100 Fun Facts About Bathroom

Which Elizabethan courtier described England's first flushing toilet, the Ajax, in a 1596 book?

Sir John Harington named it with a pun on 'a jakes', slang for a privy, and the book's barbs got Queen Elizabeth's godson banished from court again.

Alexander Cumming's S-bend of 1775 solved which problem of early flush toilets?

Sewer gases are held back by the water that settles in the bend after each flush; the London watchmaker's trick was so simple that toilets still rely on it today.

Popular legend wrongly credits which Victorian plumber with inventing the flush toilet?

Thomas Crapper held nine plumbing patents, none of them for the flush toilet; the legend owes most to a tongue-in-cheek 1969 biography called Flushed with Pride.

Which French revolutionary was stabbed to death in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday in 1793?

Jean-Paul Marat spent much of each day in a medicinal bath to ease a skin disease and received visitors there, which is how Corday reached him with a hidden kitchen knife.

George Jennings installed the first public pay toilets at which 1851 event?

The Great Exhibition made his flushing 'Monkey Closets' in the Crystal Palace so popular that the first public lavatories opened the following year, billed as 'Public Waiting Rooms'.

The euphemism 'to spend a penny' comes from what?

Coin-operated toilet door locks took one old penny in London's public lavatories, and the euphemism has outlived both the locks and the pre-decimal coin.

Which Roman emperor taxed public urinals and reputedly told his son that money does not smell?

Vespasian held a coin from the first payment to his son Titus's nose and asked if the smell offended him; street urinals in France are still called vespasiennes.

Very early toilets that used flowing water have been found at Skara Brae, a Neolithic village where?

Orkney, Scotland, hid the village under sand until a storm uncovered it in 1850, revealing stone houses with drains running beneath them.

Which ancient culture is credited with the world's first known urban sanitation systems?

The Indus Valley Civilisation lined the main streets of cities such as Mohenjo-daro with covered drains, so waste water from houses was carried away instead of pooling in the lanes.

In which country was paper first recorded as being used for personal hygiene, in the 6th century AD?

China's scholar Yan Zhitui wrote in 589 that he dared not use paper bearing quotations from the Five Classics or the names of sages for toilet purposes.

Joseph Gayetty's Medicated Paper of 1857, America's first commercial toilet paper, was sold as a way to prevent what?

Hemorrhoids were the pitch: the aloe-infused sheets were sold as a medical product, and their New York inventor was proud enough to print his name on every one.

Which firm popularised toilet rolls when it began marketing them in 1890?

Scott sold its first rolls through dealers under other brand names, because the brothers were too embarrassed by the product to put the family name on it for over a decade.

As late as the 1930s, the Northern Tissue company advertised its toilet paper with what selling point?

Splinter free was a real boast: it took makers until the 1930s to refine toilet paper enough to promise that no slivers of wood were left in it.

Before toilet paper was common, which free publications did rural Americans hang in the outhouse and use page by page?

Mail-order catalogs from Sears arrived free in the post, which is one reason the first commercial toilet papers sold poorly: few people saw the point of paying for paper.

In TV adverts from 1964 to 1985, the grocer Mr Whipple scolded shoppers for squeezing which toilet paper?

Charmin's fussy grocer became so familiar that a 1978 poll named him the third best-known man in America, behind only Richard Nixon and Billy Graham.

Which fixture is named after a French word for a pony?

Bidet meant a small horse in French, and the name passed to the low basin because a user sits astride it like a rider.

Which Procter & Gamble soap, first sold in 1879, was advertised with the slogan 'It Floats'?

Ivory was named in church, the story goes: Harley Procter, a founder's son, heard a psalm that speaks of 'ivory palaces' and knew what to call his new white soap.

Which Japanese company makes the Washlet, the electronic toilet seat that washes its user?

Toto began by importing American 'wash air seats' meant for hospitals and nursing homes, then launched its own improved Washlet in 1980.

Which mouthwash turned 'halitosis', an obscure medical term, into a household word through its 1920s adverts?

Listerine was developed in 1879 as a surgical antiseptic and only reached shop shelves in 1914; the word it made famous had been coined by a physician back in 1874.

In which 1960 Alfred Hitchcock film does the most famous shower scene in cinema appear?

Psycho toned down Robert Bloch's novel, in which the victim is beheaded in the shower; Hitchcock's film has her stabbed in a scene storyboarded by Saul Bass.

