Futuristic High-Tech Toilets
These stunningly futuristic facilities are sort of the antithesis of the rest of my collection.
Automated public toilets were invented in France and installed in public some time probably around 1990. The design has since been exported to other countries.
This is a classic unit in Paris.
Entrée gratuite or free entry, they say. Originally they cost a few centimes, but now they're free.
Wait until the green LIBRE or FREE indicator shows. That's "free" as in libre or unoccupied, and not as in gratuite or no fee. Then press the button and the door opens.
The toilet design has changed over time.
The older ones, at left, had an unusual design. The bowl was just that — a bowl with no drain. It is flushed after you leave the compartment by rotating back into the wall and being hosed out.
The newer ones, at right, have a more conventional design. But they are still retracted and sprayed down after every use.
Compartments on the panel above the toilet dispense toilet paper and provide water, soap, and hot air for hand cleaning.
A floor sensor detects whether a person is really inside or not. If there is no person, or after a period of time even if there is a person, the door automatically opens.
After the person steps out, the door closes and the entire interior is sprayed with a disinfectant. The toilet bowl is rotated back into the wall and hosed out. After this quick cycle of 60 seconds or less, it is available for the next user.
San Francisco, America's most European city in many ways, has a number of the French design automated toilets.
Here's one undergoing maintenance on the Embarcadero, the waterfront facing central San Francisco Bay and the Bay Bridge to Oakland. That's the Coit Tower up on Telegraph Hill in the background.
This man is working on this one. Let's see if we can get a look inside the mechanical back end!
After all, the advertising poster on the side does say "Voyeur".
The back end contains a mixture of electrical, water, and waste hardware.
This is the entry to another automated unit. This one is at the base of the Coit Tower.
The internationalized signage indicates it's good for individuals and groups of two, smoking is not allowed, and it will automatically open in 20 minutes.
The fine print describes all that in more detail in a variety of written languages.
Much of the interior is cast in a speckled plastic.
This is the automated sink. It says:
AUTOMATED SINK
INSERT HANDS TO START SOAP, WATER, DRYER
NO DRINKING WATER
This toilet has the more traditional design with a drain, it's not the simple bowl of the early French designs. This is made of stainless steel, the early and middle French designs used a white plastic material.
The bowl is rotated back ninety degrees during the cleaning cycle and sprayed from the rear to clean it.
The floor and some of the lower wall surfaces are covered in a tough corregated rubber material. You can see the speckled plastic on the wall at right.
You might notice that the floor feels a little springy in these automated units. It's a weight sensor. The entire floor functions as a crude scale to determine if it is actually occupied. If someone starts the cycle and steps out before the door closes, it will quickly re-open.
This is a Toilette a Grande Vitesse, or a High Speed Toilet, found on the TGV or Train a Grande Vitesse, the High Speed Train running through France.
Before leaving my seat, my GPS had synced up and was indicating a speed of 305 kilometers per hour.
At left is an electically-powered toilet seat in a luxury hotel room in Tokyo, Japan.
It was the Hotel Intercontinental, I was there on business. It wasn't the hotel in "Lost in Translation" but it might as well have been.
A console arm beside the seat has a couple of dials and some push buttons, and the bottom side of the seat lid has a multi-paragraph manual explaining its operation.
Unfortunately, it was only in Japanese. The only English warned that you shouldn't break the toilet or urinate all over the seat. But that's always good advice!
Below that are some better images of a similar high-tech Japanese toilet.
This one is in the Tokyu Haneda Hotel, including an image of the instruction manual. This one has at least a little English.
A waterless urinal, which is only slightly high-tech. The first one of these I saw was at Fort Huachuca, in south-eastern Arizona. It featured an eye-level explanation of how the things work: Teflon-like non-wetting surface, a collection vessel with a layer of light oil so the urine collects below a sealed oil surface. However, as Fort Huachuca is where the US Army does its intelligence training, it's not the best place to be taking pictures.
Taking pictures in public restrooms is bad enough, but taking pictures on intelligence bases is even worse.
I had to wait until spotting this one in the Dark Horse Tavern along North Highland Avenue in the Virginia Highlands area of Atlanta, Georgia, USA, to collect an image of a waterless toilet.
At left is a pair of waterless urinals. Unlike the above, with its marble-flecked plastic material, this Sloan Waterfree unit appears to be traditional porcelain, although probably with a teflon-like coating on the, ah, active surface, shall we say.
This waterless urinal pair is found in the American Tap Room bar in the Reston Town Center in Reston, Virginia, USA.
