50 Fun Facts About Bathroom

Which Elizabethan courtier described England's first flushing toilet, the Ajax, in a 1596 book?

Sir John Harington named it with a pun on 'a jakes', slang for a privy, and the book's barbs got Queen Elizabeth's godson banished from court again.

Alexander Cumming's S-bend of 1775 solved which problem of early flush toilets?

Sewer gases are held back by the water that settles in the bend after each flush; the London watchmaker's trick was so simple that toilets still rely on it today.

Popular legend wrongly credits which Victorian plumber with inventing the flush toilet?

Thomas Crapper held nine plumbing patents, none of them for the flush toilet; the legend owes most to a tongue-in-cheek 1969 biography called Flushed with Pride.

Which French revolutionary was stabbed to death in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday in 1793?

Jean-Paul Marat spent much of each day in a medicinal bath to ease a skin disease and received visitors there, which is how Corday reached him with a hidden kitchen knife.

George Jennings installed the first public pay toilets at which 1851 event?

The Great Exhibition made his flushing 'Monkey Closets' in the Crystal Palace so popular that the first public lavatories opened the following year, billed as 'Public Waiting Rooms'.

The euphemism 'to spend a penny' comes from what?

Coin-operated toilet door locks took one old penny in London's public lavatories, and the euphemism has outlived both the locks and the pre-decimal coin.

Which Roman emperor taxed public urinals and reputedly told his son that money does not smell?

Vespasian held a coin from the first payment to his son Titus's nose and asked if the smell offended him; street urinals in France are still called vespasiennes.

Very early toilets that used flowing water have been found at Skara Brae, a Neolithic village where?

Orkney, Scotland, hid the village under sand until a storm uncovered it in 1850, revealing stone houses with drains running beneath them.

Which ancient culture is credited with the world's first known urban sanitation systems?

The Indus Valley Civilisation lined the main streets of cities such as Mohenjo-daro with covered drains, so waste water from houses was carried away instead of pooling in the lanes.

In which country was paper first recorded as being used for personal hygiene, in the 6th century AD?

China's scholar Yan Zhitui wrote in 589 that he dared not use paper bearing quotations from the Five Classics or the names of sages for toilet purposes.

Joseph Gayetty's Medicated Paper of 1857, America's first commercial toilet paper, was sold as a way to prevent what?

Hemorrhoids were the pitch: the aloe-infused sheets were sold as a medical product, and their New York inventor was proud enough to print his name on every one.

Which firm popularised toilet rolls when it began marketing them in 1890?

Scott sold its first rolls through dealers under other brand names, because the brothers were too embarrassed by the product to put the family name on it for over a decade.

As late as the 1930s, the Northern Tissue company advertised its toilet paper with what selling point?

Splinter free was a real boast: it took makers until the 1930s to refine toilet paper enough to promise that no slivers of wood were left in it.

Before toilet paper was common, which free publications did rural Americans hang in the outhouse and use page by page?

Mail-order catalogs from Sears arrived free in the post, which is one reason the first commercial toilet papers sold poorly: few people saw the point of paying for paper.

In TV adverts from 1964 to 1985, the grocer Mr Whipple scolded shoppers for squeezing which toilet paper?

Charmin's fussy grocer became so familiar that a 1978 poll named him the third best-known man in America, behind only Richard Nixon and Billy Graham.

Which fixture is named after a French word for a pony?

Bidet meant a small horse in French, and the name passed to the low basin because a user sits astride it like a rider.

Which Procter & Gamble soap, first sold in 1879, was advertised with the slogan 'It Floats'?

Ivory was named in church, the story goes: Harley Procter, a founder's son, heard a psalm that speaks of 'ivory palaces' and knew what to call his new white soap.

Which Japanese company makes the Washlet, the electronic toilet seat that washes its user?

Toto began by importing American 'wash air seats' meant for hospitals and nursing homes, then launched its own improved Washlet in 1980.

Which mouthwash turned 'halitosis', an obscure medical term, into a household word through its 1920s adverts?

Listerine was developed in 1879 as a surgical antiseptic and only reached shop shelves in 1914; the word it made famous had been coined by a physician back in 1874.

In which 1960 Alfred Hitchcock film does the most famous shower scene in cinema appear?

Psycho toned down Robert Bloch's novel, in which the victim is beheaded in the shower; Hitchcock's film has her stabbed in a scene storyboarded by Saul Bass.

Which late-night TV host's 1973 joke about a toilet paper shortage sent Americans rushing to empty the shelves?

Johnny Carson's Tonight Show quip was taken at face value by viewers, and their panic buying created a real shortage that lasted for weeks.

Marcel Duchamp signed a porcelain urinal 'R. Mutt' in 1917 and entered it in an art show under which title?

Fountain was kept out of sight at the 1917 show, yet in 2004 a poll of 500 art experts named it the most influential modern artwork of all time.

Which US president's administration broke up the price-fixing 'porcelain trust' of toilet makers in 1912?

William Howard Taft's government beat the fixture makers in the Supreme Court; the famous story that he once got stuck in a White House bathtub is a tale no document supports.

Which ancient Greek reportedly shouted 'Eureka!' after noticing the water rise in his bath?

Archimedes is said to have leapt from the tub and run home naked through Syracuse, shouting the word; the tale comes from the Roman architect Vitruvius, writing some two centuries later.

In a Roman bath complex, what was the caldarium?