Which late-night TV host's 1973 joke about a toilet paper shortage sent Americans rushing to empty the shelves?

Johnny Carson's Tonight Show quip was taken at face value by viewers, and their panic buying created a real shortage that lasted for weeks.

Marcel Duchamp signed a porcelain urinal 'R. Mutt' in 1917 and entered it in an art show under which title?

Fountain was kept out of sight at the 1917 show, yet in 2004 a poll of 500 art experts named it the most influential modern artwork of all time.

Which US president's administration broke up the price-fixing 'porcelain trust' of toilet makers in 1912?

William Howard Taft's government beat the fixture makers in the Supreme Court; the famous story that he once got stuck in a White House bathtub is a tale no document supports.

Which ancient Greek reportedly shouted 'Eureka!' after noticing the water rise in his bath?

Archimedes is said to have leapt from the tub and run home naked through Syracuse, shouting the word; the tale comes from the Roman architect Vitruvius, writing some two centuries later.

In a Roman bath complex, what was the caldarium?

The hot room stayed hot because its floor was raised on pillars, letting air from a furnace flow underneath and up through the walls.

The Farnese Bull and the Farnese Hercules were recovered from which Roman bathing complex?

The Baths of Caracalla were dug over in the 1540s on the orders of Pope Paul III, who wanted ancient statues for his family's palace; both marbles are now in Naples.

The earliest evidence of a cleansing fat-and-alkali mixture, around 2800 BC, comes from which ancient civilisation?

Babylon left the oldest trace, in clay cylinders; Egypt's version turns up more than a thousand years later in a medical papyrus, as a treatment for skin diseases.

Traditional Castile soap, named for a region of Spain, is made from which oil?

Olive oil grew on the doorstep in Spain, Italy and France, which is why those three countries became Europe's early centres of soap making.

William Addis is believed to have made the first mass-produced toothbrush in 1780 where?

Britain's William Addis is said to have had the idea in Newgate prison, where he drilled holes in a bone saved from a meal and tied in bristles begged from a guard.

Before nylon took over in 1938, the bristles of most toothbrushes came from which animals?

Pigs supplied the stiff neck hair of the first bristle toothbrushes, though Europeans found it too firm and often chose softer horsehair until nylon arrived.

In a 2003 MIT survey of inventions Americans could not live without, which came a close second to the toothbrush?

The car won 37 percent of adults to the toothbrush's 42, while the computer, the mobile phone and the microwave each managed only about 6 percent.

The rubber duck entered the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2013 alongside which centuries-old board game?

Chess shared the class of 2013 with a toy whose first versions could not even float: early rubber ducks were cast solid and sold as chew toys.

In January 1992, 28,800 plastic bath toys including yellow ducks were washed off a ship in which ocean?

Pacific currents scattered the toys so widely that oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer used beachcombers' finds to track how the ocean's surface waters move.

Which Sesame Street character took the bath-time song 'Rubber Duckie' into the Billboard top 20 in 1970?

Ernie, performed by Jim Henson, sang it to his bath toy; the single reached No. 16 and helped make the rubber duck the classic bathtub companion.

In software engineering, 'rubber duck debugging' means what?

Explaining your code aloud to an object forces you to spell out every step, which is when the mistake shows; the name comes from a story in the book The Pragmatic Programmer.

Which of these is a traditional nickname for a chamber pot?

Thunder mug is one of many nicknames for the pot, whose slops old Edinburgh flung from upstairs windows into the street with the warning cry 'Gardyloo!'

A 'Jack and Jill' bathroom is one that is what?

Shared between two bedrooms, it usually sits between them with a door from each, and often has two wash basins so both occupants can get ready at once.

Which Southeast Asian country tabled the 2013 UN resolution that made World Toilet Day an official observance?

Singapore is also home to the World Toilet Organization, the campaign group founded on 19 November 2001, which is why the day falls on that date.

London's central sewerage system was built by Joseph Bazalgette in response to which 1858 event?

The Great Stink came in a hot summer when the sewage-filled Thames reeked right outside Parliament, and politicians who had stalled for years quickly approved the new sewers.

Astronauts on the International Space Station use a toilet that can recover what from urine?

Drinking water is distilled from the crew's urine by the station's life-support system, which NASA reported in 2023 could recover about 98% of the water astronauts use.

Acoustically, why does singing sound better in the bathroom?

