Impress your friends with these little known plumbing facts:
- Popular wisdom says that Sir Thomas Crapper invented the flush toilet. Not so: John Harrington invented the modern flush toilet in 1596.
Harrington was a brilliant inventor, but he wrote a book about it called A New Discourse upon a Stale Subject: The Metamorphosis of Ajax (Ajax was what he called his toilet since “jakes” was a name for toilets in his day).
Unfortunately, the book compared excrement to the royal system and made some powerful people very angry.
- His name is why we call a toilet a John. The word “crap” doesn’t refer to Crapper. It dates back to medieval English and didn’t originally refer to excrement.
- Flush toilets were first conceived of during the Neolithic Revolution. Basically, as soon as humans switched from hunting and gathering to agriculture, people didn’t want to deal with their waste and figured out ways to get it as far away as possible.
- The Indus Valley Civilization used flush toilets. There were toilets in Britain in the 31st Century B.C. The Romans had them too. Obviously the technologies were different – for one, rubber was not available to ancient peoples.
- One of the finest, cleanest water supplies in the US is in…wait for it…New York City.
New York has a vast system of reservoirs and aqueducts upstate and uses gravity to bring the water to town. Some of the water comes from as far away as the Catskills.
New York brings in more than 1 billion gallons of water per day.
- New York has nothing on the Romans, who used a vast system of aqueducts to move water around. Some of them are still standing.
- The average person uses about 33 gallons per shower. Your mileage will vary depending on the water pressure in your shower.
- In our day, we use industrially produced paper to clean ourselves. In different times and places, there have been different solutions.
Eskimos use snow, which surely works but doesn’t sound very pleasant, least of all during a cold snap.
Romans used sponges on a stick which were stored in salt water.
Corn cobs and leaves have been used in North America for thousands of years.
- The most common item dropped down toilets is jewelry. So be careful.
- The busiest time of the year for plumbers is the holiday season, because everyone is using the system more which puts a bigger strain on resources.
Whatever time of year it is though, if you need a plumber in the Phoenix area, we’ll be there for you. And we won’t treat your problem like it’s trivial.
