Flushing

Water scarcity stems from our profligate use of it

I hate to disappoint you, but Yorkshireman Thomas Crapper did not invent the flush toilet. He patented a number of plumbing innovations, but the flush toilet itself was not invented by him.

If you control someone else’s water, you control them.

If you control your own water, you have self-control.

In the U.S., the first water closets were installed in Seattle of all places, and proved popular for wealthy residents who lived up on the hill above the city’s Skid Row, which was the original thoroughfare to be named as such because it was the hillside down which timber was slid to supply the lumber yards from which the initial, low-level Seattle was constructed (before it burned down in 1889). If you visit Seattle today, you can join a tour to see the new, stone-built, low-level city, which is some nine or so feet below your … feet in the modern city. When the new city was raised, it was first the roads that were altered, so that pedestrians arriving at a crossroads would have to mount a ladder to the roadway itself, cross the road and then descend by another ladder to continue on their way, which was a great disincentive to jaywalking and jewellery robbers.¹

Image: a corner of Seattle’s “basement” city. (https://tobiaskappel.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-incredible-seattle-underground.html.)

The people up on the hill devised water closets by which a pipe led their waste down into the sea. They did their business, threw a bucket of water after it and down it came into Puget Sound. It was a great labour-saving arrangement, because until then they had needed to slop out: collect the waste in a bucket and lug it to a cesspit for bacterial degradation.

The new whizz-bang system still needed a little refinement, however. The people who devised it, and who imported Crapper’s toilet bowls for incorporating into it, missed off one other of Crapper’s developments: the U-bend and syphon. Because, Puget Sound has a pretty rough tide, and when it comes in all of a sudden and you are perched on the throne way up there on the hill at the deposit end of your four-inch waste pipe, not only can you quickly find that the waste reverses direction, but that it does so with the force of the Jet d’Eau de Genève. Therefore, householders who fitted a WC also had to display behind the door the tables for the Puget Sound tides. Perhaps, with careful timing, they might not only have used their toilets for waste disposal, but also as a bidet.

Image: the Jet d’Eau (“water jet”) of Geneva.²

Seattle aside, nor, sadly, does the English word crap derive from the name Thomas Crapper (1864-1910): the word was in use back in the Middle Ages and is related to another English word, scrap, with crap, related to Dutch krappe and French chrape, originally applying to chaff or, the scrap left after sifting grain: i.e. a worthless waste byproduct.

One thing for which Thomas Crapper is rightly famous, however, is for having established the world’s first toilet showroom. It is seen momentarily in the opening shots of the 1963 film The Servant, directed by Joseph Losey, as Dirk Bogarde crosses the King’s Road in London’s West End on his way to the town house where he is going to be interviewed for the position of butler to its new owner (James Fox). The shot of Crapper’s showroom sets the location for anyone who knows it as a feature of London’s West End.

By the 1960s, King’s Road was becoming as fashionable as Carnaby Street and Petticoat Lane, and would soon be overtaken by Sloane Square. It was bright young things who were attracted to the area, such as are also depicted in 1966’s Blow-Up, another iconic black-and-white film about West-End London, this time with David Hemmings, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.

Image: David Hemmings discovers a murder by blowing up a picture he’s taken in the park.

They would be followed to the King’s Road by punk rockers in the 1970s, but even in 1963, the mere idea of engaging a butler was somewhat incongruous. It’s a point made in the course of the film’s dialogue by Fox’s co-star girlfriend, Wendy Craig, which earns her the disdain of Bogarde the butler as they enter into a duel over where a bunch of flowers is to be displayed. Hence, the idea of a Crapper showroom in a fashionable quarter almost mirrors the plot of The Servant itself, which is about a lower-class gentleman’s gentleman coming down from up north to civilise a young, well-to-do bachelor-in-town, with the film’s storyline gradually turning that relationship on its macabre head. The film’s worth seeing.

Image: Dirk Bogarde and Wendy Craig prove how contentious a bunch of flowers can be in a house with both a butler and a girlfriend.

