The flush toilet's long history, and where the word 'crapper' really comes from

The flush toilet has a long and strange history, and the word "crapper" is tangled up in it. The plumber whose name looks like the obvious source of the word is not the source at all. The real story takes in a queen, a London showroom and American soldiers.

A flushing toilet, built for a queen

In 1596 the Elizabethan writer and courtier John Harington published a book called Metamorphosis of Ajax. The title was a pun on "jakes", a slang word for a privy. In it he described a device he had installed in his own house: a pan with a seat, and a cistern filled with water. Turn a handle and the water washed the contents of the pan into a cesspool.

Harington was not the first to design such a thing. A Londoner named Thomas Brightfield had done so in 1449. But Harington was the first to write down a full specification for one, and he installed a flushing toilet for Queen Elizabeth I at Richmond Palace.

It did not catch on. The cost was high, water supply was a problem, and there were no sewers to carry the waste away. The idea sat waiting for centuries.

The sewers the flush toilet needed

By the 1850s London's growing population was producing more sewage than the city could handle. Cesspools leaked and overflowed, contaminating water supplies, and the growing popularity of the water closet made matters worse. House drains were connected to sewers, and those sewers emptied straight into the River Thames.

After the Great Stink of 1858, when the smell from the river was so bad that MPs considered abandoning Westminster, the civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette was put in charge of rebuilding London's sewerage. His project lasted 16 years. It included embanking parts of the Thames, 1,100 miles of street sewers, 82 miles of main interceptor sewers and four large pumping stations, all designed to carry the sewage east, away from where most people lived.

The plumber whose name is on the cistern

Thomas Crapper was a Yorkshire-born industrialist and plumber. In 1866 he opened the world's first bathroom showroom, in Chelsea. For the first time customers could see sanitary products in place rather than in a catalogue, and some were plumbed in so that people could try before they bought. In the late 1880s the Prince of Wales asked him to install lavatories at Sandringham, and he went on to supply sanitary ware for Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle.

The idea that one of the blunter words for a bowel movement comes from his name is a myth. That word was in use well before Crapper became famous. The word "crapper" meaning a lavatory is a different case: it is possible that it became popular in America after US soldiers serving in Britain in 1917 saw Crapper's name stamped on the cisterns in some public toilets.

So the flush toilet's history runs from a book of puns in 1596 to a plumber's name on a cistern in 1917. Crapper did not give the toilet its rudest word. He may, instead, have given Americans a new name for the room it stands in.