The Curious History of Your Home · NOISER

Toilets

July 29, 2024·34 min·3 clips

Archaeologists discovered Mohenjo-daro had a toilet in nearly every house, with a complex sewer system, over 4,500 years ago.

The episode opens with a tour of Mohenjo-daro, an Indus Valley city built around 2500 BC and rediscovered in the 1920s, which featured indoor toilets connected by clay pipes to a city-wide sewer system. Ruth Goodman notes that private lavatories were common to many households, not just the elite, and that the city had one well per three households. The host explains the fundamental problem of settled communities: once people stop moving, waste accumulates unless actively removed. Early solutions included spreading waste on fields as fertiliser and building sewers to discharge into rivers. Skara Brae in Orkney had a linked indoor lavatory-and-sewer system from around 3100 BC, and Minoan Crete used rainwater collected on palace rooftops to flush stone-seat toilets. Roman communal toilets called forikai were marble-benched rooms flushed by waste water from baths, where toilet use was a social activity. Romans cleaned themselves with a shared sponge-on-a-stick called a tesorium rinsed in vinegar, or with flat ceramic discs. Wealthy Romans had private latrines at home, while one of Seneca's letters records an enslaved gladiator using a latrine as the only private space to commit suicide. The Han dynasty Chinese used pigsty toilets, where a privy hut suspended over a pig enclosure allowed pigs to consume human waste as food, producing fertiliser in return. Ceramic models of pigsty toilets were made as grave goods. Buddhist monks at Abahagiri Monastery in Sri Lanka used multi-layer rock-carved urinals with sand, lime, and charcoal filtration systems. In medieval Europe, garderobe privies in castles discharged via chutes into moats, while cesspits were periodically emptied by workers called gong farmers or night soil men. In 1184, the wooden floor of an archbishop's palace in Erfurt gave way during Henry VI's assembly, dropping the assembled nobles into the cesspit below and drowning many of them. Thomas Brightfield introduced a cistern-fed flush toilet in England in 1449, and Sir John Harrington improved it for Queen Elizabeth I in 1596. Alexander Cumming's 1775 S-bend patent prevented sewer gases from entering homes. The 1858 Great Stink brought raw sewage from the Thames into Parliament, prompting Benjamin Disraeli to introduce an emergency bill and appoint Joseph Bazalgette to build over 1,000 miles of new sewers. Cholera, incorrectly attributed to miasmas at the time, was a waterborne disease spread through sewage contaminating drinking water, as demonstrated by Dr John Snow's 1854 Broad Street investigation. Bazalgette's solution mirrored Mohenjo-daro's ancient approach. The episode ends with a comparison of dual-flush modern toilets and Japanese smart toilets with multi-function remote controls.

As heard by us

A sharply observed history of how humans turned sanitation into technology.

This episode traces sanitation as ordinary infrastructure with outsized consequences. It starts in Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley, where a highly complex urban settlement took shape around 2500 BC and was later forgotten until the 1920s, then moves to Roman drainage, which…

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You want the hidden history behind the room everyone uses but nobody celebrates, from Mohenjo-daro to today's smartest flushers.

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