Shiny metal structures have popped up in cities all over the world: automatic toilets that give a user twenty minutes of privacy before the door opens, the person leaves, the door closes, and the robotic sanitation cycle begins. As I’ve said before, these units make so many design sacrifices to achieve the ideal of self-cleaning that they become unusable for their intended purpose: providing a convenient place to poop.
One of the first cities to adopt automatic toilets was Seattle. They spent $5 million in 2004 to build glimmering steel cylinders that turned out to be less ideal for tourists caught without a Starbucks than for people shooting up and having sex with prostitutes. (Fart Poopie provided this firsthand tour back in 2006.)
From today’s New York Times: “Seattle officials say the project here failed because the toilets, which are to close on Aug. 1, were placed in neighborhoods that already had many drug users and transients.” What’s more, unlike other cities, Seattle law prohibit the city from recouping their costs with ads.
“‘Other cities around the world seem to be able to handle toilets civilly,’ said Richard McIver, a Seattle city councilman. ‘But we were unable to control the street population, and without the benefit of advertising, our costs were awfully high.’
“In Seattle, problems arose almost immediately. Users left so much trash behind that the automated floor scrubbers had to be disabled, and prostitutes and drug users found privacy behind the toilets’ locked doors.
“‘I’m not going to lie: I used to smoke crack in there,’ said one homeless woman, Veronyka Cordner, nodding toward the toilet behind Pike Place Market. ‘But I won’t even go inside that thing now. It’s disgusting.’”
But Seattle’s decision isn’t a setback for the cause of public toilets. It’s a step in the direction of a more appropriate technology: humans with brooms for sanitation, and passers-by with eyeballs for security. As the Times says: “Rather than automated toilets, some cities are looking for cheaper alternatives that would be cleaned by human attendants. One prototype, to be installed next month in Portland, Ore., would cost $50,000 each, compared with some $300,000 for an automated unit.
“Randy Leonard, a Portland city commissioner, helped design that toilet, which in addition has open gaps at the top and bottom of the door, a feature discouraging drug abuse, prostitution and the like.”
Public toilets have to balance pooping privacy against the human inclination to do terrible things when no one is watching. The gaps in Portland’s toilet doors will mean that someone might recognize your shoes, but they’ll also ensure the toilets don’t get abused so much that you won’t want to use them at all.
For the past week, astronauts aboard the ISS have been alternating between their only other civilized option — the toilet on the Soyuz return capsule — and a “back-up bag-like collection system” NASA engineers developed for just such an emergency. Given the challenges surely presented by peeing in zero-gravity (picture splashback droplets floating around the cabin like plankton in a poorly-maintained aquarium), the mechanical toilet surely involves some sort of negative air-pressure device that sucks urine into a receptacle; I’m hard-pressed to imagine how a non-mechanical device can properly function.
On Earth, sanitary waste management relies on two forces: the muscles of the body, which physically propel liquids and solids at velocity through one of two apertures; and gravity, which we trust to ensure that-which-is-no-longer-us goes into the toilet and stays there. Our bodies evolved to rely on gravity as a constant; there’s a reason these excretory apertures function best when aimed downward. But in space, while the muscles of the body continue to function, the lack of gravity means that streams of effluvia will not simply drop with a satisfying plop, but instead ricochet about an enclosed area with an equal and opposite velocity to that at which it was expelled (allowing for friction caused by viscosity, of course; but in zero-G, you shouldn’t place your hopes for a particle-free oxygen on your waste’s penchant for stickiness).
So on Wednesday, a NASA employee left Russia (where the ISS’s toilet was built) with a thirty-five pound replacement pump packed in a diplomatic pouch and carried onto a commercial airliner as hand luggage. The galaxy’s most important plumber’s assistant is en route to Florida, where Discovery is set for launch on Saturday. The shuttle will dock with the ISS on Monday, at which point the three panicked astronauts aboard the ISS will presumably rush the airlock and head straight to Discovery’s bathroom.
“Never mind modern technology,” said the residents of San Diego, as I discussed back in August of 2006. “Never mind science and reason. Never mind the billions of dollars of research that have gone into developing filtering and cleansing equipment capable of purifying water down to the atomic level.
“Poop,” said the residents of San Diego, “is glue. It’s a special kind of glue that sticks to water and creates a bond that, no matter what science says, no man can tear asunder.”
San Diego has three million people living in a city with enough water for three hundred thousand of them. Nevertheless, forced to make a stupid decision by a superstitious constituency that believes poo love is strong enough to defy physics, San Diego mayor Jerry Sanders took to his desk last November and vetoed the city’s toilet-to-tap water recycling program. The city council overturned his veto, but the fight continues.
