Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into History

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  The greatest number of fatalities that day was at a Public Works building, where municipal employees were just having lunch. The molasses slammed into the building, shattering it and throwing fragments 150 feet in the air. Another city building was similarly torn from its foundations; the tenement apartments on the upper floors collapsed into kindling.

  MOLASSES SWALLOWS PEOPLE

  It was literally a tidal wave, swallowing dozens of people, rolling and crushing them under its brown mass. Dozens were critically injured by the debris picked up and carried by the sticky mess, while others were simply crushed to death by the heavy molasses.

  THE RESCUE

  Finally, the molasses began to cool and congeal. The tidal wave slowed, then stopped. The first group of rescuers arrived: sailors from the harbor patrol ship Nantucket. They plunged into the mess and started pulling survivors out. Right behind them were the local boys in blue, followed by soldiers from a nearby army base. The Red Cross arrived next, in their crisp white uniforms, but soon you couldn’t tell them apart: everyone was covered with the same brown goo.

  PUMPING IRONY

  The final toll was 21 people dead, 150 injured. The clean-up crew pumped sea water from the harbor via hoses. But the molasses and saltwater didn’t mix, and soon the whole area was buried under brown foam. It took months before the streets of Boston were their old familiar dirty gray again. How could anything as harmless—and sweet—as molasses cause such devastation?

  The mummy of Ramses II, thought to be the pharaoh in Exodus, is in the British Museum.

  WHAT’S SO BIG ABOUT WAGNER?

  * * *

  Everything, actually. His operas. His influence. His sins. His ego.

  His operas were huge in every way. We’ve all seen the schtick: the huge blonde lady with the braids, wearing breastplates and a helmet, squalling high Cs that could cause sonic booms in the next county. There’s some truth to it.

  HIS STYLE

  Richard Wagner wanted his music to be big, loud, and long. And voices that can outshout a hundred-piece orchestra—and don’t go hoarse after three or four hours—don’t come from undersized lungs.

  In Wagner’s operas, music flows in an endless stream of melody; no separate musical numbers, no breaks for applause, just continuous “music drama.”

  HIS IMPACT

  Wagner’s fans found it thrilling; his enemies called it boring. Other composers hotly denied being influenced by him—and started writing their operas more and more like his anyway.

  HIS OPUS

  Wagner chose towering, epic stories for his operas. His biggest work was The Ring of the Nibelung, finished in 1874. It’s a series of four operas, three of which last over four hours each. (Here’s a hint: never take your seat at a Wagner opera without hitting the john first.)

  HIS SHOWMANSHIP

  Nowadays any Hollywood director with a fat special-effects budget could show you mermaids singing underwater, warrior women riding winged horses, or a magic helmet that could change a man into any kind of animal right before your eyes. Wagner packed all of these and much more into The Ring of the Nibelung, and he expected it to look realistic, live and on stage. Practical guy, huh?

  Teddy Roosevelt’s “cavalry charge” up San Juan Hill was done on foot.

  HIS EXTRAVAGANCE

  The story? Nothing much. Only a gargantuan power struggle between gods and men, a few giants, dwarfs, and fire-breathing dragons; all of them scheming to get their hands on a magic ring that gives its wearer the power to run the world. (If this reminds you of Lord of the Rings, it’s because the two stories are based on a lot of the same Norse myths. Wagner was the J.R.R. Tolkien of his time—including the huge cult following.)

  HIS SELF-INDULGENCE

  Wagner may have written on noble themes, but in real life he was as selfish as they come. He’d flatter you to your face if he needed a favor, and then curse you to your friends as soon as you’d left the room. When he didn’t have enough money to pay the rent, he’d borrow heavily from friends—and then blow it all on the fancy silk clothes he liked to wear. He’d run up huge bills and then skip town and cross the border to avoid debtor’s prison. Then he’d do it all again in a new country.

  HIS WIFE

  His wife, the long-suffering Minna, stood by him through years of poverty and disgrace, and he rewarded her by constantly having affairs with other women. When the money finally began to roll in, he abandoned Minna to run off with Cosima von Bülow, who was the daughter of composer Franz Liszt and the wife of one of his best friends. (He eventually married her after Minna’s death.)

  HIS BIG BREAK

  In 1864 Ludwig II became King of Bavaria at the ripe old age of 18. Ludwig was fabulously wealthy, something of a lunatic, and a huge fan of Wagner’s music. Wagner, now in his fifties, sweet-talked Ludwig into paying off his creditors (the line stretched halfway across Europe) and bankrolling the construction of a new theater in Bayreuth, Germany, specially designed for—what else?—presenting Wagner’s own operas.

  As a result of Ludwig’s patronage, Wagner lived on Easy Street for the rest of his life. Who says nice guys finish last? Because in this case, they’re right.

  Ho Chi Minh once worked as a photo retoucher in Paris.

  DIRTY SECRETS IN THE HISTORY OF HYGIENE (Part I): MAN ON THE CAN

  * * *

  Over the centuries, man has experimented with different solutions to one of life’s stickiest problems—the sanitary elimination of human waste. We’ve unearthed a few facts you won’t find in most history books.

  While excavating an early Egyptian house, archaeologists found a toilet seat that conformed perfectly to a pair of buttocks. The seat was made of limestone, providing cooling relief in the hot Egyptian climate. It sounded comfy—we wanted to know more.

  “WHAT’S NEW, MAXIMUS?”

