45 Fun Facts About Toilet

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

Sir John Harington described his flushing 'Ajax' in the 1596 book The Metamorphosis of Ajax; its name punned on a slang word for a privy, and its satire got him banished from court.

The 1596 toilet book The Metamorphosis of Ajax got its author banished from court by which monarch?

Elizabeth I was the author's godmother, and she had banished him once before, until he translated the whole of Orlando Furioso as penance for passing a racy canto around her ladies.

What does the S-shaped bend that a Scottish watchmaker patented for toilets in 1775 keep out of the room?

Sewer gas is blocked by the plug of water that sits in the bend, a trick Alexander Cumming patented in 1775 and that still works beneath almost every toilet and sink.

Which Victorian plumber is wrongly credited by legend with inventing the flush toilet, though he did hold nine patents?

Crapper held nine patents but did not invent the flush toilet; Wallace Reyburn's tongue-in-cheek 1969 biography Flushed with Pride inflated his fame, and his firm's manhole covers at Westminster Abbey draw tourists.

Which royal residence of the future Edward VII earned a Chelsea plumber his first royal warrant in the 1880s?

Sandringham House in Norfolk had been bought for the Prince of Wales in 1862, and the job led on to work at Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey.

Which Hitchcock thriller is credited as the first Hollywood film to show a toilet being flushed on screen?

Psycho alarmed the censors with its shot of torn-up notepaper swirling down the bowl, because American films of the time almost never showed a toilet at all.

At the 1851 Great Exhibition, 827,280 visitors each paid how much to use George Jennings' 'Monkey Closets'?

One penny bought a clean seat, a towel, a comb and a shoe shine, and the closets proved so popular that they stayed open after the Exhibition, earning about £1,000 a year.

Which Roman emperor's tax on collected urine inspired the saying 'money has no smell'?

Vespasian taxed the urine collected from Rome's public latrines and sold to fullers; Suetonius records his retort that the coins did not smell, and French street pissoirs were later named vespasiennes after him.

Which ancient civilization, in cities like Mohenjo-Daro and Lothal, had the first known urban sanitation systems?

Indus Valley builders ran covered brick drains along the streets of Mohenjo-Daro to carry waste water from houses, and left openings at intervals so the drains could be inspected and cleaned.

Which Neolithic village in Orkney, occupied from about 3100 BC, had small rooms over a communal drain?

Skara Brae, a stone-built Neolithic settlement on Orkney, was buried in sand and re-exposed by a storm in 1850; some of its huts had small cells over a communal drain.

A medieval castle's toilet was called the garderobe, a word that also gave English the name of which piece of furniture?

Wardrobe is the same word as garderobe, 'guard the robes'; by one account clothes were hung in the castle privy because the ammonia was thought to keep fleas and moths away.

Which household vessel was nicknamed the jerry and the guzunder?

Chamber pot nicknames were many, and guzunder simply records that it 'goes under' the bed, where it spared its owner a night-time walk to the outdoor privy.

The word 'toilet' comes from toilette, a diminutive of the French toile, which means what?

Cloth is toile in French and a toilette was a little one; the word passed from the cloth to the dressing table, to getting dressed, to the dressing room and only then to the fixture.

Which 1858 London event, caused by sewage in the Thames, spurred Parliament to fund Bazalgette's sewers?

The Great Stink of summer 1858 made the sewage-laden Thames so foul that Parliament, sitting beside it, quickly funded Joseph Bazalgette's interceptor sewer system for London.

Which president signed the 1992 energy law that capped new American toilets at 1.6 gallons per flush?

George H. W. Bush signed the Energy Policy Act days before the 1992 election, and from 1994 it more than halved the 3.5 gallons a typical American toilet had used for every flush.

The two-button dual-flush toilet was developed in 1980 to save water in which drought-prone country?

Australia's Caroma developed the two-button cistern with a government grant, and states such as South Australia went on to make dual-flush toilets compulsory in new homes.

Which Japanese company launched the 'paperless' Washlet toilet seat in 1980?

Toto was selling to a country with no habit of washing with water, and buyers stayed sceptical until a 1982 television commercial made the Washlet a household name.

What does the 'Otohime' device fitted in many Japanese women's toilets do?

Plays a flushing sound to mask noise: the Otohime was introduced so users need not flush repeatedly for privacy, saving large volumes of water in public toilets.

Which bathroom fixture is named after an old word for a pony?

Bidet meant a small horse in French, and the low basin took the name because the user straddles it like a rider; English had borrowed the word for the horse in the 1620s.

The world's first known toilet paper, in the 6th century AD, was used in which country?

China: the scholar Yan Zhitui wrote in 589 AD that he would not use paper bearing the classics for toilet purposes, the earliest known reference to toilet paper.

Which brothers, credited with first selling toilet paper on a roll, were too embarrassed to put their own name on it?

Scott brothers Irvin and Clarence of Philadelphia let dealers sell their rolls under some 2,000 other labels, and the family name only went on the wrapper in about 1903.

For two decades of TV ads, the grocer Mr. Whipple begged shoppers 'Please don't squeeze' which toilet paper?

Charmin's fussy grocer, who squeezed the rolls himself when nobody was looking, was played by Dick Wilson in more than 500 commercials, the first of them filmed in Flushing, New York.

As late as the 1930s, the Northern Tissue company advertised its toilet paper as being free of what?