But while San Diego bickers over the nature of romance and feces, reason and logic have triumphed in Orange County. This January, officials opened the world’s largest water purification project. Wired News has a cool pictures of the systems that will provide clean water to 100,000 Orange County residents at rates lower than most other municipal sources. The plant cleanses and purifies the water and then flows it into nearby lakes, where it slowly trickles down into the aquifer and then, months later, back into the taps of the residents.
Slate Magazine provides a brief look into the water crisis facing California and the world. (And it points out the irony in Orange County’s system: “Although putting water into the ground, rivers, or lakes provides some additional filtering and more opportunities for monitoring quality, the benefits of doing it that way are largely psychological. In its 2004 report on the topic, the EPA concluded that Americans perceive this water to be ‘laundered’ as it moves through the ground or other bodies of water, even though in some instances, according to the report, ‘quality may actually be degraded as it passes through the environment.’” In fact, supertreated wastewater “is clean enough to drink right after treatment.”)
More American cities need to follow Orange County’s example. It collects sewage and, in accordance with the laws of nature and the State of California, allows poop and water to divorce. The poop is physically removed from its mate, forced to watch its true love move on with life, enjoy a brief marriage with microfilters and disinfectants, and then return to the water cycle to eventually work its way back into a toilet and find a new piece of poop to mate with. Poo and water have a strong relationship, but nothing lasts forever. If only San Diego would get the message.
In the bathroom utopia of the glorious future, pristine municipal facilities will await on every corner, their stall doors wide open to all comers and goers. This utopia will come into being only when the golden brown rule (”Doo unto others…”) is held sacrosanct — until then, as long as public toilets provide a respite from prying eyes, there will be those who use them less wholesome acts than that for which they’re designed.
This is the problem confronting authorities who want to provide for their pooping populace: the more open and accessible toilets are for those who need to go, the more open and accessible they are for those with other things on their minds. Drug addicts, prostitutes, thieves, arsonists, and turd terrorists thrive in the surveillance vacuum created for the benefit of the emboweled. But most measures taken to add security come at the expense of usability.
The solution to this problem, as Finland’s Road Administration has shown, may lie not in prevention but in deterrence. Their problem was theft and arson in highway toilets and an inability to institute appropriate surveillance. Their solution was to encourage self-policing by trading surveillance for accountability.
Pulling into a rest-stop on Finland’s Highway 1, you’ll find the bathroom door locked. To unlock the toilet, text “open” to such-and-such number. The company managing the service will keep a short-term record of who’s been pooping, so if anything unsavory (aside from last night’s Mämmi) happens, the police will have the mobile number of the culprit.
Assuming the company protects their users’ privacy (a non-trivial assumption, I admit), and assuming the mobile numbers aren’t passed to telemarketers selling portable toilet seat covers, I see no problem in this approach. If people know they will be identified, they’ll be less likely to cause trouble.
It’s obviously not a foolproof system — stolen mobiles will be a problem, as will friendly people who hold the door open for people waiting. But there’s no such thing as a foolproof system. The goal should be to find the balance between privacy and security that maximizes the period between incidents of excretory malfeasance.
100% uptime can be guaranteed only if a) privacy is completely surrendered or b) society is fully assimilated into the bathroom utopia. Finland has made a good compromise: mostly secure, and mostly private. That’s a bathroom I’m willing to poop in.
Last week, New York City unveiled the first of twenty futuristic new public toilets intended to give desperate citizens a choice beyond waddling to the nearest Starbucks or crouching behind the nearest trashcan. The city is relying on state-of-the-art technology to avoid the crack addicts, prostitutes, and green puddles of god-knows-what that have plagued the public toilets of New York City’s past: these toilets are self-cleaning and designed to operate safely and sanitarily without a human attendant.
But while I’m proud of the city for finally considering its citizens’ most basic needs, it looks like their quest for automation has detracted from what should have been their goal: building toilets people would actually want to use.
From the New York Times review of the facility: “When the green light marked ‘vacant’ is lit, 25 cents — coins only, no bills — starts the visit. What follows is possibly the longest and most awkward 20 to 30 seconds of a person’s day. The door slips open like an elevator, but then it stays open, to accommodate those who need extra time getting in. Meanwhile, men and women in suits walk past. It is very difficult to look inconspicuous in a bathroom on a sidewalk in New York with the door open. There is just nothing to do but stand there.”