Hard tiled surfaces flatter the voice by bouncing it around a small room, and the reverberation gives the singer a fullness and depth that soft furnishings would soak up.

In US real-estate jargon, what fixtures does a 'half bath' contain?

A toilet and a sink are two of the four fixtures that usually define a full bath, which adds a tub and a shower; a '3/4 bath' has the shower but no tub.

In Canada, what is the usual word for a public toilet, where an American would say 'restroom'?

Washroom is the Canadian word for public facilities, though at home most Canadians simply say bathroom, as their American neighbours do.

In ancient Rome's public latrines, which shared tool is thought to have done the job of toilet paper?

A sponge on a stick, the tersorium, was rinsed in vinegar or salt water between users, though some researchers now think it was more of a toilet brush.

'Toilet' comes from 'toilette', a diminutive of the French 'toile', and first meant what?

Little cloth: the word passed from the cloth to the dressing table it covered, then to the act of dressing, and reached the bathroom only as a polite euphemism.

Which American bathroom brand made its first bathtub in 1883 by enamelling a cast-iron water trough?

Kohler was a Wisconsin foundry making ploughs and other farm implements, and the trough it sold as a bathtub was the first plumbing product it ever made.

In a typical UK bathroom, the one power socket you are likely to find is labelled for what?

Electric shavers get a special low-power socket fed through an isolating transformer, because wiring rules keep ordinary sockets well away from baths and showers.

Akrotiri, a Bronze Age town with paved streets and drains, was buried by a volcano on which island?

Santorini's eruption about 3,600 years ago buried the town under ash and pumice, which is why its frescoes and three-storey houses survived so well.

Epsom salts, a staple of the soothing bath, take their name from a spa town in which country?

England's Epsom, in Surrey, had a mineral spring whose bitter water was boiled down for the salts, and visitors flocked to the town to take the cure.

A natural bath loofah, often taken for a sea sponge, is really the dried inside of what?

A gourd from a tropical vine in the cucumber family, the luffa is eaten as a vegetable when young; left to ripen and dry, its fibrous skeleton becomes the scrubber.

Which European airport etched a tiny housefly into its urinals to give men something to aim at?

Amsterdam Schiphol put the image of a housefly in its men's room urinals to improve aim, and the trick became one of the most often cited examples of a behavioural 'nudge'.

The Bathroom Reader trivia books, written to be read on the toilet, carry which relative's name?

Uncle John is a real person, John Javna, who created the series with his brother Gordon, though the books are credited to the Bathroom Readers' Institute.

Which bathroom cabinet staple was first sold under the name Baby Gays?

Q-tips began as Baby Gays because the swabs were intended for infants, and the Q that was added later stands for quality.

Kleenex tissues were first marketed in 1924 as a disposable way to wipe off which beauty product?

Cold cream remover was the original pitch for Kleenex, whose first national adverts in September 1924 sold it for cleaning faces rather than for catching sneezes.

The myth that toilets swirl opposite ways in each hemisphere wrongly blames which phenomenon?

Coriolis force is far too weak to matter in a toilet, where the shape of the bowl mostly decides which way the water turns in either hemisphere.

Which shape, popularised by cartoonists, is traditionally cut into the door of an American outhouse?

A crescent moon is the well-known mark of the American outhouse, but the custom has a questionable basis in fact and owes its fame to drawings.

The Otohime, a gadget found in many Japanese women's public toilets, does what when switched on?

The Otohime, or Sound Princess, plays a flushing sound to cover embarrassing noises, saving the water many women used to waste by flushing continuously for cover.

Legend says Cleopatra kept her skin youthful by bathing in the milk of which animal?

Donkey milk is what Cleopatra is said to have bathed in to preserve the beauty and youth of her skin, and modern makers turn it into soaps and moisturizers.

In Jurassic Park, what is the job of Donald Gennaro, whom the Tyrannosaurus eats on a toilet?

Lawyer Donald Gennaro speaks for the park's worried investors, and his outhouse death was first written for another character, Ed Regis, who was cut from the film.

Which 1950s sitcom fought censors to show a toilet tank, where two brothers hid a pet alligator?

Leave It to Beaver meant the alligator episode to be its pilot, but censors would not allow a toilet on screen and finally passed it with only the tank showing.

On a ship, the toilet is traditionally known by which name, after its old position at the bow?

