A history of… toilets
'Gong farming' had nothing to do with gongs. Or farming.
My bathroom is being refurbished at the moment, which means that if I want to use the toilet during the day I have to rely upon the kindness of my neighbours.1 As you might imagine, toilets have been very much front of mind for me this week as a result, and given that my most popular piece to date was about toilet paper, I thought that they would make an interesting subject to explore this week. Be warned, due to the nature of the topic things are likely to get somewhat scatalogical at times.
It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that ancient civilisations were somewhat primitive, particularly where hygiene was concerned. The reality is that they were vastly more advanced than one might suspect, and in most cases far superior to the facilities that were available in medieval Europe, as we shall see. Some of the earliest known loos can be seen at the Neolithic village of Skara Brae in Orkney, Scotland (occupied c. 3,180–2,500 BCE). A number of the houses there had small, cell-like rooms built over a communal drain, suggesting they functioned as indoor latrines that used running water to carry off waste. It seems that the residents understood the need to remove excrement and so, some 5,000 years ago, they built a kind of flushing toilet.
Archaeologists excavating the Temple of Bel at Nippur and a site at Eshnunna found clay pipe sections dating from even earlier, 4,000 BCE, which were used to remove waste and are generally considered to be the first sewerage system. The Mesopotamian city of Uruk also has pit latrines dating from 3,200 BCE, while the The Palace of Knossos on Crete (c. 1,700–1,500 BCE) had a well-known bathroom that is often cited as one of the earliest flush toilets. It consisted of a wooden seat over a drain that was flooded with water from a cistern or bucket – essentially an early flushing mechanism.
Further afield in the Indus city of Lothal (c. 2,350 BCE), a sophisticated covered sewer network constructed of brick and gypsum mortar has been found, to which some private toilets of the upper-class houses were connected. The brick-lined channels carried waste to soak pits or to the outskirts of the town. These soak pits (essentially early septic pits) were periodically emptied of solid waste, quite possibly for use as fertilizer on surrounding fields. The toilet rooms would be provisioned with jugs or buckets of water to enable the flushing of the loo. In East Asia, across China, Japan, and Korea there are similarly the remains of elaborate sewerage systems dating back thousands of years.
In ancient Egypt things were a little more primitive, with wooden or stone toilet stools containing a jar or box of sand to catch the waste in. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, found their desire to defecate in private somewhat perplexing:
Women pass water standing, men sitting. They ease their bowels indoors, and eat out of doors in the streets, explaining that things unseemly but necessary should be done alone in private, things not unseemly should be done openly.
Ancient Greek cities, though famed for public baths and gymnasia, lagged somewhat in developing dedicated toilet infrastructure compared to contemporaneous cultures. For much of Greek antiquity, the chamber pot was the common solution for household needs. Greeks used ceramic chamber pots2 (often called ορχανοί) to urinate or defecate in private, and later emptied them outdoors. These pots were portable and could be brought even to social gatherings – indeed, it was not uncommon for Greeks (and later Romans) to bring a chamber pot to drinking parties so they wouldn’t have to leave the room to relieve themselves (and, err, they were handy to vomit into if needed). However, Greek cities did have some sanitation measures. Many had rudimentary drainage channels running down streets for storm water and waste. In the Asklepieia (healing temples) and in large public buildings, lavatories or latrines have been found, though nothing as elaborate as Rome’s. It was during the Hellenistic period (post-323 BCE) – especially in the cosmopolitan cities like Alexandria or Pergamon – that public latrines and multi-seat toilets began to appear under Greek influence, likely inspired by Eastern models or later adopted from the Romans. For example, on the Greek island of Delos, archaeologists found public latrines from the second century BCE consisting of stone seats over a water channel.
It was ancient Rome that truly revolutionised communal sanitation in the West. The Romans were heirs to Etruscan and Greek ideas but took them much further by building extensive sewer networks and large public latrines. The centrepiece of Roman waste management was the Cloaca Maxima, a massive sewer in Rome originally engineered in the sixth century BCE (during the Etruscan kings’ era) to drain the Forum marshes. Over time, this and other sewers were adapted to carry not just storm water but also waste from latrines and cesspits into the Tiber River. By the early imperial era (first century CE), the city of Rome had numerous public latrinae – essentially public toilets – often attached to bathhouses or located in forums and marketplaces. These public latrines typically consisted of a long bench (usually stone or marble) with keyhole-shaped openings, set over a continuous flow of water. Dozens of people could sit, err, cheek-to-cheek (sorry) with no partitions between them. It may seem strange to us today, but communal defecation was considered a social activity, a good opportunity for a chat!
As with many other aspects of civilisation, the fall of the Western Roman Empire (476 CE3) resulted in a significant decline in sanitation in Europe and for even the rich it would be a thousand or more years before toilet technology met or exceeded that of the ancients. In rural areas poorer people would simply do their business outside, sometimes directly into a cesspit if one was available. If you were fortunate to live in a castle then you could use a small room that protruded from the walls, a garderobe, which simply had a hole in the floor so that the waste could drop into the moat or a pit.