Let’s consider the user of a New York City street toilet. A street toilet is by definition a toilet of last resort, used only by users who don’t have time to make it anywhere nicer. And as we all know, bowels in a state of panic are notorious for discharging when the eyes spot a toilet — not necessarily when the butt actually sits on it. Imagine the desperate user who digs out his quarter, opens the door, dashes inside, and then has to make eye-contact with passers-by for thirty seconds before he can even loosen his belt.
“The toilet itself {is} an imposing, metal, cold-looking receptacle in the corner … There is no seat to raise or lower, just the wide rim of the bowl, with covers made of tissue available in a dispenser to the side.”
A cold toilet seat? A squared toilet seat? A seatless toilet seat??? No one will want to sit on this thing. American butts prefer porcelain horseshoes. This unfriendly, unfamiliar, sure-to-be-uncomfortable steel apparatus will drive people to hover instead of sit — which will lead to a lot of spray-painting.
“{The black button} dispenses toilet paper. One will quickly familiarize oneself with that button, because the designers have deigned a little 16-inch strip the standard helping of paper. A word to the wise: There is a maximum of just three helpings.”
Sixteen inches = four squares. Again, consider the user. He’s only using this toilet because he’s minutes from eruption. Eruption implies diarrhea. And diarrhea implies the need for a whole lot more than twelve squares of toilet paper.
“The floor is rubber and, more strikingly, very wet … {the seat} too, is quite damp, for perfectly good reasons: when the visitor steps out, the door shuts again, but the “occupied” light stays lit. Strange hisses and spraying sounds come from within — did someone slip past? No, actually, the room is cleaning itself. A robotic arm swings out over the toilet bowl and hits it with disinfectant, while similar jets spray across the sink and the floor. Then, dryers fan hot air over everything.”
It’s great that it’s cleaned after every use. But you don’t assume a wet floor or wet seat is due to cleaning — you assume it’s due to urine, and you guard your pants cuffs and butt cheeks accordingly.
“After 90 seconds of cleaning, the green light outside comes back on.”
Let’s again consider the users of this toilet. While our first hypothetical user has been resolving his situation, imagine a second who has been outside doing the waiting dance. The door finally opens and the second user’s sphincter slackens in anticipation; but when the door slams shut, will the second user’s sphincter do the same?
I believe that public conveniences are the mark of a civilized society, which makes me feel guilty to criticize New York’s long-overdue effort to this ideal. But this toilet was not designed with users in mind. Instead, with its metal seat, its twelve-square paper limit, its thirty-second open-door policy, it was designed primarily to maximize the time between maintenance visits. Which results in a facility that actually works against the very people who need it most.
The primary goal should have been to give users a place they’d want to poop; the form of the facility should have followed this function. Based on the Times’ review, if I’m stuck short anywhere near Madison and 23rd, even if I’ve got a quarter in my pocket, I’m going to duckwalk it to the Starbucks a few blocks away.
Today I’m going to talk about how the flush toilet negatively shapes attitudes towards sanitation. And I’m going to tell you what you need to know in order to counteract the ideological influence of the flush toilet.
But first, a bit about me. In 2003, I started writing what I expected to be a humorous look at the world of toilets. But the more research I did, the more serious the book grew.
As you can see by its title, my book still has humor — but the humor is for a purpose: I use humor to diffuse the taboo so that people feel comfortable enough to take the subject seriously.
In my research, I’ve discovered something about the toilet that everyone attending the World Toilet Summit needs to know: the toilet was NOT invented for sanitation. It was invented for ideology.
Here’s the brief history. The toilet was invented in the 18th and 19th century to help rich Victorians in England differentiate themselves from the lower classes.
This was during the industrial revolution, when wealth began to spread beyond the most elite members of society.
The most elite Victorians didn’t like it that so many people were becoming rich like them, and so they adopted elaborate customs and morality to differentiate themselves in ways mere money couldn’t.
So to them, sweating, burping, having sun-darkened skin, showing sexual desire or strong emotion — all these were taboo to the elite Victorians, because they identified all these with the lower classes.
But the problem was, whenever they felt the need to evacuate, they left behind in their chamber pot a disgusting reminder that they were no different than anyone else.
Even if no one heard or smelled what they were doing in their private bathroom, there was still this disgusting THING left in the chamber pot, and the servants would know who put it there.
The toilet appealed to their ideology because it enabled fecal invisibility. The water would contain the smell, and then with a press of a button, every reminder of their shared humanity would disappear down the drain.
The toilet is a tool of ideology. It only became a tool of sanitation after science linked cholera with fecal contamination of water. THAT’S when people decided the toilet had a sanitary purpose.
This isn’t to say the toilet is a bad thing. Of course it isn’t. It’s one of the most lifesaving inventions in the history of man. But if we’re going to attend the World Toilet Summit, it’s important to know where the toilet came from. This knowledge will help your work.