Splinters were sometimes left in early rolls by the way the paper was made, and in the 1930s Northern became the first brand to advertise its tissue as free of them.

Which talk-show host's 1973 joke about a possible shortage triggered a real run on toilet paper in the US?

Johnny Carson's December 1973 Tonight Show monologue riffed on a press release by Wisconsin congressman Harold Froehlich about a possible paper shortage; viewers rushed out and emptied the shelves.

Which British toilet roll brand began in 1942 as a gentleman's disposable handkerchief sold only at Harrods?

Andrex takes its name from St Andrew's Mill in Walthamstow, where it was first made, and its soft tissue slowly saw off the hard, shiny sheets that British bathrooms had known.

Which British king died in 1760, minutes after going to his close stool?

George II drank his morning chocolate at Kensington Palace and went to his close stool alone; minutes later his valet heard a crash, and the post-mortem found that his aorta had torn.

Before toilet rolls were cheap, which printed items famously ended up on a nail in rural American outhouses?

Mail-order catalogs from Sears and Montgomery Ward gave rural families something free to read and then to use, and The Old Farmer's Almanac came with a hole in the corner so it could hang there too.

Which Australian word means outhouse?

Dunny is a clipping of dunnekin, old British slang for a privy, and Australians still speak of the dunny roll and the dunny door.

Which UN-recognised day falls on 19 November each year?

World Toilet Day, 19 November, was started by the World Toilet Organization in 2001 and recognised by a UN General Assembly resolution in 2013 to draw attention to sanitation.

Which country tabled the UN's 2013 'Sanitation for All' resolution, the first it had ever put forward?

Singapore had never tabled a resolution in its 48 years at the UN, and the idea came from Jack Sim, a Singaporean businessman who had campaigned for clean public toilets for more than a decade.

Which waterborne disease did John Snow trace to a Broad Street pump in 1854?

Cholera is spread by water contaminated with faeces; John Snow's 1854 map of deaths around the Broad Street pump in Soho helped prove it, and sewers and treatment are the main defence.

Marcel Duchamp's 1917 readymade Fountain was what everyday object, signed 'R. Mutt'?

A urinal, laid flat and signed 'R. Mutt 1917', was submitted to the Society of Independent Artists, which hid it from view; the original was lost and replicas were later authorised by Duchamp.

The artist Maurizio Cattelan's America, a working toilet stolen from Blenheim Palace in 2019, was made of what?

Solid gold, 18 carat and plumbed in for visitors to use, it was ripped out of Winston Churchill's birthplace in a dawn raid that flooded the building, and the gold is believed to have been melted down.

What is the name of the automatic self-cleaning street toilet pod that first became popular in France?

Sanisette is a JCDecaux trademark that has passed into everyday French; after every visitor the cabin washes, dries and disinfects its own floor and bowl.

A 1970s campaign begun by Ohio teenagers, its logo a fist rising from a toilet bowl, got what banned in many states?

Pay toilets numbered more than 50,000 across America in 1970, most of them behind a dime-in-the-slot lock; Chicago banned them in 1973 and by 1980 almost none were left.

Which Wisconsin bathroom giant made its first bathtub in 1883 by enamelling a cast-iron horse trough?

Kohler was then a Sheboygan foundry making farm implements; its founder coated one of its troughs in enamel, gave it four legs and sold it as a bathtub.

On the International Space Station, what directs waste into the toilet in the absence of gravity?

Airflow does the job: a fan draws urine into a hose funnel and solid waste into bags, since without gravity nothing falls; the urine is then recycled into drinking water.

A ship's toilet is traditionally called what?

The head takes its name from the bow, or head, of a sailing ship, where the crew's seats of ease were simple openings above the sea.

Which empire's capital, Kumasi, had a toilet in every house when the British envoy Thomas Bowdich visited in 1817?

Asante toilets were deep-dug pits, some of them upstairs, and boiling water was poured down them every day, which Bowdich wrote 'effectually prevents the least offence'.

What noisy nickname did the British in India give the portable commode, a comic prize in Evelyn Waugh's Men at Arms?

Thunderbox probably owes its name to the noises made on it; in the novel the officer Apthorpe fights a battle of wits with his brigadier over his own brass-bound oak model.

Until 2001, British water rules required toilet cisterns to flush by which mechanism?

Siphon cisterns lift the water over a bend instead of unplugging a hole, so they cannot dribble into the bowl; the continental valve flush was banned in Britain as wasteful until the rules changed in 2001.

What does the float valve, or ballcock, inside a flushing cistern control?

The refill after a flush is the float valve's job: as the cistern empties the float drops and opens the inlet, then rises with the water and shuts it off at the set level.

UN Sustainable Development Goal 6 pairs sanitation for all with which other basic need?

Clean water shares Goal 6 with sanitation; five years before the goals were adopted, the UN General Assembly had declared access to both a human right.

Which 1922 book's pun on Waterloo and 'watercloset' may be the earliest hint of the word 'loo' in print?

Ulysses has Stephen Dedalus run 'Waterloo' straight into 'watercloset', the line that those who derive 'loo' from Waterloo lean on; the first firm record of the word dates only from 1940, and its origin is still uncertain.

Why do trains, aircraft and ships favour vacuum toilets?

Less water saves weight and stops slopping: suction does the work of a cistern, so each flush needs only a fraction of the usual water and no pool sits in the bowl to spill when the vehicle lurches.