[Rhodes22-list] Crapper correction

[R22RumRunner at aol.com]

Elle,
I have had a copy of "flushed with pride" in the bathroom for years. It  
makes for great reading.
 
Rummy
 
 
In a message dated 3/15/2008 3:24:17 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,  
watermusic38 at yahoo.com writes:

Every  time I teach my course in the history of technology, some student 
informs me  -- often with a salacious grin -- that the flush toilet was invented 
by a  19th-century Englishman named Thomas Crapper. Well, he didn't really 
invent  the flush toilet, but his name is indeed a cloud that hovers over its 
history.  
The flush toilet was actually invented in the 18th century. It was  an 
important landmark in the Industrial Revolution -- closely tied to the new  
technology of steam-power generation. In the mid 18th century, the important  concept 
of automatic liquid-level control arose -- both in steam boilers and  in the 
tanks of these new water closets. 
Thomas Crapper was a real  enough person. He was born in Yorkshire in 1837 -- 
long after the first flush  toilets came into use. His biography by Wallace 
Reyburn is titled Flushed with  Pride. It's all very tongue-in-cheek, but it's 
nevertheless quite complete.  Thomas Crapper apprenticed as a plumber when he 
was still a child. 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 1910. 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. 
This business points out something historians  have to guard against. Now and 
then a really good story comes along -- one so  well contrived that it should 
be true, even if it isn't. Who wants to admit  that no apple ever fell on 
Isaac Newton's head -- or that George Washington  didn't really chop down the 
cherry tree? What humorless pedant wants to insist  that Thomas Crapper didn't 
really invent the flush toilet! 
I'm John  Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we're interested in 
the way  inventive minds work. 


Wikipedia  also has a detailed history of the device.with similar  info.......


elle


We  can't change the angle of the wind....but we can adjust our sails.

1992  Rhodes 22   Recyc '06  "WaterMusic"   (Lady in  Red)

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