Contrary to popular myth, Thomas Crapper did not invent the flushing toilet.
But he did make one big improvement to it – and made it much more popular – at a time when public health was a major concern.
Until the Industrial Revolution began around 1760, most of Britain’s cities were of a manageable size.
People tended to live rural lives, working on farms or running their own smallholdings.
But the rise of large factories and mills attracted people into cities at an incredible rate.
City populations typically trebled or quadrupled in 50 years.
By the time Queen Victoria (1819–1901) came to the throne in 1837, cities were noisy, filthy and overcrowded.
Supplying water to big cities is a major technological challenge. By the end of the 18th century, most had pipes bringing in water from nearby springs or rivers.
By the middle of the 19th century, steam-powered pumping stations had opened in some cities, with engines lifting water from rivers into towers, from where gravity would deliver water under pressure to thousands of homes.
But as cities grew more crowded, springs could no longer cope and the increasing sewage output inevitably found its way into the water supply.
Most people in big cities were poor and lived in terraced slums. Their toilets were pots they emptied into open sewers in the streets or small outside ‘closets’ above cesspits.
Despite the rapid scientific advances of the 18th century, city dwellers in the 19th century were at greater risk of disease than people before industrialisation.
One of the biggest killers was cholera. Between 1830 and 1850 it claimed more than 30,000 lives in London alone. In 1850, London’s Metropolitan Commission of Sewers ordered all cesspits closed, wrongly believing cholera was transmitted through the air by a ‘dirty vapour’ called miasma.
In 1854, English doctor John Snow (1813–1858) proved that cholera is carried in water (we now know it to be caused by a waterborne microbe).
After another outbreak killed 10,000 people in 1856, a plan was hatched to build an extensive network of underground sewers in London.
The chief engineer was Joseph Bazalgette (1819–1891). He built about 1,700 kilometres (1,000 miles) of pipes from London’s streets to the Thames Embankment and 140 kilometres (82 miles) of sewers along the Embankment.
All of London’s sewage was emptied into the river further downstream.
By the end of the 19th century, those sewers emptied into treatment works rather than straight into the river.
Thomas Crapper (1836–1910), an English businessman and a plumber by trade, formed his company in London in 1861 when Bazalgette’s sewers were not finished and water supplies patchy and unreliable.
Few people needed domestic plumbing. But by the 1880s, things had improved – in London and most large cities.
Many families had water tanks in the roof, directly filled by filtered water supplies.
At last, flushing toilets could slot into place: there was a water supply to feed the cisterns, and somewhere for the waste to go.
Crapper’s toilets were state-of-the-art. Although the idea of flushing had been around for centuries, even the most modern systems were weak and prone to leaks.
Crapper’s ‘syphonic flush’ was powerful and his toilets well-built.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTErKynZpOke7a3jqecsKtfnbytsIyynGaeoqS7tXnPmp6eZ2JlhHKElXFmnKeeqb%2Bivthmq6hloKS9trjAq2SmsaSderW0zqaYrGWTp66xvMSrZJ2hlGK7sMCMoqWvnZ6perW0xGadpa2jnbavs4ytpqKklal8