95 Fun Facts About Toilet

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

Sir John Harington described his flushing 'Ajax' in the 1596 book The Metamorphosis of Ajax; its name punned on a slang word for a privy, and its satire got him banished from court.

The 1596 toilet book The Metamorphosis of Ajax got its author banished from court by which monarch?

Elizabeth I was the author's godmother, and she had banished him once before, until he translated the whole of Orlando Furioso as penance for passing a racy canto around her ladies.

What does the S-shaped bend that a Scottish watchmaker patented for toilets in 1775 keep out of the room?

Sewer gas is blocked by the plug of water that sits in the bend, a trick Alexander Cumming patented in 1775 and that still works beneath almost every toilet and sink.

Which Victorian plumber is wrongly credited by legend with inventing the flush toilet, though he did hold nine patents?

Crapper held nine patents but did not invent the flush toilet; Wallace Reyburn's tongue-in-cheek 1969 biography Flushed with Pride inflated his fame, and his firm's manhole covers at Westminster Abbey draw tourists.

Which royal residence of the future Edward VII earned a Chelsea plumber his first royal warrant in the 1880s?

Sandringham House in Norfolk had been bought for the Prince of Wales in 1862, and the job led on to work at Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey.

Which Hitchcock thriller is credited as the first Hollywood film to show a toilet being flushed on screen?

Psycho alarmed the censors with its shot of torn-up notepaper swirling down the bowl, because American films of the time almost never showed a toilet at all.

At the 1851 Great Exhibition, 827,280 visitors each paid how much to use George Jennings' 'Monkey Closets'?

One penny bought a clean seat, a towel, a comb and a shoe shine, and the closets proved so popular that they stayed open after the Exhibition, earning about £1,000 a year.

Which Roman emperor's tax on collected urine inspired the saying 'money has no smell'?

Vespasian taxed the urine collected from Rome's public latrines and sold to fullers; Suetonius records his retort that the coins did not smell, and French street pissoirs were later named vespasiennes after him.

Which ancient civilization, in cities like Mohenjo-Daro and Lothal, had the first known urban sanitation systems?

Indus Valley builders ran covered brick drains along the streets of Mohenjo-Daro to carry waste water from houses, and left openings at intervals so the drains could be inspected and cleaned.

Which Neolithic village in Orkney, occupied from about 3100 BC, had small rooms over a communal drain?

Skara Brae, a stone-built Neolithic settlement on Orkney, was buried in sand and re-exposed by a storm in 1850; some of its huts had small cells over a communal drain.

A medieval castle's toilet was called the garderobe, a word that also gave English the name of which piece of furniture?

Wardrobe is the same word as garderobe, 'guard the robes'; by one account clothes were hung in the castle privy because the ammonia was thought to keep fleas and moths away.

Which household vessel was nicknamed the jerry and the guzunder?

Chamber pot nicknames were many, and guzunder simply records that it 'goes under' the bed, where it spared its owner a night-time walk to the outdoor privy.

The word 'toilet' comes from toilette, a diminutive of the French toile, which means what?

Cloth is toile in French and a toilette was a little one; the word passed from the cloth to the dressing table, to getting dressed, to the dressing room and only then to the fixture.

Which 1858 London event, caused by sewage in the Thames, spurred Parliament to fund Bazalgette's sewers?

The Great Stink of summer 1858 made the sewage-laden Thames so foul that Parliament, sitting beside it, quickly funded Joseph Bazalgette's interceptor sewer system for London.

Which president signed the 1992 energy law that capped new American toilets at 1.6 gallons per flush?

George H. W. Bush signed the Energy Policy Act days before the 1992 election, and from 1994 it more than halved the 3.5 gallons a typical American toilet had used for every flush.

The two-button dual-flush toilet was developed in 1980 to save water in which drought-prone country?

Australia's Caroma developed the two-button cistern with a government grant, and states such as South Australia went on to make dual-flush toilets compulsory in new homes.

Which Japanese company launched the 'paperless' Washlet toilet seat in 1980?

Toto was selling to a country with no habit of washing with water, and buyers stayed sceptical until a 1982 television commercial made the Washlet a household name.

What does the 'Otohime' device fitted in many Japanese women's toilets do?

Plays a flushing sound to mask noise: the Otohime was introduced so users need not flush repeatedly for privacy, saving large volumes of water in public toilets.

Which bathroom fixture is named after an old word for a pony?

Bidet meant a small horse in French, and the low basin took the name because the user straddles it like a rider; English had borrowed the word for the horse in the 1620s.

