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History of TOILET and Toilet Paper - Before Toilet Paper, What Did Humans Actually Use?
#Toilet #History #Historianhere
#Toilet #History #Historianhere
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00:04Summer 1858, London. The heat is relentless, and the River Thames, the same river running
00:13directly past the Houses of Parliament, has become something closer to an open sewer than
00:19a river at all. For decades, London's waste had been quietly overwhelming the city, but
00:27that summer the heat cooks it into something unbearable. Members of Parliament sitting
00:33in session just yards from the water cannot stand the smell. Curtains soaked in chloride
00:40of lime are hung across every window facing the river in a desperate attempt to mask what's
00:47coming off the water. Newspapers of the time call it simply the Great Stink. There is serious,
00:54documented discussion in Parliament about abandoning the building entirely and relocating the government
01:00somewhere the air might actually be breathable. And here's the detail that makes this story
01:06so strange. The Great Stink wasn't caused by London falling behind on sanitation. It was
01:14partly caused by London getting ahead of it. Flush toilets had become fashionable in wealthy
01:21homes across the city in the preceding decades, and every one of them sent far more wastewater
01:28rushing into the old cesspit system than that system had ever been built to handle. The very
01:35invention meant to make households cleaner was quietly turning the river that ran past the seat of the
01:42British Empire into something that could clear out Parliament itself. This is where it begins.
01:52Go back nearly 4,500 years to the Indus Valley Civilization in the cities of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa in
02:03what is now Pakistan and Northwest India.
02:08Archaeologists digging through the ruins found something that shouldn't have existed that early in human history at all.
02:16Individual homes with brick-lined toilet seats connected to covered drains running beneath the streets,
02:22carrying waste away from the city into larger sewer channels. It's one of the earliest known examples of organized urban
02:31urban sanitation on Earth, built roughly 1,000 years before the pyramids at Giza were even planned.
02:39Whoever engineered those cities understood something that a huge number of civilizations after them would completely forget,
02:48that keeping waste separate from where people live and drink is one of the most important inventions a society can
02:57make,
02:57long before anyone understood a single thing about germs. The Romans understood it too, on a scale nobody would match
03:06again for close to 2,000 years.
03:10Sometime around the 6th century BC, under the kings of early Rome, engineers began building the cloaca maxima, the great
03:19sewer,
03:19Tiber River, originally an open channel that was later covered over, running straight through the heart of the city and
03:26out into the Tiber River.
03:29Parts of it are still structurally intact today, over 2,500 years later.
03:35Public latrines, called forishai, dotted Roman cities, long stone benches with rows of keyhole-shaped openings cut side by side,
03:47sometimes twenty or more in a single room, with absolutely no partitions between them.
03:54Romans sat shoulder to shoulder, chatting, doing business, while a channel of flowing water ran beneath their feet to carry
04:02everything away.
04:03And when it came time to clean up, there was no toilet paper.
04:08Instead, a communal tool called a tersorium, a natural sea sponge fixed to the end of a wooden stick,
04:16sat in a trough of vinegar or salted water by the door, ready for the next person to use.
04:22Then Rome fell.
04:25And along with the empire, most of that engineering knowledge simply vanished from Western Europe for centuries.
04:33Medieval castles solved the problem with something called a guardrobe,
04:38a small stone chute built directly into the thickness of a castle wall,
04:43letting waste drop straight down into the moat or a pit below.
04:48Castle historians have long noted an odd side detail.
04:53That same small chamber was sometimes also used to store clothing because the strong ammonia fumes
05:00rising up from below were believed to help keep fleas and moths away from the fabric.
05:08Outside castle walls, ordinary medieval towns relied on cesspits and privies,
05:14emptied by workers known as gong farmers, who did their filthy, dangerous work at night,
05:22hauling waste out through city streets by cart.
05:26It was one of the most hazardous jobs a person could have.
05:31London's own coroner records from 1326 describe a gong farmer named Richard the Raker,
05:38who fell through rotting floorboards while working and drowned in the cesspit beneath him.
05:44An entire profession existed purely to carry away what medieval cities refused to properly
05:50engineer their way around, and sometimes it killed the very people doing the carrying.
06:00The flush toilet's real comeback came from an unexpected source, a courtier with a sense of humour.
06:08In 1596, Sir John Harrington, godson of Queen Elizabeth I, designed and built a working flush toilet
06:18with a valve at the bottom of the bowl and a cistern of water above to rinse it clean.
06:24He installed one in his own home and reportedly built one for the Queen herself at Richmond Palace.
