[Rhodes22-list] Crapper correction

[elle]

You haven't finished it yet?

;^)

elle


--- R22RumRunner at aol.com wrote:

> 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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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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