The first modern flushable toilet was described in 1596 by a godson of Queen Elizabeth I.
The first modern flushable toilet was described in 1596 by Sir John Harington, an English courtier and the godson of Queen Elizabeth I.
Harington’s device called for a 2-foot-deep oval bowl waterproofed with pitch, resin and wax and fed by water from an upstairs cistern. Flushing Harington’s pot required 7.5 gallons of water—a veritable torrent in the era before indoor plumbing. Harington noted that when water was scarce, up to 20 people could use his commode between flushes.
Harington described his device in a satirical pamphlet entitled “A New Discourse on a Stale Subject, called the Metamorphosis of Ajax”—a pun on the term “a jakes,” which was a popular slang term for toilets.
Although Harington installed a working model for Queen Elizabeth at Richmond Palace, it took several centuries—and the Industrial Revolution’s improvements in manufacturing and waste disposal—for the flush toilet to catch on.
In 1775 Scottish inventor Alexander Cumming was granted the first patent for a flush toilet. His greatest innovation was the S-shaped pipe below the bowl that used water to create a seal preventing sewer gas from entering through the toilet.
Source history website
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