The History of the Toilet

WARNING: I do not suggest reading this if you're planning on eating anytime soon.

Having said that, lets dive right in.

In ancient times the methods people used to dispose of their waste varied. In Rome and Greece they sometimes used running water in their bath houses. Although chamber pots were also commonly used, they even brought them to meals and drinking sessions. The pots were then emptied into receptacles on the streets if you lived in large cities like Rome or Pompeii. One fun fact is that workers, called fullers, collected and used the urine from the receptacles to eliminate impurities from cloth. In ancient China during the Han dynasty they used pig toilets, which was an outhouse with either a chute or a hole that deposited the waste into a pigsty where the pigs then ate it.

In the Middle Ages garderobes were used, mostly in upper class dwellings. Garderobes were basically slabs of wood or stone with one or more holes to sit on, connected to a chute or pipe that carried the waste out of the castle. They were placed close to kitchens or fireplaces so that the rooms would be warm, but far away from bedrooms because of the smell. The name garderobe means to guard your robe, and many people think that the "bathrooms" were named this because of the practice of hanging your clothes in the rooms so that the ammonia from the urine would kill the fleas.

The toilets we know and love started to take shape at around 1770 due to the work of Alexander Cumming and Joseph Bramah, although "water closets" were first introduced in the Tudor era. However they didn't begin to be moved inside until around 1850, though that luxury was for the upper class. It wasn't until the Tudor Walters Report of 1918 that more people started to have toilets in their homes, the report suggested that semi-skilled workers should have houses with kitchens and internal WC.

The chain-pull indoor toilet was introduced to America in 1890, but only in wealthy homes and hotels at first. Toilets were then improved by a man named William Elvis Sloan when he invented the Flushometer in 1906. The Flushometer used pressurized water directly from the supply line for faster recycle time between flushes. And the rest is history.