Because clearly this ideological influence is at work today.
Surely you’ve met people who refuse to even talk about the toilet, to even think about it, whether it’s as a joke or in discussing the importance of sanitation in the developing world.
Like it or not, when you talk about toilets, many people think you’re talking about making feces invisible. We know that our goals are sanitation, but there is an ideology that comes with it.
But here’s the good news: by recognizing this ideology, we can use it to our advantage!
I gave a lecture at the University of Iowa about the way the news media covers bathroom-related subjects. In it, I examined some of the headlines that ran worldwide about this very event: the World Toilet Summit. Here are some of the headlines that ran:
- World Toilet Summit lifts lid on public hygiene (Reuters)
- World Toilet Summit more than a wee bit important (Irish Examiner)
- Summit flushes out smelly toilets (AP)
Obviously the World Toilet Summit does not “flush out smelly toilets.” Why does the media feel the need to use puns, or place stories about the World Toilet Summit in the “news of the weird” column?
It’s because in American culture, at least, and I suspect in many other cultures, human waste is taboo.
And when you treat human waste in any other way than the taboo dictates, many people will be horrified — horrified by the subject, and horrified by you for bringing it up. It’s contamination by association.
If the media thinks some of its readers will think the World Toilet Summit is disgusting, then the media will do what it takes to distance itself from the subject. Hence, headlines like those.
There are also people who will think that someone who takes toilets seriously is contaminated.
That is the ideological barrier to sanitation.
It’s imperative to break down this barrier. And it can be as simple as acknowledging the absurdity of the subject, making a joke to break the taboo– as Jack Sim does when he introduces himself as Toiletman.
It’s important to recognize that you see the taboo and show that you’ve moved past it, if you’re going to get people receiving your message to do the same.
Sanitation is critical for both the developing world and the developed world. I don’t need to tell that to the people in this room.
But it does need to be communicated to the people outside of this room, and to the media.
So whether you’re on the floor of the UN talking about the Year of Sanitation, or introducing people to their very first toilet, you need to keep this in mind: the toilet has an ideology, and this ideology speaks as loudly as the facts and statistics that we’re working so hard to change.
If you have any questions, my email address is in the book. Thank you very much.
As at any other conference, delegates arriving at the 2007 World Toilet Summit in New Delhi are handed a tote bag full of schwag. Unlike any other conference, however, our bags contained two small plastic containers of human waste.
Composted human waste, of course. In one, a few powdery ounces of “human excreta-based manure” (2.0% nitrogen, 6.9% phosphorus, 0.4% potassium); in the other, a “hard ball” of composted humanure mixed with adhesive. I don’t know what one does with a “hard ball” of poop, but I do know that it has absolutely no smell.
Yes, I gave it a whiff.
At the 2007 World Toilet Summit, which runs until Saturday, 153 international delegates from 39 countries have joined 172 Indian attendees to discuss and debate issues of sanitation. This year’s theme is “Toilet for All” — a reference to the 2.6 billion people around the world who don’t have one, which contributes to 1.8 million children dying of diarrheal diseases every year. Academics, scientists, economists, bureaucrats, NGO representatives, and at least one writer of books about poop have gathered to present papers, discuss strategies, examine technologies, and kick off preparations for the U.N.-declared International Year of Sanitation, just two months away.
In a vast assembly hall straight out of every movie I’ve ever seen about the UN (headphones for listening to translations, delegates bowing their heads in conference), the event kicks off. I count two dozen photographers and at least ten video crews documenting speech after speech by dignitary after dignitary — Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, founder of Sulabh International; Jack Sim, founder of the World Toilet Organization; His Royal Highness the Prince of Orange of the Netherlands; former Indian President APJ Abdul Kalam; and, symbolically, a “former scavenger woman” who was “liberated” from the “demeaning” practice of collecting human waste from household cesspools by Dr. Pathak’s organization. (Their words, not mine.)
The speeches adhered to what I’ve learned to be the grand Indian tradition in which each speaker lavishly honors the people on the dais before any other words are uttered; only after flowers are given, plaques are presented, and accomplishments are praised can each speaker then move on to exhort of the attendees that everyone in the world should have a toilet. (The word “toilet” is used in a sense broader than the flushing Ferguson we’re all familiar with; here, it means simply an apparatus that accepts and stores poop in a sanitary way.)
I hear lots of statistics, but little to keep my attention. As fascinated as I am by the human waste infrastructure, and as concerned as I am about 2.6 billion of my fellow humans, toilets can indeed be rendered humorless and uninteresting.
