Today, we deal with a word that really shouldn't be
used in polite company. The University of Houston's
College of Engineering presents this series about
the machines that make our civilization run, and
the people whose ingenuity created them.
Every time I teach my course
in the history of technology, some student informs
me -- often with a salacious grin -- that the flush
toilet was invented by a 19th-century Englishman
named Thomas Crapper. Well, he didn't really invent
the flush toilet, but his name is indeed a cloud
that hovers over its history.
The flush toilet was actually invented in the 18th
century. It was an important landmark in the
Industrial Revolution -- closely tied to the new
technology of steam-power generation. In the mid
18th century, the important concept of automatic
liquid-level control arose -- both in steam boilers
and in the tanks of these new water closets.
Thomas Crapper was a real enough person. He was
born in Yorkshire in 1837 -- long after the first
flush toilets came into use. His biography by
Wallace Reyburn is titled Flushed with
Pride. It's all very tongue-in-cheek, but
it's nevertheless quite complete. Thomas Crapper
apprenticed as a plumber when he was still a child.
By the time he was 30, he'd set up his own business
in London. He developed and manufactured sanitary
facilities of all sorts until his death in 1910. He
held many patents and was in fact an important and
extremely inventive figure in creating modern
water-closet systems.
But did he really give his name to these systems?
Reyburn claims that many American soldiers in WW-I
were off the farm -- that they'd never seen
anything like the classy English water closets --
that they called them by their brand name, much as
the English call a vacuum cleaner by the brand name
Hoover.
The problem with this explanation is that the word
almost certainly derives from the 13th-century
Anglo-Saxon word crappe. It means
chaff or any other waste material. The modern form
of the word was certainly in use during Thomas
Crapper's life. So not only was he not the inventor
of the flush toilet -- it's also unlikely that he
really gave it his name, either. What he did do was
to carry the technology forward.
This business points out something historians have
to guard against. Now and then a really good story
comes along -- one so well contrived that it should
be true, even if it isn't. Who wants to admit that
no apple ever fell on Isaac Newton's head -- or
that George Washington didn't really chop down the
cherry tree? What humorless pedant wants to insist
that Thomas Crapper didn't really invent the flush
toilet!
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
