The Man Behind The Throne -- Though Little Remembered, Thomas Crapper Made History

HISTORY MUST HAVE HELD its breath that day in 1884 at the Health Exhibition in London. One can imagine the inventor's subordinates gathered around, drained of emotion, with furrowed brows. The room crackles with tension. Only Thomas Crapper himself, brimming with confidence, chain-pull in hand and poised for the big test, seems ready to meet the challenge head-on.

Was there a countdown? We don't know. But we do know that Crapper pulled the chain and down went three wads of paper. Another pull of the chain and away went a sponge. Then four paper sheets stuck to the bowl with grease. And then, Mother of All Flushes, 10 apples.

It was mankind's greatest hygienic breakthrough, the high-water mark of plumbing history. But the true, behind-the-scenes story of the flush toilet has been tossed in history's garbage can. There was no Watson as there was for Bell, no flash in the New Mexico desert that ushered in the Atomic Age, no invitation to the White House as there had been for Edison.

Even more tragically, Thomas Crapper has been robbed of his good name. He has become the butt of jokes. His place in posterity hangs by the barest of threads. It is time to make Thomas Crapper a household name as he deserves.

CONSIDER, FIRST, THE magnitude of his achievement.

The flush toilet, or water closet as it is called in Crapper's homeland, changed the course of history by allowing society to live with itself. It is more than valves and arms and floats that hiss and gurgle - the flush toilet is the very symbol of modern civilization. It has done more for public health than all the doctors since Hippocrates. Life without the water closet is, for most of us, a horror beyond imagination - so unspeakable and unacceptable that we cannot conjure up the prospect.

Over the years, many alternatives have been tried: compost toilets that rely on time and heat to evaporate the moisture and destroy the pathogens in the sewage, oil-flushed toilets that use recyclable mineral oil, bio-electric toilets that use heat and circulating air, incinerating toilets that reduce waste to ash, biological toilets that use enzymes to dissolve wastes, and earth closets that seal wastes in the soil.

But the old Thomas Crapper WC is still the best. Crapper's genius was a mechanism that allowed water to flush the toilet only when necessary. Lift off the lid of your own right now, and you'll see the basic mechanism: a float, a metal arm and a siphonic action to empty the reservoir. In short, he invented the valve that made flushing practical. In more than a century, neither the mechanical concept nor the basic shape of the Crapper invention has changed.

Not only is the flush toilet the most warmly received invention in human history, but it also is one of our few purely benevolent technological developments. In a world of nuclear weapons, pesticides and indestructible plastics, the Crapper WC is a breath of fresh air.

HERE NOW, TO SET the record straight, is the real story of the man who made it all possible. Thomas Crapper, plumber extraordinaire, inventor of the Valveless Water-Waste Preventer, founder of Thomas Crapper & Co., Sanitary Specialties, of Chelsea, London., Est. 1848.

The best documentation is "Flushed With Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper" by Wallace Reyburn (Prentice Hall, 1971), a slim, useful volume, originally published in England, amply illustrated with photographs of Crapper and his products.

According to Reyburn, Crapper was born in Yorkshire in 1837, the same year Victoria ascended the throne. He came to London at the age of 11 and found work as a plumber's helper. In 1861 he started his own business as a sanitary engineer. London had just installed a sewer system, and Crapper and other plumbers were inundated with work.

In these days, toilets were flushed by a cistern, and often water ran ceaselessly through the toilet. Authorities feared that this could dry up water supplies. Many plumbers were working on a more water-efficient toilet, but it was Thomas Crapper who perfected the flush toilet with "Crapper's Valveless Water-Waste Preventer. One Moveable Part Only. Certain Flush with Easy Pull. Will Flush When Only Two Thirds Full."

There were flush toilets before Crapper came along, but none of them worked very well. Once word of Crapper's triumph leaked out, every household in London wanted one.

Never before or since has necessity so mothered an invention.

THOMAS CRAPPER SOLVED a problem that had plagued mankind right from the beginning. Indeed, the idea of a separate room for the disposal of bodily wastes goes back at least 10,000 years to the island of Orkney off Scotland. And in 2,000 B.C. in the palace of King Minos, at Knossos, on Crete, there was a splendid bathroom and latrine with a reservoir for flushing water. But there things stood for the next 38 centuries or so.

There were public latrines in Rome that had a long stick with a sponge tied to one end that was immersed in a bucket of water. The latrine user would cleanse his person with the sponge and return it to the bucket. As you might suspect, there was a lot of plague and famine, but the ancients believed they were the result of divine retribution rather than a mere plumbing problem.

In the Middle Ages, we come across the first recorded instance of English euphemism in the matter of waste disposal. The privy came to be called the "garderobe," which actually was a kind of wardrobe. It's the same thinking that in modern times led to the British calling this area the "cloakroom."

Many castles kept the garderobes in small vaulted chambers within the walls (and conveniently near the banquet room); they discharged through the wall into the moat below - proving conclusively that medieval moats were not just defensive, but offensive as well.

There were two principal forms of privies in these days - the chamber pot and the close stool.

The chamber pot under the bed was an indispensable feature of homes in colder climates because it removed the need for a freezing nocturnal trip to the outdoor privy. Chamber pots became very elaborate and often had likenesses of enemies of the people at the bottom. In 19th-century England, some carried a portrait of Napoleon in the target area. Others came with poetry: "Use me well and keep me clean/And I'll not tell what I have seen."