It’s Jack Sim’s speech that brings back the excitement. And he does it by addressing one of the two common baselines at which people view toilets: they’re funny. “I think,” he said, rising to the lectern as we round out the second hour of interminable speeches, “after this long discussion, I don’t have to convince you right now of the importance of a toilet.”
Sim wants to make sanitation “sexy.” His solution to the sanitation crisis is not to deliver a bunch of toilets to a bunch of villages, but to address it as a problem of demand. To him, 2.6 billion people living without sanitation isn’t a function of poverty — it’s a function of demand. It’s less important to bring sanitation to people that it is for them to want to be sanitized. It’s not even necessary for people to know WHY toilets are important — he just wants them to want them.
His strategy is to educate suppliers — from the smallest rural plumber to the largest corporation — on the profit potential even rudimentary toilets possess when multiplied by almost half the world’s population. It would be primarily up to local suppliers to generate demand — a strategy that will position the toilet in ways far more culturally-relevant than any NGO-sponsored campaign could accomplish, and could deliver toilets far faster than any not-for-profit approach could facilitate.
He also exhorted politicians to help eliminate taboos by taking pictures next to toilets.
The next day, at the toilet Expo: the latest innovations in porta-potties. A new technology to retrofit any urinal into a waterless apparatus. A latrine that utilizes negative air pressure to suck out all smells. Composting toilets. Solar toilets. Toilets on trains. A grade-school sanitation club’s posters depicting the dangers of open defecation in the fields (which, as the crayoned drawings graphically depict, include being bitten on the ass by a cobra).
And then, at the delegates’ presentations: a call for the American government to legislate more public toilets. Tours of rural toilets from the Philippines, Africa, and Germany. Descriptions of schools toilets across India and Nepal. A debate of the benefits of sitting toilets versus the squatting kind (with the cryptic subtitle “Demedicalisation of hemorrhoids therapy/prevention”). An impassioned call for the creation of a Canadian Toilet Organization to address that country’s water resource issues that ran far over the allotted time. As the moderator progressed from polite exhortation to all-out shouting for him to stop, the speaker finally announced that Canada’s desperate need for a toilet organization has finally been met — by the speaker himself, who is now forming a Canadian Toilet Organization.
While the Toilet Summit skews towards issues affecting developing nations, the World Toilet Organization represents toilet needs of all countries. This leads to strange juxtapositions of concerns — one delegate calls for US airlines to provide more toilets for their passengers, while the next pleads on behalf of distant villages for even one toilet at all.
The air at the World Toilet Summit is one of optimism. Unlike many of humanity’s problems, this is a fight that can be won. A billion more people have access to sanitation than did twenty years ago. Jon Lane, executive director of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council, looks at the technology — affordable — and the strategies — proven — and issues a declaration: “We can achieve universal sanitation in our lifetime.”
There is one more day left in the conference. Hopefully I’ll find out what to do with my ball of composted shit.
On the morning of August 8, three inches of rain fell on Brooklyn. On the 3,200 Brooklyn acres that drain into the Red Hook Water Pollution Control Plant, 260 million gallons of runoff coursed into the sewers, mixing with millions of gallons of human waste already headed towards a treatment plant capable of processing only 60 million gallons per day.
When flow exceeds capacity by that much, the only choice is to channel it all, untreated, into the waterways. And so emergency outflow points in Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal and across Upper New York Bay began to ejaculate diluted sewage.
But aside from homeowners whose basements were flooded by Gowanus sewage and beachgoers who swam in feces the next day, few people paid attention to the sewer overflows. After all, New York City averages 53 combined sewer overflows (CSOs) a year, and 772 American communities have combined wastewater and rainwater sewers that overflow during heavy rains. But since CSOs rarely make the news and few politicians want to stake political capital on sewers, the political will to fix them probably won’t appear until the problem becomes a catastrophe.
This is the story of one such catastrophe: a stench so vile that it changed the course of human sanitation.
London in 1858 was not a pleasant place for people who enjoyed breathing through their nose. The Industrial Revolution had attracted three million fortune-seekers to the big city, turning housing into a two-pronged competition: landlords tried to see how many times they could subdivide a flat and tenants tried to see how many people they could pack into each one. Every inch of real estate not reserved for someone sleeping was appropriated by the machinery of capitalism — neighborhoods teemed with tanneries, breweries, soap factories, glue works, slaughterhouses, laundries, and bone boilers, and pollution spewed into the skies and streets and sewers from each one.
Spewing waste: that’s an excellent metaphor for London in 1858. Waste spewed from buildings and waste spewed from the people. And it was this inexorable brown flow that, in the summer of 1858, brought the city to its knees.