06:32Harrington then wrote an entire book about his invention, a satirical pamphlet called
06:38A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, called The Metamorphosis of Ajax,
06:45playing on the fact that Jake's was slang at the time for a toilet.
06:50Harrington's device worked more or less, but it never caught on. Without a proper sewer system
06:57waiting on the other end of the pipe, a single clever toilet in a palace was solving only half
07:04a problem. And for nearly 200 years afterward, that's exactly where things stayed.
07:12Before we go further, if you're new here, this channel covers the hidden histories behind the
07:19things that shaped the world. Real stories, real numbers, no filler. New video every week. Hit
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07:35The actual engineering breakthrough that made flush toilets practical took until 1775,
07:42when a Scottish watchmaker named Alexander Cumming patented something deceptively simple,
07:48a bent section of pipe now known as the S-trap. By curving the pipe into an S-shape,
07:56a small amount of water was permanently trapped inside the bend, forming an airtight seal that
08:03stopped foul sewer gas from drifting back up into the room. It's such a fundamental piece of engineering
08:10that the exact same S-bend is sitting under your toilet right now. Three years later, in 1778,
08:19an English inventor named Joseph Brahma refined the valve mechanism further and built an enormously
08:27successful business manufacturing toilets around the new design. The modern flush toilet, in its basic
08:36mechanical form, was essentially complete before the United States had even finished writing its
08:42constitution. And this is where we have to correct one of the most widely repeated myths in this entire
08:49story. Thomas Crapper did not invent the flush toilet. He was born in 1836, more than half a century
08:58after Cumming's original patent. What Crapper actually did was build an extremely successful Victorian
09:04plumbing supply business, hold a handful of legitimate patents for genuine improvements like a better
09:10floating ball cock valve, and stamp his own name proudly across his showroom and his fixtures.
09:17Tea Crapper, sanitary engineer. According to a story that's been repeated for generations,
09:25American soldiers stationed in Britain during the First World War saw his name plastered across
09:32bathroom fixtures all over the country and brought the slang word home with them.
09:38Historians are genuinely divided on whether that story is fully accurate, since versions of the word
09:46already existed in English before Crapper was ever born. But the myth that he personally invented the toilet
09:54is definitively false, and it's a myth his own marketing ironically helped create. The device itself,
10:03though, was only ever half the solution, and London's great stink is exactly where that gap finally
10:11caught up with an entire empire. Four years before that unbearable summer, in 1854, a London physician
10:21named John Snow had already been quietly building the case for why this all mattered so much.
10:28During a brutal cholera outbreak in the Soho district, Snow rejected the era's dominant theory that disease
10:38spread through foul-smelling air and instead went door to door, mapping every single death by hand. His map
10:48pointed to one place again and again, a single public water pump on Broad Street. Snow convinced local
10:57officials to remove the pump's handle, and the outbreak collapsed almost immediately. Later investigation
11:05found the well had been contaminated by a leaking cesspit sitting just a few feet away. It was one of
11:14the
11:14the founding moments of modern epidemiology, and it proved, years before anyone fully understood germs,
11:23that what happens to human waste isn't a matter of comfort or manners. It's a matter of who lives, and
11:31who doesn't.
11:33Parliament finally had the political will to act after the great stink made the stakes impossible to ignore
11:41any longer, and it handed the job to a civil engineer named Joseph Bazalgette.
11:48Between 1859 and 1875, Bazalgette designed and built well over a thousand miles of new sewers running
11:57beneath London, intercepting waste before it could reach the central Thames, and carrying it well downstream
12:04instead. Cholera, which had killed tens of thousands of Londoners in repeated outbreaks throughout the
12:12century, essentially disappeared from the city almost overnight. A river that had once threatened
12:18to drive Parliament out of its own building became the site of one of the greatest public health
12:24engineering triumphs in human history. And large sections of Bazalgette's original sewer system are
12:30still carrying London's waste right now, more than 150 years later.
12:38Quick question before we keep going. Right now in 2026, how many people on the entire planet do you think
12:46still don't have access to a safely managed toilet at all? Take a real guess and drop a number in
12:53the
12:53comments. The real figure is coming up and it's almost certainly bigger than you think.
