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Pooing and peeing is now something that we prefer to do in private and not give much thought to unless we are constipated or restricted to close proximity to a toilet due to over enthusiasm in the Indian restaurant the previous evening when drunkenly ordering "The hottest dish on the menu ". Once you have flushed the toilet and casually watched the poo, pee and paper slip around the bend you probably don't worry what it is made up of or where it goes next. Skara Brae is a large Neolithic settlement on the Bay of Skaill on the Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland. It was occupied roughly 5,000 years ago. The dwellings contain some of the earliest examples of flushed indoor toilets. The Babylonian, Minoan and Roman civilisations all had sophisticated toilet systems - many communal. Where better to sit and put the world to rights?Mediaeval castles had their 'Garderobe' toilets which stank so badly that best clothes were hung up in the stench because the moths would not live there. The first mechanically flushed inside toilet was invented in 1596 by Sir John Harington, who was Queen Elizabeth's godson. He installed one in his mansion and another in his Godmother's residence - the first "Royal Flush" so to speak? And yet, by the middle of the nineteenth century indoor toilets were still a rarity owned only by the rich. Raw sewerage oozing up between the floorboards in slum homes in Dorset was the cause of a deadly cholera epidemic as witnessed by the Rev. Moule in Fordington as he visited his dying parishioners in the 19th century. He saved countless lives by inventing a cheap and effective 'Dry Earth Closet' to collect and store their human waste safely. Public toilets are now being liberated from the 'Gender Binary' so that the full spectrum of LGBTQ+ users are being catered for with new designs of asexual porcelain urinals and pedestals. This fully illustrated book will take the reader on a five-thousand-year exploration of toilet and sewerage history right up to the 'zero gravity' toilet facilities on spacecraft and the liberating funnel devices that enable women to pee standing up.