As described in Poop Culture, the flush toilet had by 1858 become a social necessity. The elite Victorians’ late 18th Century embrace of the apparatus had trickled down to their social inferiors; mid-19th Century bourgeoisie agreed that anything flushless was uncivilized. But until 1847, law and custom both held that sewers were for drainage and not for human waste — anything bearing urine or feces was legally and morally obliged to be emptied only in the nearest cesspool. So the majority of flush toilets were plumbed to outflow not into sewers, but into pits in people’s backyards.
Cesspools could contain the quantity of waste deposited via chamber pots and privies, but the gallons of water accompanying every flush of the toilet proved too much to bear. As more and more toilets were installed in the city, more and more cesspools began to overflow. Liquid sewage would leach into basements and drinking wells until reaching the nearest sewer — which, designed for drainage, would channel the muck into the nearest waterway. And so as the summer of 1858 began, the biological and commercial feculence of London was flushed in ever-increasing volumes into the Thames.
June of 1858 was dry. Damned dry. So dry that the current of the Thames slowed almost to a stop.
June of 1858 was hot. Damned hot. So hot that the biological stew floating atop the still waters of the Thames began to putrefy.
And so began the Great Stink.
“A Stygian pool reeking with ineffable and unbearable horror,” Prime Minister described it. Human and animal feces, dead dogs and cats, entrails from the slaughterhouses, rotten food, and the mechanized vomit of countless factories bobbed and bubbled while the people of London invested heavily in scented handkerchiefs. But as bad as it must have stunk, smell is something people can get used to. (And it’s not like previous summers had been remembered for smelling of roses. Michael Faraday’s 1855 description of the Thames: “The whole of the river was an opaque pale brown fluid.”) No, the stench of the Thames terrified London because most Londoners genuinely believed the odor would kill them.
In 1858, both science and laymen alike subscribed to the miasma theory of disease: that cholera, malaria, and the common cold were all caused by inhaling air infected through exposure to putrefying matter. Although Dr. John Snow had demonstrated in 1854 that cholera was caused not by miasma but by fecal contamination of water, his theories had few believers at the time of his death on June 16, 1858 — right at the height of the Great Stink. So while John Snow was being laid to rest at Brompton Cemetery, Londoners feared for their lives of the smells arising from the Thames’ clotted waters.
With Parliament right on the banks of the river, the politicians’ first act was, of course, to save themselves: they ordered curtains soaked in chloride of lime to be hung in the windows. Presumably the smell of the chemical overpowered the smell of the river and thus, by their science, neutralized whatever foul demons rode the invisible airwaves of odor. For a brief time, Parliament smelled less like putrefying shit and more like the 1858 equivalent of Formula 409, and the business of running the country continued.
But when the stench proved too resilient, Parliament realized more needed to be done to ensure their own well-being. Welsh MP Owen Stanley repeated to the great body Dr. John Bredall’s testimony at the Court of the Queen’s Bench: “It would be dangerous to the lives of the jurymen, counsel, and witnesses to remain. It would produce malaria and perhaps typhus fever.”
So, for the good of the nation, Parliament abandoned the portions of the building overlooking the river.
Well-to-do Londoners fled for the summer retreats. But working-class London stayed put, holding their breath, avoiding the river, and hoping not to die as the stench smothered the city (and, according to one source, spawned an epidemic of giant flies). A few brave sanitary engineers attempted to solve the problem by dumping tons of chemicals into the Thames. Chloride of lime, chalk lime, slaked lime, and carbolic acid went in by the ton, but whatever effects these chemicals may have had were negated by the ceaseless sludge spewing from the buildings and the people. While the Great Stink was created by man, only nature could end it.
Fortunately for London, nature intervened: after a fortnight of misery and terror, the heat finally broke and the rain finally came. The Thames began to flow. The stink began to dissipate. And the politicians began to do their jobs.
Just like our government today is well aware of the problems of combined sewers, so too were London officials fully cognizant of their sewer problems in the years before the Great Stink. By 1847, sanitation had gotten so bad that a consolidated Metropolitan Commission of Sewers was formed to begin surveying and mapping the existing problem. (From an 1849 report: “The smell was of the most horrible description, the air being so foul that explosions and choke damp were frequent. We were very nearly losing a whole party by choke damp, the last man being dragged out on his back through two feet of black fetid deposit in a state of insensibility.”) In the eleven years prior to the Great Stink, six separate commissions evaluated 137 proposed solutions without making any tangible progress.