At right is a free-standing waterless urinal at the Pasara Thai restaurant, 2501 Jamieson Avenue, Alexandria, Virginia, USA. This is in the Carlyle area surrounding the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
At left is a slightly different waterless model, featuring the fly image pioneered by the urinals at Schiphol Airport outside Amsterdam (it's a bee in this example, click here to see the famous Schiphol Airport urinals). A small target on which to concentrate? A distraction? Whatever the mechanism, it is said to significantly improve cleanliness.
Somewhat ironically, this high-tech urinal was spotted in the Hand and Bell Tavern in Boston, which claims to be the oldest bar in U.S. (1795).
O'Hare Airport (ORD), outside Chicago, USA, contains abominations called "Sani-Seat" toilets.
Least. Comfortable. Toilets. EVER.
The seating surface is narrow and flat with squared off edges. It's somewhat like sitting on exposed rafters during a construction job.
-
Wave your hand over the symbol.
Coloque su mano sobre el simbolo.
Passez votre main devant le symbole.
-
Wait until the new cover is applied.
Espere a que se accomode la nueva cubierta.
Attendez le nouveau recouvrement.
-
The seat is now ready for your use.
Ahora está listo el asiento para su uso.
Le siège est maintenant prêt à être utilisé.
The wall-mounted manual is also written in Braille, if you happen to be groping around all the surfaces inside the airport toilet stall.
I doubt that the majority of blind patrons even notice the sign, let alone read it.
What are these like for the user?
Imagine starting with the least comfortable toilet seat shape ever designed, and then wrapping it in crinkly waxed baking paper.
It's like that, except less comfortable.
This high-tech urinal is in the park adjacent to the campus of Cambridge University. The hand-washing water flushes it, and there is a (nearly hidden) hot-air hand drier also built in.
This is not handicap-accessible, so this is not Steven Hawking's personal toilet. He is on the faculty there, having held the position once held by Isaac Newton.
Also see the Toilets of Higher Education page.
The super-fancy bathroom in the Ambassador Suite in the Westin Boston Waterfront hotel, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
When you turn on the bathroom light, a television set embedded behind the mirror turns on. And there is what appears to be an Ethernet jack in the wall above the handrail next to the toilet!
However, the Westin Boston Waterfront hotel has horrible service. I was there for two weeks while working at a conference (although not staying in the suite shown above!). Don't stay there, it's awful:
- One evening the bellman pushed our group into a dangerous van instead of the taxi we had requested. The driver did not know where we were going, and then asked for $50 for a one-mile trip. Half the seats in the van had their backs broken off, and the roof-mounted air conditioning unit sprinkled water through the back half of the van.
- Our used damp washclothes were left to pile up in the bathtub, and we had to go downstairs to ask for replacement bottles of shampoo multiple times during our stay.
- The concierge was so unfamiliar with the area that he could not even tell me where a mailbox was located.
- This hotel is so petty and fixated on taking the guest for everything possible that they even bill for placing toll-free calls! And, there is no warning in the room that they are going to charge you for this. I questioned this at checkout and a staff member angrily snapped at me, "All hotels do that!". No, they don't, just the rude ones.
Rose George's The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters is a fascinating description of sanitation conditions around the world. "2.6 billion people don't have sanitation. [....] Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box. [....] Poor sanitation, bad hygiene, and unsafe water — usually unsafe because it has fecal particles in it — cause one in ten of the world's illnesses. [....] Diarrhea — nearly 90 percent of which is caused by fecally contaminated food or water — kills a child every fifteen seconds. The number of children who have died from diarrhea in the last decade [1998-2008] exceeds the total number of people killed by armed conflict since the Second World War.
In September 2009, Morna Gregory and Sian James published a book titled Toilets of the World. It's pretty much the same theme that you find here — photographs and commentary on other people's plumbing.
The Porcelain God: A Social History of the Toilet, by Julie Horan, contends that civilization began with the toilet.
Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, edited by Laura Noren and Harvey Molotch, has essays by anthropologists, sociologists, and architects on the importance of the toilet, especially for urban dwellers.
Latrinae Et Foricae: Toilets in the Roman World describes the toilets of the Roman Empire from Iberia to Syria, and from North Africa to Hadrian's Wall in Britannia.
Toilets, Bathtubs, Sinks, and Sewers: A History of the Bathroom, explains the history of personal cleanliness and hygiene to children in grades 5-8.
| A Sani-Flush blue border indicates a toilet that I've used. |
How long have my Toilets of the World pages been around? I'm not exactly sure, although they started in the mid 1990s as a single page on a Purdue University server. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine lets you see what that looked like as far back as January 17, 1999.
My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001, although the Wayback Machine didn't notice its one enormous Toilet of the World page until January 17, 2002. Some time soon after that I split it into categories, and the collection has grown ever since.
In December, 2010 I registered the toilet-guru.com domain and moved the pages to a dedicated server.
If you're not bored yet, you might be interested in (or at least tolerate):