People feel it is infra dig to use the word toilet, because, they say, it’s uncivilised. That’s especially so in America, where some of them openly carry firearms but feel too prudish to use the word toilet: they talk of bathrooms, which, unsurprisingly, is a room where the British take their baths, not where they do their plop-plops. But imagine how uncivilised the prudish Americans would be without toilets, call them what they will. Especially seeing how the word toilet comes from French toilettes, which literally means little pieces of cloth, which aptly describes the paperwork that we all need to account for once the job itself has been completed.

Deborah Meaden was, or is, a Dragon on BBC TV’s start-up seed capital programme Dragon’s Den, in which bright sparks present their innovative ideas to a panel of wealthy businesspeople, who then decide whether they want to invest money in the idea, a process made more pointed by the fact they invest their own money, and not the BBC’s (i.e. the British public’s).

In one programme, a man presented a hygienic cover for toilet seats, which could be quickly deployed in a public convenience. He demonstrated it on a classic ceramic toilet, and in doing so, needed to bend at the waist to secure the device around the seat and, as one does when one bends at the waist, his head and face approached within a closer range of the toilet than when he was standing upright. It is to be understood that, given the act of installation and the procedure to which it was intended to form a preface, the gentleman would have been washing his hands afterwards.

His invention was intended to assure users of public toilets a modicum of hygiene in the lower body area, as they used the toilet for its intended purpose, but Deborah Meaden immediately pounced on that initial movement by the invention’s developer: coming that little bit closer to the bowl with his head. With a dramatic Ugh! she immediately declared that she was out and not interested. No one was interested, unfortunately. The poor man retreated without any investment, and I was left dumbfounded looking at the screen, red with rage, and asking it, “So what do you bastards do once you’ve done your crap? Don’t you ever brush the bowl clean for the next user? The reason being that that action would bring your face into exactly the same close quarters with the bowl as fitting this man’s device would.

And as I did so, I knew the answer already. Deborah Meaden, I can tell you with absolute certainty, leaves her skidmarks on the porcelain for the next person to scrub them off. Perhaps even her butler. She thought she was being smart with this inventor, but instead she revealed a little of her own class-conscious haughtiness. Typical capitalist: produces no end of shit to make her money, and expects everyone else to clear up after her.

The average capacity of a toilet cistern is about 6 to 10 litres or 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 U.S. gallons. A short flush is available on many more recent models, so you can have a pee with 3 to 5 litres (3/4 to 1 1/4 U.S. gallons). Never mind where you are when you do it, how many times do you flush a toilet per day? It will depend on the weather, what you drink, how much of it you drink, and other things like the water content of the food you eat. Diuretics (alcohol, coffee) promote water excretion, just as cabbage and cauliflower promote excretion of solids from the other part. Water intake is a valuable contributor to healthy bowel movements as well as flushing the kidneys and keeping them healthy. But healthy water isn’t available to all.

I think I probably flush about 8 times in 24 hours. I don’t flush paper goods other than toilet tissue, and certainly not (lanolin-impregnated) towelettes, which are a real problem for sewage treatment plants (they need to be filtered out), not to mention nappies, whose disposal in the toilet is simply irresponsible.

The residents of Seattle very soon came to learn about the correct way to dispose of human waste and there is nothing quite like arranging a tour of a sewage treatment facility, or even descending into city sewers on a guided tour, to raise awareness of the fact that, while pulling the chain is the last you ever see of your dinner, it is but the first stage in dealing with its impact on the environment. I visited my local water purification plant just last week and it not only—in places—closed my nose, but opened my eyes. The smelliest part was the damp towelettes filter stage.

Eight chain pulls in 24 hours accounts for about 80 litres of water, with or without toilet paper. Just for me, alone (after all, we don’t share our toilet flushes, certainly not with Mrs Squeamish herself, Deborah Meaden). Hence, the very existence of toilets in our houses, offices and public places is predicated on two things: a ready supply of water, plus piping that will take it and the waste away to a treatment plant. When you think about the water you use for a sponge bath, or for cooking your carrots, it is conceivable you could make do with bottled water, which comes in flagons of 1.5 to 2 litres. Imagine carting 40-odd bottles into your house every day, just to flush the toilet.

