•  In 3,000 BC, the Indus River Valley civilization used pipes made of earth to move water and drain waste.

• The term “water closet” (“WC”) was an early term for an interior or exterior room with a flushing toilet in contrast with an earth closet usually outdoors and requiring periodic emptying as “night soil”. Originally, the term “wash-down closet” was used. The term “water closet” was coined in England around 1870.

• It is a widely-held belief that Thomas Crapper designed the first flush toilet in the 1860s. … The credit for inventing the flush toilet goes to Sir John Harrington, godson of Elizabeth I, who invented a water closet with a raised cistern and a small downpipe through which water ran to flush the waste in 1592.

• The first modern public lavatory, with flushing toilets opened in London in 1852.

• In 1892 John Nevil Maskelyne invented the coin operated lock for toilets. In Britain you had to insert one penny to use it. Meanwhile toilet paper went on sale in the USA in 1857.

•  Thomas William Twyford (1849–1921) was a pottery manufacturer in England. He invented the single piece, ceramic flush toilet.

• Thomas Crapper was a plumber that is often mistakenly called ‘John Crapper‘. While Sir John Harrington is credited with the invention, it was Alexander Cummings that received the first patent for a flushing water closet (toilet not John).It was called “the crapper” because of Thomas Crapper who increased the popularity of the flushing toilet.

• In the White House, Andrew Jackson, was the first to get potable, running water indoors, in 1833; a “bathing room” was added soon after. The Chicago Tribune credits Millard Fillmore with installing the first flush toilets in 1853. But his successor, Franklin Pierce, built the first modern bathroom.

• Flush toilets were also known as “water closets”, as opposed to the earth closets described above. WCs first appeared in Britain in the 1880s, and soon spread to Continental Europe. In America, the chain-pull indoor toilet was introduced in the homes of the wealthy and in hotels in the 1890s.

• Even though Queen Elizabeth I’s godson invented one of the first flush toilets in 1596, commercially produced toilet paper didn’t begin circulating until 1857. Quilted Northern, formerly Northern Tissue, advertised as late as 1935 that their toilet paper was “Splinter-Free!

• There are two types of plungers – a toilet plunger and a sink/shower plunger. Toilet plungers narrow at the bottom to fit into the toilet while sink/shower plungers are flat.  What do you have in your home ?

• Some suggest that if you flush a toilet in the Southern Hemisphere that it flows opposite of the water in the Northern Hemisphere.  Not true.  They can flow both ways in either hemisphere.

• The floating mechanism in your toilet’s water tank is called a ballcock and it controls the flow of water.

AND THE LAST ONE!   E.W. TOMPKINS IS THE OLDEST PLUMBING COMPANY IN THE CAPITAL REGION. Started 1921 on Market Street in Albany, New York by Elbert W. Tompkins having completed a heating project in Schenectady NY for a church!

518-462-6577