The world's first known toilet paper, in the 6th century AD, was used in which country?

China: the scholar Yan Zhitui wrote in 589 AD that he would not use paper bearing the classics for toilet purposes, the earliest known reference to toilet paper.

Which brothers, credited with first selling toilet paper on a roll, were too embarrassed to put their own name on it?

Scott brothers Irvin and Clarence of Philadelphia let dealers sell their rolls under some 2,000 other labels, and the family name only went on the wrapper in about 1903.

For two decades of TV ads, the grocer Mr. Whipple begged shoppers 'Please don't squeeze' which toilet paper?

Charmin's fussy grocer, who squeezed the rolls himself when nobody was looking, was played by Dick Wilson in more than 500 commercials, the first of them filmed in Flushing, New York.

As late as the 1930s, the Northern Tissue company advertised its toilet paper as being free of what?

Splinters were sometimes left in early rolls by the way the paper was made, and in the 1930s Northern became the first brand to advertise its tissue as free of them.

Which talk-show host's 1973 joke about a possible shortage triggered a real run on toilet paper in the US?

Johnny Carson's December 1973 Tonight Show monologue riffed on a press release by Wisconsin congressman Harold Froehlich about a possible paper shortage; viewers rushed out and emptied the shelves.

Which British toilet roll brand began in 1942 as a gentleman's disposable handkerchief sold only at Harrods?

Andrex takes its name from St Andrew's Mill in Walthamstow, where it was first made, and its soft tissue slowly saw off the hard, shiny sheets that British bathrooms had known.

Which British king died in 1760, minutes after going to his close stool?

George II drank his morning chocolate at Kensington Palace and went to his close stool alone; minutes later his valet heard a crash, and the post-mortem found that his aorta had torn.

Before toilet rolls were cheap, which printed items famously ended up on a nail in rural American outhouses?

Mail-order catalogs from Sears and Montgomery Ward gave rural families something free to read and then to use, and The Old Farmer's Almanac came with a hole in the corner so it could hang there too.

Which Australian word means outhouse?

Dunny is a clipping of dunnekin, old British slang for a privy, and Australians still speak of the dunny roll and the dunny door.

Which UN-recognised day falls on 19 November each year?

World Toilet Day, 19 November, was started by the World Toilet Organization in 2001 and recognised by a UN General Assembly resolution in 2013 to draw attention to sanitation.

Which country tabled the UN's 2013 'Sanitation for All' resolution, the first it had ever put forward?

Singapore had never tabled a resolution in its 48 years at the UN, and the idea came from Jack Sim, a Singaporean businessman who had campaigned for clean public toilets for more than a decade.

Which waterborne disease did John Snow trace to a Broad Street pump in 1854?

Cholera is spread by water contaminated with faeces; John Snow's 1854 map of deaths around the Broad Street pump in Soho helped prove it, and sewers and treatment are the main defence.

Marcel Duchamp's 1917 readymade Fountain was what everyday object, signed 'R. Mutt'?

A urinal, laid flat and signed 'R. Mutt 1917', was submitted to the Society of Independent Artists, which hid it from view; the original was lost and replicas were later authorised by Duchamp.

The artist Maurizio Cattelan's America, a working toilet stolen from Blenheim Palace in 2019, was made of what?

Solid gold, 18 carat and plumbed in for visitors to use, it was ripped out of Winston Churchill's birthplace in a dawn raid that flooded the building, and the gold is believed to have been melted down.

What is the name of the automatic self-cleaning street toilet pod that first became popular in France?

Sanisette is a JCDecaux trademark that has passed into everyday French; after every visitor the cabin washes, dries and disinfects its own floor and bowl.

A 1970s campaign begun by Ohio teenagers, its logo a fist rising from a toilet bowl, got what banned in many states?

Pay toilets numbered more than 50,000 across America in 1970, most of them behind a dime-in-the-slot lock; Chicago banned them in 1973 and by 1980 almost none were left.

Which Wisconsin bathroom giant made its first bathtub in 1883 by enamelling a cast-iron horse trough?

Kohler was then a Sheboygan foundry making farm implements; its founder coated one of its troughs in enamel, gave it four legs and sold it as a bathtub.

On the International Space Station, what directs waste into the toilet in the absence of gravity?

Airflow does the job: a fan draws urine into a hose funnel and solid waste into bags, since without gravity nothing falls; the urine is then recycled into drinking water.

A ship's toilet is traditionally called what?

