In 1596, an English courtier named Sir John Harington published a book about a toilet.
It was not a plumbing manual. It was a satire, aimed at the court of his godmother, Queen Elizabeth I, and he called it A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, called the Metamorphosis of Ajax — Ajax being a pun on "a jakes," the slang of the day. Buried in the jokes were working instructions for a flushing water closet: a cistern above, a valve, a waterproofed oval bowl sealed with pitch, resin and wax.
The Ajax, as printed in 1596. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
He built one at his house in Somerset and installed another at Richmond Palace for the Queen. It used around 28 litres a flush, and Harington noted cheerfully that when water was short, twenty people could use it between flushes.
And then nothing happened for one hundred and seventy-nine years.
Not because it didn't work
The Ajax flushed perfectly well. The problem was what came back.
The bowl emptied down a straight pipe into a vault, and a straight pipe is a two-way street. Everything in that vault had an open route back into the room. Harington had built a machine for moving waste out of sight while leaving the smell exactly where it was.
In an era that believed disease travelled by bad air, a device that piped the cesspit into your bedroom was not an easy sell.
The whole of modern sanitation rests on a puddle.
It had already been invented. Twice.
Harington was not first, and neither was Europe.
Around 2500 BC, the cities of the Indus Valley — Mohenjo-daro, Harappa — were building houses with a seat over a brick chute, flushed with a jar of water, running into a covered drain beneath the street. Not a palace. Ordinary houses, at scale, connected to a municipal system.
Rome did it again: the Cloaca Maxima from around 600 BC, still carrying water today, and communal latrines where twenty people sat on a stone bench with no partitions and no apparent awkwardness about it. Privacy, it turns out, is the modern addition.
The public latrine at Ostia Antica, the port of Rome. Twenty seats, one room, running water underneath, and not a partition in sight. Photo via Wikimedia Commons — check the licence before reuse.
Both systems were lost. Not because anyone forgot how bricks work, but because the cities went. A sewer is only worth building where enough people live close enough together to need one, and for a thousand years in Europe, they did not.
What replaced it: the garderobe. This one is in the latrine tower at Malbork Castle in Poland. A seat, a shaft, and gravity. Photo via Wikimedia Commons — check the licence before reuse.
That is the pattern of this entire history: the ideas keep getting invented, and what determines whether they survive is the infrastructure around them.
Eleven moments. Ten of them are about pipes.
1775: someone finally bends the pipe
The Scottish watchmaker Alexander Cumming took out the first patent on a flushing water closet in 1775 — patent 1105. His improvements covered the shape of the bowl and the way water entered it, but the one that mattered was a double bend in the waste pipe.
Water sits in that bend and never drains away. It is a plug, permanently in place, that lets waste fall through but stops gas coming back. That is the S-trap, and a version of it is under every toilet, sink and shower you have ever used.
Three years later Joseph Bramah added a hinged valve to seal the bottom of the bowl, a design robust enough that it went to sea on ships. The water closet was now a real product.
It still had nowhere to send anything.
1858: legislation by nose
Here is the awkward part of the story. Working toilets made things worse.
Every new water closet in London emptied into a cesspit or, increasingly, into the Thames — the same river the city drank from. Cholera arrived repeatedly. The 1848 Public Health Act required new houses to have a water closet, privy or ash-pit, which multiplied the flow without giving it anywhere to go.
Then the summer of 1858 was hot, the Thames cooked, and Parliament — sitting directly beside it, with curtains soaked in chloride of lime — found the matter suddenly urgent. Funding for Joseph Bazalgette's sewer network passed in eighteen days.
Four and a half centuries of sanitary engineering, and the thing that finally moved it was a smell strong enough to reach politicians.
Crapper sold it. He did not invent it.
Thomas Crapper's real contribution was commercial: he opened a showroom and put toilets in the window, at a time when displaying one in public was close to indecent. He improved the tank-filling mechanism. He did not invent the flush, and the word "crap" predates him by centuries — though British cisterns stamped with his name, seen by American soldiers stationed in England, probably did the rest.
