Toilets Changed EVERYTHING! Here's Why! - The Dark History of the Toilet | History Documentary

Imagine walking through London in 1858. The river is brown. The air is so thick with the smell of human waste that Parliament shuts down. Lawmakers hold handkerchiefs over her faces. They called it the Great Stink. And it happened because nobody had figured out where the toilet should drain. Now imagine today's world without toilets. No flushing. No pipes. And no privacy. Just the challenge of managing waste. Yet for thousands of years, humans have been inventing ways to solve this very problem. I'm Aidan Thomas of Hidden History. And this is the hidden history of how we managed the stink. This is the history of the toilet. For most of human history, you went wherever you could. A ditch. A river. The street. And in medieval Europe, you went out the window. People dumped chamber pots directly onto the road. There was even a phrase for it. Garde les loups. Which basically meant, watch out for the water. Some historians think that's where the word loup comes from. The smell was constant. Disease was everywhere. And nobody connected the two. But here's the thing most people don't realize. The toilet is actually ancient. And far older than you'd think. Around 3000 BC, 5000 years ago, the people of Skara Brae in Scotland had something remarkable. Stone huts with small drains built into the walls. Indoor plumbing. In the Stone Age. 500 years later, the Indus Valley civilization in what's now Pakistan took it even further. The city of Mohenjo-daro had toilets in nearly every home. Connected to a city-wide drainage system. Covered sewers running beneath the streets. This was 2500 BC. Most of Europe wouldn't catch up for another 4000 years. Meanwhile, on the island of Crete, the ancient Minoans built one of the first flushing toilets around 1700 BC. Water from cisterns was used to wash waste through clay pipes. And then there were the Romans. The Romans built enormous public latrines. Long stone benches with holes side by side. No walls. No dividers. You sat next to strangers. And you talked. It was social. A place to do business. In every sense of the word. And when you were done, there was no toilet paper. Instead, they used something called a tersorium. A sea sponge on a stick dipped in vinegar or salt water. And in many public latrines, that sponge was shared. Let that sink in for a second. A shared sponge on a stick in a room full of strangers. And the Romans considered themselves the height of civilization. When Rome fell, so did its sewers. For the next thousand years, Europe forgot almost everything the Romans knew about sanitation. Castles had garter robes. Stone seats built into the walls that dropped waste straight down the outside. Sometimes into a moat. Sometimes just onto the ground. In cities, it was worse. London streets were open sewers. River Thames became a dumping ground for everything. Butcher waste. Tannery runoff. And human sewage. People drank from the same water they dumped into. And nobody understood why they kept getting sick. Cholera. Dysentery. Typhoid. These weren't mysterious plagues. They were the direct result of drinking water contaminated with human waste. For centuries, people blamed bad air. A theory called miasma. If it smelled bad, it must cause disease. So they carried flowers. They burned insects. They did everything except fix the actual problem, which was in the water. The first real flush toilet didn't come from a plumber. It came from a poet. In 1596, Sir John Harrington, a writer and godson of Queen Elizabeth I, designed a device he called the Ajax. It had a raised cistern, a hand valve, and it used seven and a half gallons of water to flush waste into a cesspool below. He built one at his estate near Bath. And when Queen Elizabeth visited, he installed one for her. By most accounts, she used it. But the invention never caught on. It was expensive. It was noisy. And Harrington had made so many enemies at court with his satirical writing that people dismissed his toilet as a joke. The flush toilet was invented in 1596 and then essentially forgotten for nearly 200 years. By the 1850s, London was a city of nearly 3 million people and almost no sewer system. Everything, and I mean everything, drained into the Thames. The river was black. It was thick. And in the summer of 1858, a brutal heat wave made it unbearable. The smell was so overwhelming that Parliament couldn't function. Lawmakers sewed curtains in lime chloride trying to block the stench. Sessions were cut short. People fled the building. They called it the Great Stank. Finally forced the government to act. Engineer Joseph Battlegood was given the job of building a modern sewer system. Over 1,100 miles of street sewers feeding into 82 miles of main intercepting sewers. It took years. It cost millions. And it transformed London from one of the deadliest cities in the world into one of the most livable. But the toilet itself still needed one more breakthrough. By the way, if you've made it this far, you're clearly the kind of person who finds this stuff fascinating. If you want more stories like this, the hidden stories behind the things you use every day, hit subscribe. Now, back to our story. Here's the truth. Thomas Crapper did not invent the toilet. That's one of history's most persistent myths. What Crapper did do was make toilets popular. He was a plumber in Victorian London who owned a company that manufactured and sold toilets. He held nine patents, including improvements to the ball cock mechanism that controls the flush. His company name, T. Crapper & Company, was stamped on toilets across England. And when American soldiers were stationed in England during World War I, they saw the name Crapper on every toilet they used. They started calling it The Crapper and as a verb, as in I need to take a crap. And the name stuck. But the real unsung hero? Alexander Cumming. In 1775, over a hundred years before Crapper, Cumming patented the S-shaped pipe beneath the toilet bowl. That S-trap kept sewer gases from rising back up through the pipe. It's the reason your bathroom doesn't smell like a sewer right now. And almost nobody knows his name. Today's toilets are the result of centuries of engineering and innovation. Modern designs focus on water efficiency, hygiene, and sustainability. Some countries even use advanced toilets with heated seats, bidets, and automatic flushing. But toilet isn't just a story about plumbing. It's a story about what happens when we don't take basic sanitation seriously. Improved sanitation reduces cholera by nearly 70%. Not vaccines, not medicine. Toilets. A toilet didn't just change how we live. It decided who lived. From ancient drains to smart toilets, the evolution of the toilet tells a larger story about human innovation and the pursuit of cleanliness. What began as a basic necessity has become a cornerstone of modern sanitation and a quiet hero of public health. It's not a luxury. It's survival. I hope you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden History. If you got a moment and you like what you heard, hit that subscribe button, like the video, and comment below on another episode you would like to see. Next week, we're uncovering the hidden history behind another invention you use every day. The hidden history of soap. Until then, take a look around. History is everywhere.