harington’s modern flush toilet model that gradually became commonplace around England and Europe over the 18th and 19th centuries, and in 1775, London watchmaker Alexander Cummings filed the first flush toilet patent.
By the time Crapper came on the bathroom scene, the original flush toilet had undergone a series of improvements, including its S-curved water piping to trap odors (Alexander Cummings), a chain-operated flushing device (Joseph Bramah) and a pressurized siphon flush system that more effectively carried excrement from toilet bowl to sewage pipes (Joseph Adamson).
Thomas Crapper became widely associated with toilets not so much for innovation, but salesmanship. The British plumber and entrepreneur established sanitation showrooms and cleverly imprinted his memorable last name on his wares.
In 1896, while Crapper was building his legacy, Scott Paper company began marketing the first rolls of toilet paper.
Fast forward nearly a century, and the toilet entered yet another revolutionary phase when the 1992 U.S. Congress passed legislation requiring new toilets to drain just 1.6 gallons per flush, instead of the average 3.5 gallons.
Manufacturers, such as American Standard, are seeing how low toilets can go to conserve water resources and save consumers money without sacrificing performance.
“We’re actually working against ourselves,” said Mike Friedberger, product manager of chinaware for American Standard. "We need to use more water at one end and use less water at the other end.”
Computer modeling and design techniques, such as critical fluid dynamic analysis, allow the sanitation researchers to digitally “flush” toilets and determine how to improve performance with minimal water before any physical models are even built.
For instance, Friedberger said older toilets took around 12 seconds to flush, while today’s newest commodes can do the job in less than 3 seconds. That faster time translates to twice the flushing force, requiring less water and keeping the bowl cleaner over time.
Future toilets will probably look less like toilets as well, with concealed traps (toilet piping) resulting in smoother, easier to clean silhouettes.
But at the end of the day, no matter the amount of water saved or the machine’s stylish aesthetics, Friedberger says customers still share the same major concern as Crapper, Harington and the rest of history’s toilet tinkerers.
“Market research has shown that overwhelmingly the first thing important in people’s minds is that the toilet flushes, that it removes waste,” he said.
Tags: Computer Software, Conservation, Design, Green Appliances, History,
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