The head takes its name from the bow, or head, of a sailing ship, where the crew's seats of ease were simple openings above the sea.

Which empire's capital, Kumasi, had a toilet in every house when the British envoy Thomas Bowdich visited in 1817?

Asante toilets were deep-dug pits, some of them upstairs, and boiling water was poured down them every day, which Bowdich wrote 'effectually prevents the least offence'.

What noisy nickname did the British in India give the portable commode, a comic prize in Evelyn Waugh's Men at Arms?

Thunderbox probably owes its name to the noises made on it; in the novel the officer Apthorpe fights a battle of wits with his brigadier over his own brass-bound oak model.

Until 2001, British water rules required toilet cisterns to flush by which mechanism?

Siphon cisterns lift the water over a bend instead of unplugging a hole, so they cannot dribble into the bowl; the continental valve flush was banned in Britain as wasteful until the rules changed in 2001.

What does the float valve, or ballcock, inside a flushing cistern control?

The refill after a flush is the float valve's job: as the cistern empties the float drops and opens the inlet, then rises with the water and shuts it off at the set level.

UN Sustainable Development Goal 6 pairs sanitation for all with which other basic need?

Clean water shares Goal 6 with sanitation; five years before the goals were adopted, the UN General Assembly had declared access to both a human right.

Which 1922 book's pun on Waterloo and 'watercloset' may be the earliest hint of the word 'loo' in print?

Ulysses has Stephen Dedalus run 'Waterloo' straight into 'watercloset', the line that those who derive 'loo' from Waterloo lean on; the first firm record of the word dates only from 1940, and its origin is still uncertain.

Why do trains, aircraft and ships favour vacuum toilets?

Less water saves weight and stops slopping: suction does the work of a cistern, so each flush needs only a fraction of the usual water and no pool sits in the bowl to spill when the vehicle lurches.

In the film Jurassic Park, which dinosaur eats the lawyer Donald Gennaro as he sits on a toilet?

Tyrannosaurus got the meal thanks to a change made on set: the lawyer was first meant to be dragged out of frame, until the crew realised the animal ate nobody else in the film.

Which rock and roll star was found unresponsive on his bathroom floor at home in Memphis in 1977?

Elvis Presley was found at Graceland by his fiancée, Ginger Alden, hours before an evening flight to Maine to begin another tour.

Which phenomenon, named after a French scientist, is wrongly said to reverse a toilet's swirl below the equator?

The Coriolis effect helps spin cyclones, but it is far too weak to matter in a bowl. Identical toilets flushed in both hemispheres drain the same way, set mostly by the bowl's shape.

What image is etched into the men's room fixtures at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport to improve users' aim?

A fly was chosen because, its proposer said, it is the animal people would most like to aim at. The etched insects went in during the early 1990s to cut spillage.

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

Leave It to Beaver had meant the alligator story to be its pilot, but the row over the bathroom fixture pushed it back to second. Only the tank was allowed on screen.

Which Hogwarts ghost in the Harry Potter stories haunts the girls' bathroom where a Basilisk killed her?

Moaning Myrtle was inspired, J.K. Rowling said, by the crying girl who always seemed to be in the communal bathrooms at the parties and discos of her youth.

Which 2006 animated film begins when a pampered pet rat named Roddy is sent down a Kensington toilet?

Flushed Away was the first Aardman film animated mainly by computer instead of clay, because water would have damaged the studio's plasticine models.

Which software billionaire's foundation launched the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge in 2011?

Bill Gates's foundation has since funded more than a dozen research teams to design toilets that kill germs and recover energy and nutrients from waste.

Which Hollywood actor co-founded Water.org, which lends families money to install a tap or a toilet?

Matt Damon founded it in 2009 with the engineer Gary White by merging their two water charities. White's idea was to lend families the cost of the work upfront.

Which Dav Pilkey book series pits its hero against Talking Toilets and the Turbo Toilet 2000?

Captain Underpants begins when two fourth-grade pranksters hypnotise their bossy principal into becoming the hero of their homemade comics.

In which country did a mayor of Suwon build his home as Mr. Toilet House, now a museum of toilets?

South Korea's Mr. Toilet House went up in 2007 for a mayor known for campaigning for better public toilets. After his death his family gave it to the city, which reopened it as a museum.

Modern Toilet, a restaurant chain where diners sit on toilets and eat from miniature bowls, began where?

Taiwan got the chain after its owner's first hit, an ice cream shop that served chocolate swirls in tiny paper squat toilets. The first branch opened in Kaohsiung.

The artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser designed a much-photographed public toilet in Kawakawa, a town in which country?

New Zealand was his adopted home: he lived near Kawakawa from 1975 until his death, and the 1999 block reuses the town's old glass bottles and bricks from a former bank.

Which Bollywood star played the husband in Toilet: Ek Prem Katha, a 2017 hit about a village home without one?

Akshay Kumar also co-produced the comedy-drama, in which a bride walks out until her husband builds a toilet, and he dug one himself in Madhya Pradesh to promote it.

India's Swachh Bharat toilet-building mission set its deadline for the 150th birthday of which national leader?

Mahatma Gandhi's birthday, 2 October, also marked the start: the campaign to end open defecation was launched on that date in 2014 at Rajghat in New Delhi.

Which TV investment show featured a pitch for the Squatty Potty, a footstool that raises the knees on the toilet?

Shark Tank viewers saw the pitch succeed, and a 2015 advert starring a unicorn then went viral and lifted sales.

Which American series of trivia books for toilet-time reading did the Javna brothers launch in 1988?

Uncle John's Bathroom Reader is credited to a Bathroom Readers' Institute, but its namesake is a real person, John Javna, who created the series with his brother Gordon.

Misuse of a new high-pressure toilet flooded and doomed which kind of German warship in April 1945?

A U-boat, U-1206, took on seawater at 200 feet off Scotland, was forced to the surface and came under British attack. Her crew scuttled her 24 days before the war in Europe ended.

Housesteads fort, home to some of Roman Britain's best-preserved stone latrines, stands on which frontier?

Hadrian's Wall was begun in AD 122 with no forts at all, only small milecastles. Housesteads exists because the plan changed before the wall was finished.

Which medieval Lord Mayor of London paid for a 128-seat public toilet beside the Thames?

Dick Whittington's Longhouse, as the giant privy was called, stood beside the Thames so that every high tide rinsed it out.

Sir Anthony Denny and Sir Thomas Heneage each served as Groom of the Stool, a royal toilet attendant, to which king?

Henry VIII made the post a powerful one: its holders spent hours alone with him and were trusted with his most intimate confidences, including his opinion of Anne of Cleves.

In 1184, dozens of nobles died when a floor gave way above a latrine pit in which German city?

Erfurt was hosting a court day called by King Henry VI to settle a land dispute. About sixty people died, some of them drowned in the cesspit beneath.

In which country are public toilets most often signed and spoken of as 'washrooms'?

Canada signs its public facilities as washrooms, though usage varies by region. Americans tend to say restroom, and to Canadians the word toilet usually means the fixture, not the room.

The Tremont House, the first hotel with indoor plumbing and eight water closets, opened in which American city?

Boston's Tremont House opened in 1829 with its eight water closets on the ground floor, and its architect, Isaiah Rogers, went on to design grand hotels across the country.

What soft material forms the traditional ring that seals the base of a toilet to its drain flange?

Wax squashes to fill the gap between the flange and the bottom of the bowl when the toilet is set down. Wax-free seals are the modern alternative.

The word lavatory, also used for an airliner's toilet, comes from the Latin verb lavare, which means what?

To wash is the root, which is why the washing place in a monastery was its lavatorium. The word reached English through the Late Latin lavatorium.

Which shared tool are ancient Romans traditionally thought to have wiped with in public latrines?

A sponge on a stick, known as a tersorium or xylospongium, was a sea sponge fixed to a wooden rod. Some scholars now argue it was a toilet brush instead.

A scoreless, fumble-filled 1983 rivalry game nicknamed the Toilet Bowl was played by two universities from which state?

Oregon and its neighbour Oregon State slogged through a torrential rainstorm to a 0-0 tie that featured eleven fumbles, five interceptions and four missed field goals.

Which astronaut, stuck on the launch pad before America's first crewed spaceflight, had to wet his spacesuit?

Alan Shepard had no other option: the flight was to last under 20 minutes, so nobody had thought to fit the Mercury capsule with anything to collect urine. Later suits got a device.

Which picture book by the Japanese author Taro Gomi tells children that every animal, from elephant to mouse, does it?

Everyone Poops was first published in Japan in 1977 and sets out to take the shame out of the subject by showing it as a natural part of life.

What was the name of ancient Rome's great drain, which carried the city's waste to the River Tiber?

The Cloaca Maxima began as an open channel and was only later covered over. Agrippa had it largely rebuilt in 33 BC.