Privies in the form of a box with a lid were called "close stools." During this period, the British had an exclamation, "gardyloo!" - roughly the equivalent of the golfer's "fore!" "Gardyloo!" was a corruption of the French, garde l'eau, "watch out for the water." In his "English Social History," G.M. Trevelyan explains how it came about: "Far overhead the windows opened, five, six or 10 stories in the air, and the close stools . . . discharged the collected filth of the past 24 hours into the street. It was good manners for those above to cry `Gardy-loo!' before throwing. The returning roysterer cried back, `Haud yer han,' and ran with humped shoulders, lucky if his vast and expensive full-bottomed wig was not put out of action by a cataract of filth."

Close stools in France were called "necessary chairs." Louis XIV had 264 of them scattered through Versailles, each one fit for a king. They were stool-like, and they played some official role at court. Kings (but not queens) treated the necessary chair as a throne at which audiences could be granted, and it was from this position that Louis announced his plans to marry Madame de Maintyenon.

(Fast forward to the 1960s, and we learn from biographer Rogert Caro that while he was in the White House, Lyndon Johnson, while thus enthroned, granted similar audiences to key subordinates, including Cabinet members.)

But back to 14th century, when latrines emptied directly into rivers and caused the Black Death, which wiped out between a third and half of the total population of England. During the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci designed buildings with spiral staircases, to eliminate the temptation for residents to soil landings.

In the 19th century, flush toilets came on the scene but they were inefficient. Each was plagued by improper valves that kept sewer gases in the house or resulted in backups. And so the problems continued. There were cholera epidemics around the middle of the 19th century that claimed 30,000 lives in London alone. For several especially sultry days in 1859, Parliament was suspended while the Thames reeked and seethed in the sun.

ABOUT 1870 THE British Board of Trade put the word out that it needed a more efficient flush toilet. Fourteen years later, Crapper came up with the best solution. Afterward, he was commissioned to install the bathrooms at Edward VII's new country home at Sandringham, and his firm was granted three other royal warrants.

Thomas Crapper died on Jan. 17, 1910. If ever a man left the world a better place than he found it, it was he.

Interestingly, the word (BEGIN ITALICS) crapper (END) is better known in the United States than in England. Thomas Crapper did a lot of installations for the British military, and when American troops went to England during World War I, they noticed that the toilets were manufactured by "T. Crapper, Chelsea." Probably the only reason British troops didn't use the word was that the sight of the name Crapper was already a familiar one to them.

For all its richness, the English language lacks a single noneuphemistic word for Thomas Crapper's invention. Toilet? That's from the French (BEGIN ITALICS) toilette, (END) and it means dressing room. Other common terms for this place are john, potty, restroom, lavatory, bathroom and head. The British call it a WC or a loo (probably from the old warning, "Gardyloo!").

Throughout much of the world, there is a general squeamishness about the place that Thomas Crapper made habitable. Architects are taught to hide the bathroom because people do not like to be seen emerging from it, and in general, most people say as little as possible about it - which may help explain the decline of the Crapper name.

There are some signs that the long neglect of Thomas Crapper is coming to an end. In 1978, the Greater London Council considered placing a historic plaque on his original plumbing shop, but the area on King's Road in Chelsea where he worked was bombed in World War II and then redeveloped, and it was impossible to find the Crapper workshop. In 1988, British officials began a drive to upgrade public toilets by offering a prize for the most sanitary loo in all of England - The Thomas Crapper Award. In America, V.E. Mauck Plumbing Supplies in Martinsburg, W. Va., has celebrated Thomas Crapper Day annually since 1983 with special sales and promotions on Jan. 17 - the anniversary of his death.

But these are piddling gestures given the magnitude of the man. Today, only one in five American patents is issued to individuals; the rest go to corporations. The rugged, seat-of-the-pants individual inventor like Thomas Crapper, toiling away in his garage, is a thing of the past. The only thing men build today are their bodies or cases for the defense. Crapper's name belongs with those of Wright, Morse, Fulton, Marconi, Edison - giants of men who built better mousetraps and had the world beat paths to their doors.

What other invention ever had more of a path beat to its door?

Ironically, his name can be found in Westminster Abbey among the tombstones of England's greatest figures; the inscription "Thos. Crapper, Sanitary Engineer, Chelsea" is on a manhole cover.

It's time for Thomas Crapper to take a seat in the National Plumbers Hall of Fame in Skokie, Ill., beside such plumbing legends as Walter Kohler, R.T. Crane and John Hammes (inventor of the garbage disposal). Indeed, let's rename it the Thomas Crapper Hall of Fame. Time to call to account those historians who have credited his work to that four-flusher, John Harington.

But nothing would honor the inventor of mankind's greatest convenience more than to incorporate his name into the language, lower case and without embarrassment, as we've already done for Rudolf Diesel, James Watt, Lord Chesterfield, the Earl of Davenport, John B. Stetson, Jules Leotard, Henry Shrapnel, Sylvester Graham, Charles Cunningham Boycott, William Russell Frisbie, the Earl of Sandwich, Amelia Jenks Bloomer . . .

The Crapper name must live on!

William Ecenbarger, a freelance writer, lives in Pennsylvania. Christine E. Cox is a Seattle Times news artist.