Books: 'Bogs, Baths and Basins: the story of domestic sanitation'

[major_clanger]

'Bogs, Baths and Basins: the story of domestic sanitation', David Eveleigh (2006)

If you asked most people to sum up the history of the toilet they would probably suggest something along the lines of 'people used to use chamberpots and then Thomas Crapper came along and we've been flushing ever since'. Eveleigh's entertaining but comprehensive history of domestic sanitation aims to show how there was rather more to it than this; Crapper was one of many ingenious inventors seeking to improve water closets, and there were many more forms forms of waste disposal than just a pot under the bed. I had no idea that in the Midlands the dry ash privy was widely used for many years, owing to the ready availability of cinder ash. I was equally ignorant of the detailed history of the flush toilet, which took a very long time to reach its current form. Flush lavatories were developed in the late eighteenth century, but for many years used a mechanical action to tip a pan into a drain, leading to complex and hard-to-clean mechanisms. The quest for an effective syphonic flush was a long one and success was clearly much striven-for; apparently the 1884 International Health Exhibition awarded a gold medal to a toilet that '...successfully disposed of ten apples, a flat sponge and four pieces of sanitary paper stuck to the sides with plumbers' smudge'. Informative and prosfusely illustrated (lots of Victorian engravings of plumbing technology for those who like such things) it is, er, excellent toilet reading...

Comments

[quercus.livejournal.com]

The flush toilet reached its current form (as on the shelves of B&Q today) very early on, with the first leak-prone flapper valves. Then people like Crapper worked out far better designs that we used for a century. With adoption of US plumbing designs over the last decade though, even where these contravene a number of long-established UK water byelaws, we're back to 1850.

We've even recently seen an outbreak of plumbing-related Pseudomonas in Northern Ireland, which if not a bacterium recognised by the Victorians, was at least a problem recognised by its plumbers.

[non-trivial.livejournal.com]

Could you elaborate on the drawbacks of US designs? I sense a fascinating explanation coming on...

[pashazade.livejournal.com]

That sounds absolutely brilliant!

[anef.livejournal.com]

I feel I should mention the Romans here, and also the Minoans. Unless those count as having public sanitation systems rather than domestic.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

Eveleigh very briefly mentions Roman baths but doesn't address much in respect of the history of toilets before the 1600s. Whether this is because there is genuinely not much to say about domestic toilet arrangements in Classical times, or because his interest is in the modern era, I can't say.

[headgardener.livejournal.com]

1) Seems like flush toilets get re-invented about every 2000 years: the Minoans around 3-2000BC, the Romans around 0BC/AD; then the Victorians around 1900AD. Next: end of civilisation as we know it, so it can be re-invented again in another couple of thousand years?

2) Flush toilets may prove one of the great 'wrong roads' of progress, that need to be dis-invented: deliberately polluting vast quantities of scarce and precious fresh water... What's the sense in that. The Midlands dry-ash option might win out yet.

3) Support Water Aid: extremely useful charity working to bring decent loos and clean water to the developing world, especially in Africa.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Why do flush toilets need to use "scarce and precious fresh water"? For as long as people are bathing, there's plenty of grey water that can be used for flushing.

The advantage of a wet flush system is that it also (in a developed conurbation) powers a centralised collection system. Sewage treatment is one of those things that really is best handled by local corporations (in the Victorian civic sense), not individual dwellings.