I have a challenge for you. Do you have a stand pipe in your garden or basement? For one week, draw all the water you need for flushing the toilet from that stand pipe (or the kitchen sink, if you don’t have one; or a water butt if you have one of those). Carry the water into the house and fill the cistern each time you visit the loo. Do it even if you don’t close the stop-cock that automatically refills the cistern, just as an exercise. Over a week, in a household of two adults and two children, you will carry in 224 litres or 60 U.S. gallons of water.

But you will carry in far more than that. You will acquire an understanding of how huge tracts of Africa dispose of their waste, and that is if they are even lucky enough to have a water course within easy reach to do so. Many in Africa must walk miles to the nearest water source and then carry the water back to where it is intended to be used. Imagine doing that, over a distance of five miles, for 60 gallons. Just to do a poo, not counting cooking and washing.

The—to you—small cost you pay to a large corporation to deliver water to your kitchen sink could easily provide sources of clean water to the needy in another part of the world. How’s that for globalisation: if we traded a little of our comfort in order to increase the comfort in basic daily necessities for others in developing countries?

By hauling water in instead of just filling the cistern automatically, you will very quickly start to appreciate the saving of energy in using the half-flush button, or even placing a few bricks in the cistern, so it fills with less water. You will see a large difference in your water bill as well, provided you use rainwater, or reduce capacity with bricks. And, if you continue after one week, you will notice that it will become habit. An unobjectionable habit.

Because every time you draw water from the standpipe, you will remember why you’re doing it. And every time you don’t, you will remember what a huge burden that is on the rest of the world. And you will realise why those less fortunate than you do it where they are as well. That will bind you with them in a sort of community. It will make you feel good and, even if they never know anything about you, it will also make those in far-off places who benefit from your thoughtfulness feel good.

You will leave more water in the public mains for when there is a drought. And you will have shared an experience, one that, if you have kids, is an important one for them, so they along with you have a taste of what life is like beyond your comfortable shores, on a continent parts of which are plagued by war, strife, death, and a lack of water. Water is a resource that people fight over tooth and nail in Africa. When, do you think, will it become a fought-over resource where you are?

In Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, the puppet draws water for a farmer who gives him milk in return, which Pinocchio can give to his sick, bed-ridden father. Initially, Pinocchio asks the farmer for milk out of charity, but the farmer makes Pinocchio work for his milk. A hundred buckets of water a day from the well. That’s appreciation of the value of fresh water. That’s the appreciation of Pinocchio’s devotion to Geppetto. It’s not just a contractual bargain; it’s an act of love. And when the farmer says it’s because his donkey is dying, it becomes an act of contrition, for the donkey is Pinocchio’s childhood friend Lucignolo, who turned into a donkey because he didn’t go to school when he had the chance to. Some kids in Africa work like donkeys because they can’t go to school, even if they wanted to.

Pakistan has again been plagued by floods this rainy season. The floodwaters render the homes of poor peasants uninhabitable, even once the waters recede. The water itself is unusable, polluted with oil, excrement and other foulnesses, and dangerous from the snakes and other creatures that swim in it. You cannot cook with it, or drink it or wash with it. All they can do is wait for it to abate, and start again to rebuild their lives. Even though Pakistan is plagued with inundations, what they lack is water: fresh, potable water.

If you’re not inclined to accept the challenge, then, alternatively, you can take the attitude of Deborah Meaden: money is no object, and as long as you have money, water must flow through your taps, and you don’t especially care what happens to the waste after you’ve pooped it into your toilet, and even less where the water comes from to wash it out of your presence. Do you feel a flush of conscience?

In future, it is Kevin Costner’s waterworld, not Captain Kirk’s space, that will be the final frontier. From thawing tundra and melting icecaps, to plastic islands and plastic fish, to cholera, and malaria, and hurricane storms and Idyll Wild fires, to sewage treatment, and bathwater, and ice cubes that give you Delhi belly.

1. See this interesting article on early Seattle from the Los Angeles Times, or read the book “Sons of the Profits”, available from tourist outlets in Seattle.

2. By Wikibusters - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=120467149.