But in the weeks immediately following the Great Stink, Parliament rapidly authorized three million pounds for the Metropolitan Board of Works’ famed engineer Joseph Bazalgette to build a massive sewer system. Bazalgette then spent the next seven years building 82 miles of intercepting sewers, 250 miles of main sewers, and 13,000 miles of local sewers to channel London’s entire sewage output downstream to Barking and Crossness, where it could be released into the Thames, untreated, during periods of favorable current — sparing London the dangers of miasmatic sewage, but leaving the question of treatment for a future generation.
Bazalgette’s sewers, which became a model for combined sewers in New York City and across the west, experienced their first major overflow event on July 26, 1867, when 3.25 inches of rain fell on London. As per Bazalgette’s design, emergency outflow points opened and diluted sewage and water spewed directly into the Thames.
140 years later, on October 11, 2007, 1.48 inches of rain fell on New York City, and the exact same thing happened. On the 3,200 Brooklyn acres that drain into the Red Hook Water Pollution Control Plant, 128 million gallons of runoff coursed into the sewers, mixing with millions of gallons of human waste already headed towards a treatment plant capable of processing just 60 million gallons per day. Emergency outflow points across the Gowanus Canal and Upper New York Bay opened up, and diluted sewage once again spewed into the water.
In London, CSOs spew 5.2 billion gallons of sewage into the Thames each year; New York City’s waterways choke on 27 billion gallons of sewage for the same reason. In both cities, and in 772 communities across America, the problem is known but not considered urgent. London’s CSOs will cost £2 billion to fix; America is looking at $4 billion for New England’s problems alone. But with no movement towards resolution, the sewage will just continue to spill until another catastrophe finally occurs.
It’s every author’s dream that there exists some secret pocket of the world in which his work is fully appreciated. Realizing that dream is even more unlikely when the author’s work has the word “poop” in its title. So it’s a strange journey indeed that begins with founding a bathroom humor website and leads to a ceremonial honor by one of India’s most important sanitary advocates.
Only 18% of Indians use toilets, according to the country’s 2001 census. The 19th century wave of sanitary reform that formalized the west’s bathroom habits didn’t wash over India; today 13.6% of its urban population and 78.4% of its rural population still practice open defecation.
Change is coming, though — on high from organizations like UNICEF and the UN, which declares 2008 to be the International Year of Sanitation; and locally from advocates like Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, whose Sulabh International has, since 1973, built 1.2 million household toilets and 6,500 community toilet blocks that serve 15 million people.
Dr. Pathak is often cited alongside Ghandi for his work to liberate India’s untouchable caste. And yet there he was, a sanitary visionary, laying a flower garland on a guy who wrote a book about poop.
New Delhi guidebooks recognize Sulabh only for its toilet museum. But its broader mission is far more serious: liberating India’s lowest caste from “the demeaning practice of physically cleaning and carrying human excreta.” The staggering number of toilets it has built are the sole source of funding for its related ventures: free schools to teach trades to former scavengers, research into human waste as energy and fertilizer, and more.
Having found myself in Delhi on (non bathroom-related) business last month, I’d emailed Sulabh an introduction of myself and my book, hoping for little more than a tour of the museum and perhaps a few minutes of Dr. Pathak’s time. Sanitary advocacy and bathroom humor may not mix, but perhaps they could intersect for a time.
But the welcome I received…! A short audience upon my arrival, first with Anita Jha, Sulabh’s Managing Director, and then with Dr. Pathak. A formal welcome before an assembled crowd in Sulabh’s conference center. A classroom-by-classroom tour of the school. An exhibit-by-exhibit tour of the museum. A model-by-model tour of the Sulabh’s household toilets, with staff scientist Dr. P.K. Jha (no relation) explaining how their dual-pit pour-flush system allows waste to compost in one pit while the other is slowly filled. Over the three years the first pit lays untouched, bacteria transform the waste into compost — turning waste into a resource while eliminating the need for human scavengers.
Dr. Jha led me to a nearby fertilizer bin. The photographer who had been trailing me since I arrived leapt to immortalize this moment: me lifting a sample to my nose, inhaling the sweet smell of pure earth.
From there, it was on to Dr. Pathak’s office for a long conversation about his work. It began in 1968 when he moved in with a community of untouchables — an unthinkable breach of taboo for a Brahmin. But Dr. Pathak saw human waste as Ghandi did: not a symbol of filth but a fundamental baseline that links all humanity.
Dr. Pathak, Ms. Jha, and I were joined for lunch by a man introduced as “one of the most famous astrologers in India.”
