A Dirt-Powered Toilet
Did you ever look at a modern toilet and ask,
"What if I built something similar to that,
except using dirt instead of water?"
Someone not only asked that, they built it!
Ancient people had water-based flush toilets at least as early as 2600 BC.
However, the technology was forgotten
in Europe as the Roman Empire fell apart.
The Dark Ages were a grim time.
In England, flush toilets were only reinvented a little before 1600.
Alexander Cummings (and not
Thomas Crapper!)
obtained the first English patent for a flush toilet design in 1775.
The 1848 Public Health Act in England required every new house to have
"a water closet, privy, or ash-pit, furnished with proper doors
and coverings."
It also placed water supply, sewerage, draining, and paving under
the authority of a single local body.
Chicago and Brooklyn got the first U.S. sewers in the late 1850s.
Through the late 1800s, people in cities in Europe and the U.S. began
to get toilets.
These were water closets attached to sewers.
People in the country still had to make do with "outhouses" or "privy pits",
a wooden seat above a pit.
Enter the earth closet of 1871.
The Earth Closet System as illustrated in Scientific American
in 1871.
From the text:
A is the seat, B the earth reservoir,
C the valve and the piece of timber against which it strikes,
D the shoot, E the wagon,
F G the lever and roller for working the valve,
H the pan.
History of the Flush Toilet
History of the Public Toilet
Scientific American magazine used to be a weekly publication.
You can read old issues at
archive.org.
In the late 1800s it reported on recent patents and
projects for home experimenters and tinkerers.
The
May 20, 1871 issue of Scientific American
contains a report on the Earth Closet System.
As you can see in the above picture and the below text,
it's basically a frame holding a seat over a box of earth.
Where we expect to find a water tank, there's a hopper of dirt.
Where we expect to find a sewer pipe connection,
there's a wagon of dirt and human waste.
The description says that water closets are better, if
you're in a city where there is a water supply and a sewer connection.
Scientific American reports that this is an English invention,
and they are copying the report from the Mechanics' Magazine.
Let's copy their copy:
The earth closet system is making friends daily.
The superior convenience of water closets still keeps them in favor
in cities having general water service,
and it is not likely that earth closets will very
soon supplant the wasteful un-healthy system of pouring
into our rivers the sewage of large towns;
but in rural districts, where water closets are impracticable,
the earth closet has proved, and is still proving,
a most serviceable invention.
Aside from its freedom from effluvia, it serves,
in a convenient form, for application as an unequalled fertilizer.
Let those who have any doubts as to the superior quality deodorized
night soil as a manure, mix it into a compost with grass, sods,
and leaves from the woods, rolled, and saturated with a year's
showering of waste slops from the kitchen and laundry,
and apply it to any worn-out land,
and they will need no further evidence.
The economizing of the sewage of large cities, which act as huge
drains upon the fertility of the sections furnishing their food supplies,
has perhaps been discussed at greater length,
and attracted more attention, than almost any other
economical and sanitary question of the age.
A general application of the earth closet system,
or such a modification of it as should supercede water closets,
seems to us the most practical solution of the problem.
There is room for a good deal of inventive genius
yet left in this field.
With a view to keep this subject before the minds of inventors,
we this week publish an engraving of a new English invention in this line,
which we copy from the Mechanics' Magazine.
The apparatus consists of a cast iron frame,
firmly bolted together with wrought iron stays,
supporting a cast iron valve moving on two pivots
beneath a zinc hopper, which contains the earth.
The valve is so arranged as to form a measure,
and receives a certain quantity of earth,
which is cut off and thrown on to a movable shoot hung
at the lower part of the valve,
by which it is guided to and spread upon the required spot.
The valve is worked by the weight of a person sitting on the seat,
by means of a level and friction roller.
When the seat is depressed, the upper part of the valve slides
from below the hopper and opens a passage for the earth,
the lower part of the valve rises,
and with the two sides forms a receptacle
for a certain quantity of earth;
when the seat is relieved of the weight upon it,
the lower part of the valve falls of its own weight,
causing the upper part to slide back under the hopper,
and, at the same time, to cut off the earth which has fallen,
which is thrown off along the movable shoot.
The apparatus shown is intended for fixing in an internal or ordinary closet
where there is no pit or vault, or on an upper floor.
The deposit falls into a small trolly or wagon
which is drawn out and emptied when required.
A is the seat, B the earth reservoir, C the valve and the piece of timber
against which it strikes, D the shoot, E the wagon,
F G the lever and roller for working the valve,
H the pan.