Whilst these were the, err, height, of toilet technology at the time they were still incredibly primitive.
In towns and cities things were even worse. People would use chamber pots and empty them into cesspits if they had them or simply chuck the contents out of the window if they didn’t. This unpleasant state of affairs led to the creation of several fairly unhygienic professions. First there were the rakers whose job it was to keep gutters and drains clear by, you guessed it, raking them. From the London Coroners’ Roll of 1326 there is described the unfortunate case of ‘Richard the Raker’ who died falling into cesspit and downing in the excrement. Then there were the gong farmers who had the arguably worse task of emptying the cesspits and privies. This rather odd name has a somewhat disputed etymology. ‘Gong’ is pretty straightforward as it is another word for privy, or latrine, but the ‘farmer’ part is less clear; it could arise from faymer meaning ‘one who cleanses’, which then was adapted into the more familiar ‘farmer’.
This wasn’t just an unpleasant job for the people doing it; it was unpleasant simply to be around it being done. In John Stow’s Survey of London (1562) he notes under the heading Statues of the Streets of this City:
No Goungfermour shall carry any Ordure till after nine of the Clocke in the night.
Working with buckets and shovels that would empty the pits into carts so that the resultant night soil (as it was euphemistically referred to) could be taken away and used to fertilise crops. Things only really began to improve, and only then for the wealthiest, towards the end of the 16th century when Sir John Harington (1560–1612) courier, poet, translator and godson of Elizabeth I took in interest in the subject. In 1596 he published The Metamorphosis of Ajax (‘Ajax’ is a pun on ‘a jakes’, a common word for a privy) in which he lays out pretty comprehensive plans for a flushing toilet that used a value-controlled cistern:
Alongside this he carefully lists out the parts and the estimate construction cost:
A. the cistern (of stone or brick) — Price: 0s. 6d.
B. D. E. the pipe that comes from the cistern, with a stopple to hold the water — Price: 0s. 3d.
C. a waste pipe — Price: 0s. 1d.
F. G. the stem of the great stopple, with a key to lift it — Price: 0s. 1d.
H. the form of the upper brim of the vessel or stool-pot.
M. the stool-pot of stone — Price: 0s. 8d.
N. the great brass flue, to which is three inches current, to send it down amain into a cess-lax — Price: 1s. 0d.
And then he shows it all put together and working:
A privie in perfection. Here is the same all put together, that the workman may see if it be well.
A. the cistern
B. the idle water
C. the waste pipe
D. the seat board
E. the pipe that comes from the cistern
F. the screw
G. the scallop shell (to cover the orifice)
H. the stool-pot
I. the stopple (plug)
K. the current
L. the flue
M. N. the vault into which it falls
The next major development in toilet tech came about in 1775 when Alexander Cumming (c.1733–1814), a Scottish engineer and watchmaker, was granted a patent entitled Improvements in the construction of water-closets. This had many of the features of our modern toilets including the basin shape and, crucially, an S-shaped pipe which created a water trap. This prevents the stench and gases from the sewer below entering the bathroom, a truly revolutionary invention!
A couple of years later, in 1778, English inventor Joseph Bramah (1748–1814) improved upon this design (the original had a tendency to freeze up in cold weather) and started manufacturing highly effective flush toilets that continue to be sold well into the 19th century.
It would be remiss of me to write about this history of toilets without mentioned the name most readily associated with them – so I’ll end by talking about Thomas Crapper (1838–1910). First I’ll dispel a couple of myths. Crapper is not the reason that faeces are sometimes referred to as ‘crap’. The earliest known use of the word in this context dates back to 1846, when Crapper was a child of 10, in reference to a crapping ken, or a privy, where ken means a house. It is possible, however, that its usage increased once his products became more popular in Victorian England. Next he is sometimes described as being ‘the inventor of the flush toilet’, and as we have seen this is plainly not true! He did, however, improve upon earlier designs and had a total of nine toilet-related patents to his name, including the syphon flush system in use to this day and improving upon the S-bend by creating the U-bend.
Setting up his factory in 1861, he opened what was probably the first bathroom showroom in the world on the King’s Road in Chelsea in the 1870s (and it continued operating until 1966!). His reputation was really made when, in the 1880s, Prince Albert (later King Edward VII) purchased 30 toilets for his estate at Sandringham, giving the Crapper company a Royal Warrant. The company ultimately went bust in the 1960s, but the brand continues on Victorian-style toilets to this day. As I eagerly await the completion of my bathroom, I can’t help but be thankful for all of the toilet pioneers over the centuries…
Yes, I only have one toilet in my house, apart from when the bathroom is being worked on, when I have none.
Other names for chamber pot include jordan, jerry, guzunder, po, potty pot, thunder pot, and thunder mug.
Obviously there was a gradual decline, but this was the year the Germanic chieftain Odoacer deposed the last Roman emperor of the West, Romulus Augustulus.
The best invention in the world.