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I wonder how long it took for westerners to stop throwing their "night soil" out the window and start installing and using toilets. What always struck me as st
by Tharkun 10y ago
I wonder how long it took for westerners to stop throwing their "night soil" out the window and start installing and using toilets.
What always struck me as strange is that the Romans had and used public toilets, but afterwards Europe went back to shitting in a bucket and throwing it out the window. Puzzling.
- cmdrfred 10y agoIt has been said the knowledge was lost in the dark ages.
- chiph 10y agoAround 1854. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outb... Which about ten years later resulted in the Victorians building over 100 miles of sewers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_sewerage_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_sewerage_system
- CodeCube 10y agothat's only 163 years ago ... that is distressingly recent
- ralfd 10y agoNew York was even later. Paris though began to built sewers in the middle ages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_sewers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_sewers
- Pica_soO 10y agoYou know something, Jon Snow! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLpzHHbFrHY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLpzHHbFrHY
- 6d6b73 10y agoStill, buckets and "out the window" are better than "everywhere"
- sqeaky 10y agoWhere is "out the window"? People are going to be walking through that and it will flow downhill towards the water table and into well water. "out the window" is "everywhere" for most purposes.
- EGreg 10y agoBetter than shitting in people's pots and then loading them up with food and soup.
- eru 10y agoDid anyone ever do that?
- EGreg 10y agoVictorian English drank that shit https://www.google.com/amp/pictorial.jezebel.com/some-fun-nasty-dreadful-facts-about-victorian-shits-1733886210/amp https://www.google.com/amp/pictorial.jezebel.com/some-fun-na...
- anigbrowl 10y agoThat's an outstanding article and highly relevant, thx.
- bane 10y agoThere's a pretty good show on life during the era, one of the jobs they feature is people scowering the shit in the streets to find dog shit because it has different useful properties than horse shit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIjBywdLcgI&list=PL72jhKwankOjSzF6qg4IxI_uvxgZ-kq1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIjBywdLcgI&list=PL72jhKwank...
- bboreham 10y agoThis is one of the famous cases, in 1854: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_ou... See Edward Tufte's take on it too http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/tufte_snow.html http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/tufte_snow.html
- riphay 10y agoDon't mix up "Romans" and "Europeans." A better question is if the residents of Rome and other cities that had public facilities went back to the bucket or if they continued to use and maintain the public toilets. The rest of Europe likely never had public facilities to begin with, and the fall of the Empire might have delayed that technology transfer I suspect.
- dimitar 10y agoThere was a collapse of urban civilization. Rome's population went from around a million to about 50 000 people. Sanitation gets more important the higher the population density is.
- ziikutv 10y agoRecall that a lot of Roman Engineering was based off of what they learned as they colonizes/conquered. Meaning these sort of civilized solutions likely existed in other parts of Europe. I think they went back to using lower-level solutions because of the collapse as dimitar mentioned.
- Symbiote 10y agoThe Romans took their technology to the end of their empire. You can see Roman toilets and plumbing in Britain.
- hardlianotion 10y agoI seem to remember that Roman toilets were often in the kitchen...
- chimeracoder 10y ago> I seem to remember that Roman toilets were often in the kitchen... Not unusual for buildings in Europe or the US built around the turn of the last century either. These days, they're typically renovated so that there's a wall in between and the bathroom door leads off of an incredibly narrow kitchen, but a hundred years ago, those were in the same room. (And those were the ones who were lucky, because they actually had a private bathroom).
- EGreg 10y agoAnd a private kitchen!! https://www.google.com/amp/porch.com/advice/brief-history-kitchen/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/porch.com/advice/brief-history-ki...