Toilet News and Irrelevancies
Toilet news, toilet information, toilet irrelevancies.
Click on any of the pictures or questions to be taken to detailed explanations with more pictures.
Toilet Multimedia: Download MPEG video, MP3 audio, and ringtones of a flushing toilet
The Toilets of the World site has been certified as Web 3.0 compatible!
This means that it contains some multimedia content suitable for viewing on 5G and 6G devices, plus a disproportionate level of hype.
The multimedia page contains a downloadable MPEG movie of a flushing toilet, as well as a MP3 file and a downloadable ring tone.
Toilet Signs
Are you looking for toilet signs?
Which language would you prefer? Japanese? Chinese? Bulgarian? Arabic? Malay? French? Greek? English?
And would you want them to explain where not to throw paper, or how to use a foreigner's toilet, or whether or not magnets are present, or whether or not to urinate against the wall, or simply how to find the toilet?
These are just a few samples, see the detailed page for many more.
The Toilet Mailbox
Many people have had their bowels so moved by this collection that they sent me a letter. Well, at least an electronic mail message.
To give you some idea of the contents of that page, here is its table of contents:
- Best. Letter. Ever.
- An unexpected question from Kate the Constipated.
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Pointless attempts to engage me in business
or otherwise involve me in their schemes
- The Toilet Seat Vacuum
- Someone needs 1970s era Australian plastic toilet flush buttons
- A seller of stainless steel toilet pans awaits our reply.
- Please tell me who manufactures low cost toilets in East Asia
- I saw something on the Travel Channel, how do I buy it?
- Please send us your catalog of toilet cabins. (this was from when I was just ignoring these nonsensical requests)
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Other toiletological correspondance
- Please explain my irrational fear of toilets, Parts One and Two.
- Please give me silhouettes for the Men's and Women's doors
- Please tell me more
- I, too, am going to Turkey
- Please tell me more about toilet history
- A guy at work was going to do that!
- You should go to China, Parts One, Two, and Three
- You should have gone to Woodstock
- I, too, have already gone to Turkey
- I want a squatter in Ireland
- How does one clean oneself in an Indian toilet?
- My favorite toilet is on Mount Whitney!
- Why don't you show the German "Inspection Shelf"?
- I live in Australia, but I want to buy from an Italian or Asian manufacturer.
- I want to teach my dog to use a Turkish toilet.
- Halliburton wants multi-cultural toilets.
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Strange requests for quotes I have received
- Please ship enough stainless steel urinals and washbasins to Zambia to outfit 46 public lavatories.
- Please ship two dozen teflon-lined cast-iron valves suitable for 80-90% sulphuric acid to Pakistan.
- OK, forget about sending those two dozen teflon-lined cast-iron valves, but are you ISO-14001 certified?
- Please ship five titles of books on information security to the Philippines.
- Please come to the Bahrain airport and excavate 25 lavatory service pits and 25 potable water pits.
- Please ship several aircraft lavatory parts, a bunch of oxygen masks, an oxygen generator, and some auxiliary fuel tanks to Peru.
Toilet Links
I have links to many other toilet pages and sources of toilet information, in case these pages haven't provided enough.
The Grit Boxes of Scotland
Grit Boxes might sound like some sort of uncomfortable toilet.
However, the Grit Boxes of Scotland page is an overly detailed annotated collection of pictures of another form of technology.
Not toilets, but grit boxes. What is a grit box?
See the Grit Box page and learn!
Roadside Shrines of Greece
Similarly, Roadside Shrines might sound like some sort of elaborate toilet facility for travelers, but they are also something entirely different.
The Roadside Greek Orthodox Shrine page is yet another catalog of variations upon a theme seen by a traveler.
See the detailed page to learn more.
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):
