The Long History of a Common Object

Our life has turned great comforts into commonplace things: electric light, in-house plumbing, gas stoves… our homes are heated, filled with light, and clean, as they have never been in any preceding historical period; in the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, but even in times far closer to ours, not even kings’ palaces held such a level of comfort. We must not forget, though, that among many inventions that could only raise the comfort in our homes after some exceptional scientific discovery (think of electricity) … there is one that is extremely simple in itself, and perhaps even a tad embarrassing, but that seriously revolutionized, on its return after thousands of years of being lost, the house life of people everywhere and their hygienic conditions, so that it is considered, today, an utterly commonplace item… the one we call, with an acronym, the WC.

If we actually read the history of this object, perhaps with a pinch of humor, we truly discover unexpected facts. It could be amazing, for example, to learn that we have archaeological traces of WCs similar to ours, with a disposal system linked to an ample sewer complex, in the extremely ancient times of the Valley of Indus civilization – that is, more than four thousand years ago! And this object remains in use for thousands of years: we find more traces of it in Knossos, eight centuries later, and it remains a presence in select Roman houses as well, for more than a thousand years – until, like so many other technologies, sciences, and inventions, it completely disappears from the Western world with the fall of the Roman Empire.

And a long absence it will be, with the hygienic consequences we can all imagine, because besides a prototype installed in 1596 in Queen Elizabeth I of England’s palace (by the way, for what we know, the queen opted never to use it, as she found it to be too noisy) we need to wait for the last years of 1700 for WCs boasting a waste disposal system similar to that lost so many centuries before, and it is no earlier than the half of 1800 for the first common-use models to be exhibited at the Crystal Palace (and go on to become England’s first public WCs, with a fee of one penny for use.) But from that moment on, a continuous proliferation of ideas, improvement and projects flowers… ending in implementations which even boast attention to the environment, such as the development, in the 80’s, of models with a dual-power flushing system , which allows for average water consumptions savings of up to 67% per household, calculated on an annual basis.

But here is when the narrators of this story, ToiToi, a specialized Company in the field, make a pause. Because, they remark, just mentioning house WCs (after all, the very acronym we use, WC, stands for Water Closet, an euphemistic and quite British way of putting it) no longer covers the entire topic. Tens of structures nowadays, such as Building sites and Trade Shows, together with particular events (think of great concerts, sports events, or local fairs and popular gatherings, or even emergencies such as earthquakes and avalanches, which force the populace into temporary shelters), need hygienic systems to be available not in the comfort of a house, but in the middle of nowhere, often with no connection of any kind to the sewer system. And this is why Companies such as ToiToi build completely autonomous WC systems, which combine high standards of hygiene, safety and ease of use, and perfectly match the needs we describe above, replicating in any environment that same comfort we’ve enjoyed in our homes… since four thousand years ago!