Library 853
by the ® Wicked Mind's eye..

dear Cousin John

1963 / current
The boy, not much older than two, stood alongside the toilet and gripped the seat for support. He was looking down into the bowl at the water in the bottom. There floated quietly and with scant motion a brand new little brown turd. It was his. He had made it all himself, and a tremendous moment of pride was his. He watched it for some time while it floated slowly, moving as if stirred by a breeze. All sorts of thoughts filled his mind. Then without hesitation, he reached up, took a firm grip on the flush handle, and pulled. A swirl of water rushed from the vents, sending his turd spinning helplessly, caught in the twisting vortex. Then it tumbled down into the hollow center as the first tears streamed down his sullen cheeks. It was his, and now it was gone, gone forever.
( Well, not really!)

Trivia
The idea of a separate room for the disposal of bodily waste goes back at least 10,000 years (to 8000 BC.). On Orkney, an island off the coast of Scotland, the inhabitants who lived in stone huts created a drainage system that carried the waste directly into a nearby stream.

Bathtubs dating back to 2000 BC have been found on the island of Crete. Considering that they were built almost 4,000 years ago, the similarity to modern baths is startling. Around 1500 BC, elite Egyptians had hot and cold plumbing water that came into homes through a system of aqueducts and lead pipes.

The ancient Romans took their bathing seriously, building public facilities wherever they settled, including London. The more elaborate of these included massage salons, food and wine, gardens, exercise rooms, and in at least one case, a public library. Co-ed bathing was not uncommon, nor frowned upon.

As Christianity became increasingly powerful, techniques of plumbing and waste disposal and cleanliness in general were forgotten; only in the monasteries was this knowledge preserved. For hundreds of years, people in Europe basically stopped washing their bodies, in large part because nudity, even for reasons of health or hygiene, was regarded as sinful by the Church. In some cases, a reverence for dirt arose in its place. St. Francis of Assisi, for example, believed "dirtiness was an insignia of holiness." Upper class citizens tried to cover up the inevitable body odors with clothes and perfume, but the rest of the population suffered with the rank smells of filth.

Until the early 1800's, Europeans relieved themselves in chamber pots, out-houses, streets, alleys, and anywhere else they happened to feel the urge. It was so common to relieve oneself in public that people were concerned about how to behave if they noticed acquaintances urinating or defecating on the street. Proper etiquette was to "act like you don't see them." Chamber pots were used at night, or when it was too cold to go outside. Their contents were supposed to be picked up once a day by a "waste man" who carted the community's leavings to a public cesspool. But frequently the chamber pot was surreptitiously dumped at night, which made it dangerous to go strolling in the evening. Further, it was not uncommon for poor families to have only one pot for all needs. All, including cooking the breakfast porridge!

In the mid-1500's in England, a chamber pot was referred to as a "Jake." A hundred years later, it became a "John," or "Cousin John." In the mid-1800's, it was also dubbed a "Joe." That still may not be the source of the term "John" which may date to the 1920's when Men’s and Ladies’ rooms became common in public places. They were referred to as "John's" and "Jane's," presumably after John and Jane Doe. The term potty came from the pint-sized chamber pot built for kids.

The lack of bathing took an enormous toll on European life in the Middle Ages as epidemics caused by unsanitary living conditions became rampant. In the 1830's, in London, there was an outbreak of cholera, a disease the English once believed could be contracted only by inferior races. Over the next 50 years, the British built new public facilities that set the pace for the rest of the world to follow.

In 1875 the flush toilet was invented by an Englishman named Tom Crapper. Crapper's toilet emptied directly into a pipe, which then carried the undesirable matter to a cess pool or a nearby stream. Other toilets had done this too, but Crapper's major improvement was the addition of a "stink trap" that kept some water in the pipe, thus blocking bad odors.

The bathroom we know with combination toilet and bathing facilities didn't exist until the 1850's, and then was only for the rich. Until then, the term "bathroom," which came into use in the 1820's or 30's meant, literally, a room with only a bathtub in it.

First American hotel with indoor modern bathrooms was The Tremont House in Boston in the 1880's. The first toilet in the White House came in 1825, installed for John Quincy Adam, leading to a slang term for toilet - a quincy). The first city with modern waterworks was Philadelphia in 1820. The first city with a modern sewage system was Boston in1823. (Boston’s sewer system is being totally rebuilt as of this writing.)

In ancient times, there was no toilet paper. Well-to-do Romans used sponges, wool, and rosewater. Everyone else used whatever was at hand, including sticks, stones, leaves, or dry bones. In the Middle Ages, nobles preferred silk or goose feathers (still attached to the pliable neck). Toilet paper was introduced in America in 1857 as a package of loose sheets, but it was too much like the paper Americans already used- the Sears catalog. In 1879, an Englishman named Walter Alcock created the first perforated rolls of toilet paper. A year later, Philadelphia's Scott Brothers saw the potential in the U.S. for a product that would constantly have to be replaced. They introduced Waldorf Tissue (later Scott Tissue), which was discreetly sold in plain brown wrappers. The timing was right; by then there were enough bath rooms in America to make "toilet tissue" a success.

Thomas Crapper, born in 1837, died in 1910. Here was a man whose foresight, ingenuity, and perseverance brought to perfection one of the greatest boons to mankind, "The Crapper."

fin

Trivia. thanks to 1996 Grolier, Multimedia Encyclopedia. Assorted information found throughout.
October 2000

don/

thank u captain for the education.
es