The hot room stayed hot because its floor was raised on pillars, letting air from a furnace flow underneath and up through the walls.

The Farnese Bull and the Farnese Hercules were recovered from which Roman bathing complex?

The Baths of Caracalla were dug over in the 1540s on the orders of Pope Paul III, who wanted ancient statues for his family's palace; both marbles are now in Naples.

The earliest evidence of a cleansing fat-and-alkali mixture, around 2800 BC, comes from which ancient civilisation?

Babylon left the oldest trace, in clay cylinders; Egypt's version turns up more than a thousand years later in a medical papyrus, as a treatment for skin diseases.

Traditional Castile soap, named for a region of Spain, is made from which oil?

Olive oil grew on the doorstep in Spain, Italy and France, which is why those three countries became Europe's early centres of soap making.

William Addis is believed to have made the first mass-produced toothbrush in 1780 where?

Britain's William Addis is said to have had the idea in Newgate prison, where he drilled holes in a bone saved from a meal and tied in bristles begged from a guard.

Before nylon took over in 1938, the bristles of most toothbrushes came from which animals?

Pigs supplied the stiff neck hair of the first bristle toothbrushes, though Europeans found it too firm and often chose softer horsehair until nylon arrived.

In a 2003 MIT survey of inventions Americans could not live without, which came a close second to the toothbrush?

The car won 37 percent of adults to the toothbrush's 42, while the computer, the mobile phone and the microwave each managed only about 6 percent.

The rubber duck entered the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2013 alongside which centuries-old board game?

Chess shared the class of 2013 with a toy whose first versions could not even float: early rubber ducks were cast solid and sold as chew toys.

In January 1992, 28,800 plastic bath toys including yellow ducks were washed off a ship in which ocean?

Pacific currents scattered the toys so widely that oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer used beachcombers' finds to track how the ocean's surface waters move.

Which Sesame Street character took the bath-time song 'Rubber Duckie' into the Billboard top 20 in 1970?

Ernie, performed by Jim Henson, sang it to his bath toy; the single reached No. 16 and helped make the rubber duck the classic bathtub companion.

In software engineering, 'rubber duck debugging' means what?

Explaining your code aloud to an object forces you to spell out every step, which is when the mistake shows; the name comes from a story in the book The Pragmatic Programmer.

Which of these is a traditional nickname for a chamber pot?

Thunder mug is one of many nicknames for the pot, whose slops old Edinburgh flung from upstairs windows into the street with the warning cry 'Gardyloo!'

A 'Jack and Jill' bathroom is one that is what?

Shared between two bedrooms, it usually sits between them with a door from each, and often has two wash basins so both occupants can get ready at once.

Which Southeast Asian country tabled the 2013 UN resolution that made World Toilet Day an official observance?

Singapore is also home to the World Toilet Organization, the campaign group founded on 19 November 2001, which is why the day falls on that date.

London's central sewerage system was built by Joseph Bazalgette in response to which 1858 event?

The Great Stink came in a hot summer when the sewage-filled Thames reeked right outside Parliament, and politicians who had stalled for years quickly approved the new sewers.

Astronauts on the International Space Station use a toilet that can recover what from urine?

Drinking water is distilled from the crew's urine by the station's life-support system, which NASA reported in 2023 could recover about 98% of the water astronauts use.

Acoustically, why does singing sound better in the bathroom?

Hard tiled surfaces flatter the voice by bouncing it around a small room, and the reverberation gives the singer a fullness and depth that soft furnishings would soak up.

In US real-estate jargon, what fixtures does a 'half bath' contain?

A toilet and a sink are two of the four fixtures that usually define a full bath, which adds a tub and a shower; a '3/4 bath' has the shower but no tub.

In Canada, what is the usual word for a public toilet, where an American would say 'restroom'?

Washroom is the Canadian word for public facilities, though at home most Canadians simply say bathroom, as their American neighbours do.

In ancient Rome's public latrines, which shared tool is thought to have done the job of toilet paper?

A sponge on a stick, the tersorium, was rinsed in vinegar or salt water between users, though some researchers now think it was more of a toilet brush.

'Toilet' comes from 'toilette', a diminutive of the French 'toile', and first meant what?

Little cloth: the word passed from the cloth to the dressing table it covered, then to the act of dressing, and reached the bathroom only as a polite euphemism.

Which American bathroom brand made its first bathtub in 1883 by enamelling a cast-iron water trough?

Kohler was a Wisconsin foundry making ploughs and other farm implements, and the trough it sold as a bathtub was the first plumbing product it ever made.

In a typical UK bathroom, the one power socket you are likely to find is labelled for what?

Electric shavers get a special low-power socket fed through an isolating transformer, because wiring rules keep ordinary sockets well away from baths and showers.

Akrotiri, a Bronze Age town with paved streets and drains, was buried by a volcano on which island?

Santorini's eruption about 3,600 years ago buried the town under ash and pumice, which is why its frescoes and three-storey houses survived so well.

Epsom salts, a staple of the soothing bath, take their name from a spa town in which country?

England's Epsom, in Surrey, had a mineral spring whose bitter water was boiled down for the salts, and visitors flocked to the town to take the cure.

A natural bath loofah, often taken for a sea sponge, is really the dried inside of what?

A gourd from a tropical vine in the cucumber family, the luffa is eaten as a vegetable when young; left to ripen and dry, its fibrous skeleton becomes the scrubber.