A Crapper high-level cistern, still installed in the Horta Museum in Brussels. Check the licence on Wikimedia Commons before reuse.
By about 1880 the thing was finished. Bowl, trap, cistern, chain. Look at a toilet today and you are looking at a Victorian object with the tank lowered and the chain replaced by a button.
Then the road forked
After 1900 the toilet went in two directions, and most people only know one of them.
In the West it became a water problem. Nothing fundamental changed about the bowl; what changed was how much you were allowed to put through it, from around 13 litres a flush down to under 5. We wrote about that in the piece on the flush. A century of engineering effort went into doing the same thing with less.
In Japan it became a hygiene problem. TOTO launched the Washlet in 1980 and put water back into the fixture — warmed, aimed, adjustable. It is unremarkable there and exotic here, which tells you the difference was never technical.
The control panel of a Japanese toilet, labelled in Japanese, English and braille. Nothing about this is futuristic in Japan. Photo via Wikimedia Commons — check the licence before reuse.
And in most of the world, the toilet is still a pan and a bucket of water, poured by hand, and works perfectly.
A public squat pan in Malaysia. No cistern, no mechanism, no moving parts — and the most widely used toilet on earth. It is also the one least likely to appear in an article about the history of the toilet. Photo via Wikimedia Commons — check the licence before reuse.
Singapore, in a public restroom: a Western bowl with a hose beside it. Two traditions bolted together, and completely unremarkable to everyone who uses it. Photo via Wikimedia Commons — check the licence before reuse.
The step nobody engineered
Run back through the whole thing and notice what every advance has in common.
The drain. The sewer. The trap. The valve. The cistern. The tank-fill mechanism. The flush volume. Every one of them is about what happens after — moving the problem away, sealing it off, keeping it out of the river and out of the room.
Four and a half thousand years of extremely serious engineering went into the disposal of human waste. Almost none went into the step where a human being cleans themselves. That step was handed to a roll of perforated paper in 1891, and nobody has touched it since. We wrote about that one too, in the piece on 1891.
It is a strange gap. The Romans engineered the bench, the channel, the drain and the sewer — and then handed you a shared sponge. We engineered the trap, the sewer network, the ballcock and the dual-flush button — and then handed you a paper towel.
The bowl was never the hard part. Neither was the pipe. The hard part is the two seconds in the middle that nobody wants to describe out loud.
What about you?
Out of everything in the timeline above — the Roman bench, the garderobe, the chain cistern, the dual-flush button, the Washlet, the pan and bucket — how many have you actually used?
Most Europeans will answer three. Most Brazilians will answer four. Anyone who has travelled a bit will answer five, and will have a story about at least one of them.
Tell us which, and which one surprised you. What about you?
A note on our numbers
Dates in this piece are the conventional ones and several are genuinely disputed — the Indus Valley chronology, the precise workings of Roman latrines, and almost everything attributed to Thomas Crapper. Where the record is contested we have said so rather than tidy it up. The patent dates and the Public Health Act are documentary and firm.
Spray Up is a non-profit association working to reduce toilet paper consumption through water-based hygiene.
Sources
- John Harington, A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, called the Metamorphosis of Ajax, 1596 — the Ajax, the Richmond Palace installation, and the flush volume
- British patent 1105, Alexander Cumming, 1775 — the first patent for a flushing water closet, including the S-trap
- British patent 1177, Joseph Bramah, 1778 — the hinged valve design
- The National Archives (UK), Innovations in toilet design — patent texts and dating
- Public Health Act 1848 (UK) — the requirement for a water closet, privy or ash-pit in new houses
- Sanitation of the Indus Valley Civilisation — household toilets, brick drains and soak pits, c. 2500 BC
- Sanitation in ancient Rome — the Cloaca Maxima and public latrine design
- TOTO — launch of the Washlet, 1980
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