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Friday, May 31, 2013

THE FLUSH TOILET IS THE GREATEST INVENTION

THE FLUSH TOILET IS THE GREATEST INVENTION

More even than the miracle of antibiotics, the flush toilet has done most to rid us of infectious disease. Without plumbed sanitation within the home to dispose of human waste, we would still be living in a brutal age of cholera, dysentery, typhus and typhoid fever—to say nothing of bubonic plague. 
The flush toilet was invented, and re-invented, many times. Indoor toilets first appeared in the Indus Valley over 4,000 years ago. The Romans built their latrines over drains carrying running water that discharged into a fetid Tiber. Legend has it that Queen Elizabeth I was too embarrassed to use the flush toilet built for her by her godson, Sir John Harington, for fear that the roar of the rushing water would inform the palace of the royal bowels being evacuated. 
But it is only in the past century and a half that the water closet has graced more humble abodes. After Prince Albert died of typhoid in 1861, a grief-stricken Queen Victoria demanded that piped water and sewage treatment be installed throughout Britain. A decade later, her son Prince Edward came close to dying of the same disease, and word about the need for flush toilets went out across the land. From Britain, it spread to France, and thence the rest of Europe and the world. 

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