12:59While European engineers were solving the plumbing, an entirely separate revolution was happening around
13:06what people actually used to clean up afterward. Chinese records describe manufactured paper being
13:13used for hygiene purposes as far back as the 6th century, and by the Ming dynasty. Palace records from 1393
13:22describe the Imperial Bureau of Supplies, producing roughly 720,000 sheets of toilet paper a year for
13:30general court use, along with a separate much smaller batch of large, specially perfumed sheets reserved
13:38exclusively for the Emperor himself. China was mass producing toilet paper for royalty five centuries
13:45before it existed as a commercial product anywhere in the West. That didn't happen until 1857, when an
13:53American entrepreneur named Joseph Gaiety launched Gaiety's medicated paper in New York. Individual
14:00flat sheets infused with aloe and marketed less as a hygiene product, and more as a medical treatment to
14:07prevent hemorrhoids, with his own name printed on every single sheet as a mark of authenticity.
14:13Even decades later when the Scott brothers began selling toilet paper on a rollout of Philadelphia,
14:19the subject was still considered so embarrassing that for years they refused to put their own family name
14:26on the packaging at all, selling it quietly under other retailers' private labels instead. Too uncomfortable
14:33with the product to publicly claim it as their own. And here's the part of this story that isn't history
14:40at all. It's happening right now, in the present tense, and it deserves far more attention than it usually
14:48gets. In India, a practice called manual scavenging, the hand cleaning of dry latrines, sewers and septic tanks,
14:58has for generations been forced almost exclusively onto people from Dalit communities historically
15:05labelled untouchable under India's caste system. Work considered so degrading that it was assigned
15:12specifically to the people society had already decided deserved the least protection. India formally
15:20banned the practice in 1993, and passed an even stronger law prohibiting it entirely in 2013. And yet human rights
15:31organizations and the Indian government's own reports have continued documenting deaths. Workers sent down into
15:39sewers and septic tanks with no protective equipment, overcome by toxic gases like hydrogen sulfide and dying
15:49within minutes, sometimes with a second worker dying trying to save the first. It is, almost exactly the same
15:58grim story as Richard the Raker drowning in a London cesspit in 1326, except this version is still unfolding
16:07today, in a country of over a billion people, nearly 700 years after we supposedly learned that lesson the
16:16first time. So here's the answer to that question from earlier. According to United Nations monitoring data,
16:24an estimated 3.5 billion people worldwide, close to half the entire human population, still lack access to
16:34what's classified as safely managed sanitation. And UNICEF and the World Health Organization have
16:41separately estimated that more than a thousand children under the age of five die every single day from diseases
16:47directly linked to unsafe water, sanitation, and hygiene. Not a thousand a year, a thousand a day. In 2011, the
16:59Bill and
16:59Melinda Gates Foundation launched what it called the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge, funding engineers around the world to
17:07design toilets that don't need piped water, a sewer connection or even electricity, specifically aimed at
17:14the billions of people this entire 2000 year engineering story has still never actually reached. Slow down for a
17:23second, because this is the whole point. Every civilization in this story solved the exact same problem in a
17:30different way, and every single time, the solution eventually revealed a second, uglier problem hiding
17:36right behind it. Mohenjo Daro figured out drainage while Europe was still centuries away from cities of any
17:44real size. Rome built a sewer so good parts of it are still standing, and then simply forgot how to
17:51do it after the
17:52empire collapsed. London finally engineered its way out of literal government-threatening stench, and in doing
18:00so built a system that still, to this day, doesn't reach half the people alive on earth. And in between
18:08all of
18:08that, someone has almost always had to do the actual dirty work by hand. A gong farmer drowning in the
18:16dark in
18:171326. A Dalit sewer worker dying from toxic gas in 2024, separated by seven centuries and connected by the exact
18:29same failure, to build something that didn't require a human body to bridge the gap. So here's the question
18:37I actually want you to sit with. You've probably never once thought about the fact that flushing a toilet and
18:44having the results simply disappear is one of the single greatest privileges a person can have, quietly
18:51built on top of two and a half thousand years of engineering that 3500 million people alive right now
18:58still don't get to share. If you've ever traveled somewhere and been genuinely struck by how different
19:05sanitation looked from what you grew up with, I want to hear about it in the comments. I read every
19:11single
19:11one. If this is the kind of story you want more of, the real history behind the things that quietly
19:17run
19:17your life, hit subscribe and smash the like button. It genuinely tells me you want to keep going deeper.
19:25And share this with someone who's never once thought twice about what happens after they flush.
19:31Because somewhere beneath the streets of London right now water and waste are still moving through brick
19:37tunnels that a Victorian engineer built to stop a stench that once nearly emptied out the British
19:43parliament. Running quietly, invisibly, exactly the way the best engineering always does. Doing its job so
19:52well that almost nobody alive today has ever had a single reason to think about it at all.
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