History of Toilet or Flush Tanks
According to most historians and architects, the first prototype of a toilet appeared approximately 3000 years BC in Mesopotamia. Slightly younger are those found during excavations in Mohenjo-Daro ( on the banks of the Indus River) and represented a more complex sewer system: sewage from latrines made near the outer walls of houses flowed into street ditches, through which it went outside the city. The latrine was a brick box with a wooden seat. The storerooms of the British Museum contain a find no less valuable and ancient. The carved throne-seat of the Sumerian queen Shubad from the tomb in Ur dates back to 2600 BC.
As for the ancient Egyptians, their toilets, which we know about mainly from excavations at Tell el-Amarna (14th century BC), the city of Pharaoh Akhenaten, were not connected to the sewer system. In wealthy houses, a latrine, whitewashed with lime, was installed behind the bathroom. It contained a limestone slab placed on a brick box with sand, which had to be cleaned out periodically. In one of the ancient Egyptian burials in Thebes, dating back to the same century as the city of the famous pharaoh, a portable toilet made of wood was found, under which a clay pot was placed.
Archaeologists working in Henan Province on the excavation of the tomb of one of the rulers of the Western Han Dynasty, which ruled China from 206 BC to 24 BC, have discovered a toilet with a stone seat, comfortable armrests and running water.
And, of course, in the toilet history we cannot ignore the Eternal City – the main metropolis of antiquity – Rome. One of its most ancient engineering structures is the Cloaca Maxima ( from the Latin Cluo – to clean). Initially, it was an open channel, built in the 6th century BC and served both to drain the marshy soil and to drain sewage. All contents were drained into the Tiber River. A branch of the cloaca approached each of the toilets, and then returned to the main highway. A seat with a hole was placed directly above the channel, so that the flowing water constantly washed away waste products. For many centuries, the Cloaca Maxima remained the most advanced sewage system in the world. By the 1st century AD, the city's population had already reached a million, and therefore the cloaca had to be expanded in places to 7 meters; workers monitoring its condition swam along it in a boat.
It is interesting that, like bathing procedures, visiting the toilet for a Roman was a social event. The seats were arranged in a circle and were not separated by partitions. Therefore, the cheerful murmur was constantly interspersed with conversations about the fate of the empire, and Roman businessmen dragged important clients not to the bathhouse, as they do now, but to the toilet. Heated seats were also an important achievement of the Romans. The solution was simple - the seat was heated by robes assigned to the toilet. In turn, moving from one seat to another, the slave maintained the desired temperature with the warmth of his soft place. In the Middle Ages, Europeans had the habit of pouring the contents of a chamber pot right out of the window.
The streets were so covered in mud and shit that it was impossible to walk on them during the muddy season. It was then, according to the chronicles that have come down to us, that stilts, the city dweller’s “ spring shoes,” appeared in many German cities, without which it was simply impossible to move around the streets. The German fashion for stilts, which were the only way to move around the filthy streets, spread so widely that in France and Belgium in the Middle Ages, there were even stilt competitions between the two camps into which the inhabitants were divided.
In Paris in 1270, a law was passed forbidding, under threat of a fine, " to pour slop and sewage out of the upper windows of houses." The famous inventor Leonardo da Vinci, invited to the court of King Francis I, was so shocked by the Parisian stench that he designed a flush toilet especially for his patron. The great visionary's drawings included water supply pipes, drainage channels, and ventilation shafts. And although, as in the case of the helicopter and submarine, Leonardo was centuries ahead of his time, the drawings of his toilet were never put into practice. At the same time, a certain type of "portable toilet" was popular among the nobility - a bench with a hole on top and a reservoir that could be removed from the inside. Furniture makers were inventive, veiling toilet seats as chairs, benches, desks, and even bookshelves! The entire structure was usually richly decorated with wooden carvings, fabric drapery, and gilding.
Well, the mass production of toilets began in 1909 in Spain. This noble cause was taken up by a company called Unitas, which means union and unification. At first they were called hygienic ceramic products. Over time, the too long name was replaced by the short " toilet " - after the name of the manufacturer. Many glorious minds worked on the simple, ordinary-looking toilets that we use today.