The head took its name from sailing ships, where the crew's toilet area sat at the very front and by the late 1600s was a set of openings called seats of ease that drained into the sea.

Which term names a medieval castle toilet, though it first meant a small room for storing valuables?

Garderobe is French for wardrobe, and one theory holds that clothes were hung there so that ammonia from the privy would keep moths and fleas away.

Which Arabic word names the steamy public bathhouse that Westerners often call a Turkish bath?

Hammam comes from an Arabic root to do with heat, and the bathhouse was inherited from the Roman thermae, keeping its sequence of cool, warm and steam-heated chambers.

Which Japanese word names a bathing spot fed by naturally hot, geothermally heated spring water?

Onsen are regulated by Japan's Hot Springs Act, and the country has roughly 25,000 hot spring sources feeding about 3,000 bathing establishments.

The word 'sauna', for a heated room where bathers sweat, came into English from which language?

Finnish gave English the word sauna, an ancient term that covers both the traditional bath and the bathhouse it is taken in.

Toothpaste went into a collapsible tube after a dentist's son watched which workers in Paris?

Artists squeezing paint onto their palettes gave Lucius Sheffield the idea, and his father, Dr Washington Sheffield, became the first to sell toothpaste in tubes.

Before nylon, the first dental floss sold commercially in 1882 was made from which material?

Silk was the floss material from 1882, when Codman and Shurtleff began selling it unwaxed, until nylon proved tougher and easier to produce in great lengths.

Which razor brand was founded by a man named King Camp, who devised the thin disposable blade?

Gillette was steered by his friend William Painter, inventor of the disposable bottle cap, whose advice on the value of a throwaway product shaped his razor.

The word 'shampoo' reached English in 1762 from a Hindi term that originally referred to what?

Massaging was what shampoo meant when Dean Mahomed opened his vapour baths in Brighton, offering a traditional Indian treatment with hair oils.

Mencken's 1917 bathtub hoax falsely claimed which president put the first tub in the White House?

Millard Fillmore never brought the bathtub to the White House, yet his birthplace of Moravia, New York, marks Fillmore Days by racing modified bathtubs.

Which rock star was found dead in the bathtub of a Paris apartment in July 1971, aged 27?

Jim Morrison of the Doors was found by his partner Pamela Courson, and because no autopsy was performed the cause of his death remains disputed.

Which singer wrote his first hit, the 1958 bath novelty 'Splish Splash', to win a bet with a DJ?

Bobby Darin took the bet from DJ Murray the K, who doubted he could build a song on an opening line suggested by Murray's mother, and it reached No. 3 in the US.

In the Harry Potter stories, which ghost haunts the girls' bathroom where a Basilisk killed her?

Moaning Myrtle was inspired, her author Rowling said, by the crying girl who so often turned up in communal bathrooms at the parties and discos of her youth.

Haewoojae, also known as Mr. Toilet House, is a museum devoted to toilets in which Asian country?

South Korea's Haewoojae was built in Suwon in 2007 as the home of former mayor Shim Jae-deok, who campaigned to improve the quality of the city's toilets.

Which painter's 'Bubbles', first titled 'A Child's World', became famous in adverts for Pears soap?

Millais was asked for permission to add a bar of soap to the picture so that Pears could use it as an advertisement, which it did over many generations.

Which soap brand's foghorn radio adverts made 'B.O.' a household term for body odour?

Lifebuoy popularised the abbreviation, though it was coined in 1919 by Odo-Ro-No, a company that made deodorant for women.

'Lavatory' comes from the Late Latin 'lavatorium', built on a Latin verb with which meaning?

To wash is the meaning of the Latin 'lavare', and in English a lavatory was at first a basin or vessel for washing, a sense on record by about 1375.

Which Roman heating system sent hot air from a furnace beneath the floors of public bathhouses?

Hypocaust heating needed constant attention to the fire and a great deal of fuel, so it was usually found only in large villas and public bathing halls.

Which tool did ancient Greek and Roman bathers use to scrape oil, sweat and dirt from the skin?

Strigil scraping followed a rub-down with oil before the bath, so the curved metal blade lifted the oil, the dirt and the perspiration off together.

Which Hebrew word names the bath used for ritual immersion in Judaism, fed by rain or spring water?

Mikveh literally means a gathering of water, and that water must have collected naturally, flowing in by gravity instead of being pumped or carried.