My journey sees me returning to Delhi for a year beginning in November, in part to research a book about the future of toilets and sewers. Upon learning this, Dr. Pathak invited me to attend and speak at the 2007 World Toilet Summit, hosted this year in Delhi. The Summit will kick-start the Year of Sanitation’s efforts to reduce by half the 2.6 billion people who don’t have access to basic sanitation; my experience translating bathroom humor into sanitary awareness, it seems, is directly relevant to the Summit’s goals. Jack Sim, president of the World Toilet Organization, often introduces himself as “Toiletman” — intentionally eliciting an initial giggle to diffuse the taboo.
Human waste is a fundamental baseline; bathroom humor is a fundamental reaction to it.
But I didn’t know this was Dr. Pathak’s perspective when, standing with him on the dais in front of his assembled staff, the garland fresh on my shoulders, he frowned at the typed speech he was about to deliver. He turned to me, gestured to the title of my book on his paper, and asked, “What is ‘poop’?”
Before I could consider an answer, Ms. Jha leaned forward. “It’s shit, sir,” she informed him.
“Ah,” he said. And then he proceeded to the lectern and gave this author the greatest honor of his career thus far.
You can see photos of Sulabh, Dr. Pathak, and more on my Flickr page.
Last week, the New York Times announced it was making all the content on its website free. Whereas once you had to pay to access articles dating back to the paper’s founding in 1851, now this trove of history and knowledge is accessible to anyone with a login and password.
Login: poopreport. Password: poopreport. You can use that ID to follow in my steps, because the first thing I did when I heard their announcement was to search for the Times’ first use of the word “poop.”
The results weren’t as fulfilling as my research into the first appearance of the word “poop” on the Internet, which led me to identify (and interview!) the Internet’s first PoopReporter: Tom Reingold, who described his changing needs for bathroom privacy on the misc.kids newsgroup. But most early references to poop on the Times (like this one, for instance) refer to “poop decks” (which, in spite of what we may think, are actually standard features in naval architecture). This appears to be the case on September 24, 1851, in an article entitled “MARINE INTELLIGENCE.; PORT OF NEW-YORK. Cleared. Arrived. Telegraph Domestic Ports. Spoken, &c.”
“Marine intelligence”, I take it, refers to the comings and goings of various boats into and out of New York Harbor; this passage reports that the Argo, from Liverpool, arrived on the 20th of August, 1851, carrying 81 people in the poop deck.
I assume that most of the appearances of “poop” in the years that followed are similar. But the Times only allows you to download a PDF scan of the article, instead of letting you browse the digitize text rather than browsing the digitized text; so with no find function, it would take forever to go through each article to find out when “poop” is first discussed in a non-sailing context.
Outside of sailing, the only major appearances I could find were due to scanning errors. For instance, here is an article that appeared on February 4, 1923:
Nothing bathroom-related about that. But in the search results, that headline is rendered thusly:
This article, from April 10, 1879, came across as “poop” in the search results; I can’t tell if it’s a scanning error or not.
Some other notable New York Times milestones.
July 13, 1969: the first appearance of “feces”, in a book review. (”If you value your digestion and peace of mind, read no further. We’re going to be talking about fleas and feces.”)
October 29, 1851: the first appearance of “toilet”, in a list of award winners at the Industrial Exhibition of 1851. (”Hauel, J…… toilet soaps.”)
Dec 12, 1851: the first appearance of the phrase “water closet”, in testimony offered by Pugh Smith during the trial of Lawrence Reily for the murder of his wife and his wife’s mother. (”When the dinner was ready, I found Reily in the water closet, asleep; the door was fastened on the inside.”)
September 20, 1851: the first appearance of the word “diarrhea”, in a report on the health of President Millard Fillmore. (”I have just left the President. He has suffered considerably during the night and morning from an attack of diarrhea and stomach derangement, similar to his attack, recently, at White Sulphur Springs, and brought on by change of water, cold and fatigue.”)
July 15, 1888: the first appearance of the phrase “toilet paper”, in a trial following a hazing scandal at the Annapolis Naval Academy. (”He is charged with requiring Cadets Davidson and Stockford to chew their toilet paper.”)
December 3, 1856: the first appearance of the word “excreta”, in a report on findings presented at the Horticultural Society. (”In passing through animal bodies, as part of themselves and not as excreta, mineral materials acquire a modification which renders them better fitted for similar and further uses.”)
December 25, 1852: the first appearance of the word “bathroom”. (It’s somewhere in a 5,000 word article; with a lack of a search function, I’m sure as hell not going to go searching for it.)
Google News appears to have indexed the Times archive; searching there is more fruitful because they, at least, show the keyword as it appears in context. It’s not a bad interface, so maybe one of you will have more luck finding “poop” as we now know it.
