Guy who invented the toilet

According to Merriam-Webster , the word has roots in medieval Latin. Sanitary Engineers. Kat Eschner is a freelance science and culture journalist based in Toronto.

This portrait by an anonymous photographer shows the face of the man who popularized the flush toilet: Thomas Crapper. Wikimedia Commons Most of the things people say about Thomas Crapper are, well, crap. Actually, there is no known single inventor or individual invention of what we now know as the toilet, and all of its many synonyms. What we do have is a generally known and accepted historical timeline listing milestones along the way of the evolution of the toilet.

So there you have it. Not one individual is known to history as the inventor of the toilet; many have made their contribution to the single most significant product which helps promote and protect good health for people the world over.

Sources: 1. The History of Toilets, About. Now Hiring! See Openings Here. So…who invented the toilet? Thomas Crapper? In a few cities it was discovered that a flush toilet was in almost every house, attached to a sophisticated sewage system.

King Minos of Crete had the first flushing water closet recorded in history, over years ago. By the time he was 30, he'd set up his own business in London. He developed and manufactured sanitary facilities of all sorts until his death in He held many patents and was in fact an important and extremely inventive figure in creating modern water-closet systems.

But did he really give his name to these systems? Reyburn claims that many American soldiers in WW-I were off the farm -- that they'd never seen anything like the classy English water closets -- that they called them by their brand name, much as the English call a vacuum cleaner by the brand name Hoover. The problem with this explanation is that the word almost certainly derives from the 13th-century Anglo-Saxon word crappe. It means chaff or any other waste material.

The modern form of the word was certainly in use during Thomas Crapper's life. So not only was he not the inventor of the flush toilet -- it's also unlikely that he really gave it his name, either.

What he did do was to carry the technology forward.