The Thoughts The Come Unbidden come at the oddest times and in the oddest places. A recent encounter with a low-flush toilet got me to thinking about a lovely bit of engineering I found in Amsterdam in the apartment of a friend: the two-stage flush. Ingenious, really. Don’t have a lot to dispose of, then press the small button to release the water in the small chamber inside the tank. Been in there a while? Press the large button and both chambers inside the tank empty. Saves on water, certainly, and it’s just a neat idea. But this isn’t about flushing. No, it’s about something that has caused more problems than its inventors could ever have possibly imagined.<\/p>\n
I was moved to wonder the other day as I noticed that plastic hinge on the one on the toilet I normally use at the office was broken why, exactly, it’s necessary for a toilet to have a seat?<\/p>\n
The flush toilet is a staple in residences in urban areas in most industrialized countries. Chances are that even if you live in a place that doesn’t feature its very own toilet you can just wander down the hall and find one in the common bath (assuming, of course, that your neighbor hasn’t beaten you to it with the Sunday paper in hand). Wikipedia’s entry on the flush toilet<\/a> freely admits to being “anglocentric” in its chronology of invention. <\/p>\n Thomas Twyford is credited with inventing in 1885 the one-piece “china” (read porcelain) design that incorporated progress made by previous inventors (chiefly the S-trap invented by Alexander Cumminngs in 1775 which helps keep noxious gasses from the sewer pipe from backing up into the bathroom). While Wikipedia’s entry on toilets is fascinating, it tells me nothing about the toilet seat, the source of so much friction and so many jokes (indeed, the bathroom explosion where someone stumbles forth mussed and smoking with a toilet seat around his neck is nearly as hackneyed a device as the single tire that rolls forth from the car explosion, and the “up or down” debate still regularly appears in advice and etiquette columns).<\/p>\n Toiletology.com features an interesting history of the toilet<\/a> and a very interesting history of the Church Toilet Seat company, makers of the white, wooden core seat that is so common in the U.S. we don’t really see it any more, but it tells me nothing at all about who put the first toilet seat on a toilet. It does, though, link to an entry for The Porcelain God: A Social History of the Toilet<\/span> by Julie L. Horan, Deborah Frazier (Illustrator), the cover illustration<\/a> for which seems to indicate that the flush toilet didn’t always have that now-ubiquitous ring on top of the bowl.<\/p>\n The market for toilet seats is vast, vaster than I ever thought possible. There are toilet seats that come with lid art<\/a>, seats made out of solid oak<\/a>, soft seats<\/a>, seats with safety arms<\/a>, and seats for a kid<\/a> sized butt (and that’s all from one company). There are even seats specially designed to accommodate larger individuals<\/a> and clear plastic seats<\/a>.<\/p>\n Maybe it’s economics. Maybe the toilet seat manufacturing industry self-perpetuates. But with injection molding what it is, why not just size the rim of the bowl, shape it in such a way that the basic seat isn’t necessary? It would certainly solve a lot of cleaning problems and all of those seat up or seat down issues. Then the only thing left to argue about would be whether the toilet roll should go in the spindle over or under.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Thoughts The Come Unbidden come at the oddest times and in the oddest places. A recent encounter with a low-flush toilet got me to thinking about a lovely bit of engineering I found in Amsterdam in the apartment of a friend: the two-stage flush. Ingenious, really. Don’t have a lot to dispose of, then […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-330","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-thoughts","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}