Which king died in 1760 just after visiting his toilet, having drunk his morning hot chocolate?

George II rose at six, drank his chocolate and went to his toilet alone, where his valet heard a loud crash; a post-mortem found that his aorta had torn.

At the Tudor court, which title belonged to the courtier who attended the king on the toilet?

Groom of the Stool was the most intimate post at court, and the royal secrets its holder came to know made him feared, respected and powerful.

In which country did the firm Caroma design the first practical dual-flush toilet in 1980?

Australia's Caroma gave its 1980 design flushes of 11 and 5.5 litres, and laws in many countries have since required the water-saving idea in new buildings.

Inside a toilet tank, which float-driven valve shuts off the water once the tank has refilled?

Ballcock valves take their name from the hollow ball-shaped float, and the modern design was described in 1790 by the Mexican priest José Antonio de Alzate.

Which cosmetics chain was co-founded by Mo Constantine, who invented the bath bomb in her shed?

Lush co-founder Mo Constantine patented the bath bomb in 1989 after becoming intrigued by Alka-Seltzer tablets, and first called her fizzing creations Aqua Sizzlers.

Which volcanic rock, so full of bubbles that it floats, is used as a stone to rub away hard skin?

Pumice can float for years before it grows waterlogged, and after Krakatoa exploded rafts of it drifted across the Indian Ocean for up to 20 years.

Which mineral, the softest on the Mohs hardness scale, is ground to make classic baby powder?

Talc defines value 1 on the Mohs scale, and besides baby powder its finely ground form serves as a lubricant and as a filler in paper making.

Fingers wrinkle after a long soak in the bath thanks to a response driven by which part of the body?

The nerves are essential: a 1935 study found that skin did not wrinkle where a damaged nerve normally served it, so soaking up water cannot be the whole story.

The Romans built a bathing complex over the hot spring at Bath and gave the town which Latin name?

Aquae Sulis means the waters of Sulis, the goddess to whom the springs were dedicated and whom the Romans identified with their own Minerva.

Which spirit, crudely made at home during American Prohibition, was nicknamed after the bathtub?

Gin got the bathtub tag in 1920, perhaps because moonshine bottles too large to fill elsewhere were diluted with water from the bathtub tap.

The saying about throwing the baby out with the bathwater comes from a proverb in which language?

German writers have used it since 1512, when Murner's satire Appeal to Fools printed it with a woodcut of a woman tossing out a baby with the waste water.

Which Tonight Show host walked off in 1960 after censors cut his joke about a water closet?

Jack Paar walked off the night after NBC removed the joke from the tape without warning, leaving announcer Hugh Downs to finish the show.

Which breed of puppy trails toilet roll through the house in the famous Andrex adverts?

Labrador Retriever puppies have fronted the brand's television adverts for decades, and the mascot is so tied to the name that it is known simply as the Andrex puppy.

The word 'plumber' goes back to 'plumbum', the Latin name for which metal used in Roman pipes?

Lead lined Roman conduits, drain pipes and baths, and in medieval times anyone who worked with the metal, even up on a roof, was called a plumber.

Which company introduced the Airblade hand dryer to public bathrooms in 2006?

Dyson claims that the Airblade dries hands in 10 seconds while using less electricity than a conventional hand dryer.

Which capital city is home to the Széchenyi Bath, one of the largest bathing complexes in Europe?

Budapest's Széchenyi Bath opened in 1913 and draws its water from two thermal springs, one at 74 °C and the other at 77 °C.

The Great Bath, dubbed the ancient world's earliest public water tank, was dug up in which city?

Mohenjo-daro, in the Sindh province of Pakistan, kept its Harappan people supplied with fresh water from wells lined with wedge-shaped bricks.

The Beatles' 'She Came In Through the Bathroom Window' is part of the closing medley on which album?

Abbey Road carries the song as the fifth piece of its medley, written by Paul McCartney after fans used a ladder to get in through his bathroom window.

In Tudor towns, a 'gong farmer' was allowed to work only at night doing which unpleasant job?

Emptying cesspits and privies was so off-putting to the public that gong farmers were restricted to the hours of darkness, which earned them the name nightmen.

Which ghost of folklore is said to appear when her name is chanted into a dim bathroom mirror?

Bloody Mary belongs to a tradition of mirror divination in which young women walked upstairs backward with a candle, hoping to glimpse a future husband's face.