The Toilets of 19th Century Scotland
It is not just random chance that Star Trek featured a Scotsman as an engineer — Scotland has an amazing history of engineering. And of course this includes their toilets!
The national museum in Edinburgh has a great collection of Scottish engineering and manufacturing, including some toilets from the late 1800s.
This is the water closet pedestal "The Combination", made by Doulton and Company at their Paisley works. It is labeled inside the bowl: "The 'Ferguslie' pedestal wash-out".
Also visible in the case are fragments of sanitary ware with trademarks of various Scottish manufacturers:
- Shanks & Co. Ltd., Barrhead, Renfrewshire
- Buick's Patent No. 1 Wash-Down Closet, Alloa, Clackmannshire
- Avon, W.B. Morrison & Son, Glasgow
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Above is another example of Doulton & Co's work, labeled inside the bowl as: "Doulton of London 'The Combination' (patent) works Lambeth & Paisley", manufactured around 1890.
This model, The Linn, is in the history museum in Kirkwall, on the island of Mainland in the Orkney Islands just off the north coast of Scotland.
Also see the British Toilet Page.
Also see the Neolithic Toilet Page.
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):