Which toilet cleaner's TV mascot piloted a tiny boat around the inside of a toilet tank from 1968 to 1984?

Ty-D-Bol's nautical spokesman sailed through 16 years of commercials. The product itself is a coloured liquid cleanser released into the tank from an automatic dispenser.

Which inventor sold America's first commercial toilet paper in 1857, watermarking every sheet with his own name?

Joseph Gayetty sold his Medicated Paper in packs of flat sheets, laced with aloe and pitched as a remedy for haemorrhoids. It stayed on sale into the 1920s.

Which English locksmith, whose 'Challenge Lock' defied pickers for decades, patented an improved flush toilet in 1778?

Joseph Bramah took out the patent on a hinged flap that sealed the bottom of the bowl, then opened a London workshop to make toilets. He also invented the hydraulic press.

Which Staffordshire potter launched the Unitas, a free-standing one-piece earthenware toilet, in 1884?

Thomas Twyford followed the Unitas by building a new factory at Cliffe Vale in Stoke-on-Trent in 1887, sited beside both a canal and a railway.

Which 1968 Rolling Stones album was delayed for months when the label rejected its graffitied bathroom-wall cover?

Beggars Banquet was held up by the row over the front and back photographs, both the work of Barry Feinstein. It was also the band's first album with the producer Jimmy Miller.

Which group's 1966 debut album was pulled from stores because its cover showed a toilet beside their bathtub?

The Mamas & the Papas posed in the tub, and later pressings hid the bowl behind a scroll plugging California Dreamin'. The withdrawn originals became collector's items.

Before its 2019 theft, Maurizio Cattelan's working toilet America was installed for visitors to use at which museum?

The Guggenheim plumbed it into one of its own visitor lavatories, and its curator later offered it to the White House in place of a Van Gogh the president had asked to borrow.

What name is given to frozen lavatory waste that leaks from an airliner in flight and can fall to the ground?

Blue ice takes its colour from the liquid disinfectant mixed with the waste, and the leaked mixture freezes in the cold of high altitude.

On older trains whose toilets empty straight onto open track, passengers are asked not to flush while stopped where?

At a station the mess would be left right beside the platform, so some trains lock their toilets automatically as they pull in. American rail staff once had to lock them at every stop.

What name is given to the rock-like masses of cooking grease and wet wipes that block the drains beneath big cities?

Fatberg was the word used in 2008 for lumps of cooking fat that came ashore on Welsh beaches. A 130-tonne one found under Whitechapel in 2017 was partly turned into biodiesel.

Which simple habit is advised to cut down the invisible spray of droplets, the 'toilet plume', thrown up by a flush?

Closing the lid before flushing is the usual advice, though a 2024 study found that tiny viral particles can still escape through the gaps beneath it.

Toilets appeared around the 18th century BC in the Minoan palaces of which Mediterranean island?

Crete's Minoans built pedestal toilets that could be flushed with water, and examples have been excavated at the palace of Knossos.

In Tudor England, what name was given to the well-paid workers who dug out cesspits, and only at night?

Gong farmers at Hampton Court earned sixpence a day, a good living for the period, for work spent up to the knees, waist or even neck in filth.

In a Japanese urban legend, what is the name of the ghost girl said to haunt school toilets?

Hanako-san is summoned, the story goes, by knocking three times on the third stall of the girls' toilets and asking whether she is there.

In many Japanese homes, what special item waits at the toilet door to be worn only inside that room?

Slippers kept just for the toilet stop its 'unclean' floor mixing with the floors of the rest of the house. Forgetting to change back out of them is a classic visitor's mistake.

On which platform did Alexey Gerasimov release Skibidi Toilet, his 2023 series about singing toilets at war?

YouTube carried the 11-second first episode in February 2023, and the series became such a craze among Generation Alpha that commentators called it their first internet culture.

In which 1994 comedy does Lloyd lace Harry's coffee with laxatives before a date at a house with a broken toilet?

Dumb and Dumber launched the careers of the Farrelly brothers and showed that Jeff Daniels, until then known for drama, could be a gifted comic actor.

In which sitcom's episode The Stall does Elaine beg the woman in the next cubicle for toilet paper and get refused?

Seinfeld made the refuser Jerry's own girlfriend, Jane, unseen in the neighbouring cubicle after the two couples missed each other at the cinema.

Which 1989 action sequel traps a police sergeant on a toilet that is wired to a bomb?

Lethal Weapon 2 also smashes up a car full of Krugerrands and blows a hillside house off its stilts.