  To the Romans, going to the bathroom was a social occasion. And they brought their customs to the far corners of their Empire. In North Africa, for example, a large privy dating from ancient Rome had 25 seats arranged around three sides of a room. There was no privacy: only a carved dolphin separated each seat.

  MEANWHILE, BACK HOME

  After using the public latrines, the citizen of Rome looked for the bucket, which held salt water and a long stick with a sponge attached to one end. The user rubbed his posterior with the sponge and then returned it to the water bucket for the next patron’s use. Careless use of this device has been said to be the origin of the expression “getting the wrong end of the stick.” (True!)

  RENDER UNTO CAESAR. . .

  Public urinals were a source of income for Emperor Vespasian, who had the the urine collected; the ammonia in it was used to make fabric dyes.

  TAKE ME TO THE RIVER

  Romans developed the art of plumbing and built their sewer system to last. The Cloaca Maxima (“big sewer”), which connected the Forum to the Tiber River, is still in use today, 2,500 years later.

  Catherine the Great’s court held transvestite balls to evade the prohibition on women drinking.

  AFTER THE FALL

  For a thousand years after the decline and fall of Rome, Europe was a sanitation disaster. The only indoor plumbing consisted of chamber pots, portable containers that were kept under beds or at least, hopefully, in the corner. Human waste was thrown from chamber pots directly onto the streets or into rivers. Diseases borne by fecal matter flourished.

  GET THAT S—OUT OF HERE!

  Things have got to be bad when even kings notice. England’s Richard II issued a proclamation in 1388 that prohibited the throwing of waste matter into ditches, rivers, or waters of any kind. The perpetrator was either to remove the offending material or pay a fine of 20 English pounds. The practice continued, so by the 1500s, King Henry VIII, describing a trip to Cambridge, wrote that both the main roads and the lanes were lined with large mounds of filth. In London, the public latrines were built over the Thames, the same river that provided drinking water.

  “HEADS UP
,” IN FRENCH

  The British slang word for toilet, the “loo,” comes from a French custom of the Middle Ages. When tossing the contents of their chamber pots into the streets, the French very considerately shouted a warning to any luckless passersby, “Gardez l’eau” (pronounced LOO) which meant “Watch out for the water!”

  WHY NO ONE SWAM THE CASTLE MOAT

  Castles had bathrooms, privies really, built into bays that jutted out from the castle walls. The more sophisticated kind drained into stone channels or underground pits. The primitive ones simply had holes in the bottoms of the bay, so the waste fell directly into the moat or river below. The more deluxe town houses also had privy bays that hung over the streets.

  THEY LAUGHED WHEN I SAT DOWN

  Sir John Harington invented the first flush toilet in 1596. Harington was a godson of Queen Elizabeth I and presented the queen with his invention for Her Majesty’s personal use. The device was mocked and never caught on. The first patent for a flush toilet was taken out in 1755 by Alexander Cummings of London. But most people continued to use chamber pots.

  The father of U.K. Prime Minister John Major was a trapeze artist.

  CHAMBER POTS OF THE RICH AND FAMOUS

  Henry VIII’s privy chamber housed a “close stool,” that is, a chair that enclosed the royal chamber pot. It was padded in black velvet trimmed with ribbons, fringes, and quilting, all tacked on with 2,000 gilt nails. His daughter, Elizabeth I, preferred red velvet, and even had a portable loo that she took with her on trips.

  THOSE ZANY VICTORIANS!

  Some Victorian chamber pots played a tune when a hidden drawer in the commode was opened. Others had portraits of political figures such as Napoleon or Benjamin Franklin painted in the center, so you could show them what you thought of them. One popular model had a large eye with the words, “Use me well and keep me clean and I’ll not tell what I have seen.”

  THE AMERICAN SCENE

  One of Thomas Jefferson’s many inventions was an indoor privy. Using a system of pulleys, servants hauled away President Jefferson’s chamber pots from an “earth closet,” a seat with a hole over a wooden box that was lined with a pan of wood ashes.

  The poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, may have been the first American to have a flush toilet. He had it installed in 1840, and proudly showed it off to his guests.

  ENTER THOMAS CRAPPER

  Forever altering the family name, in 1872 Thomas Crapper developed a new type of flushing toilet. For his achievement, Crapper became the royal plumber to Queen Victoria’s son Edward, Prince of Wales.

  HAND ME THAT SEARS CATALOG!

  By the way, that other modern essential, toilet paper, wasn’t invented until 1857.

  Gregory Pincus changed the world. He invented the first birth control pill.

  BEING A NOSY PARKER

  * * *

  The original Nosy Parker was a 16th century Archbishop of Canterbury with a lengthy proboscis both literally and otherwise.

  In 1504 Henry VII was king of a still firmly Catholic England. That same year, a man named William Parker, who worked as a “calenderer of stuffs” (he had to smooth out cotton and wool using a tool called a calender), was about to become a dad.

  The child, once born—and you had be strong to survive your arrival in 1504—was destined for a more prominent, and some would say glamorous, profession than his pop.

  HE-E-E-RE’S NOSY!

  Matthew Parker turned out to be an exceptionally bright lad. He had a long thin face and a long pointed nose to match. No prizes for guessing what they called him at school. At St Mary’s Hostel Cambridge and then at the famous Corpus Christi College, he was nicknamed “Nosy.” In fact, the name stuck permanently. They called him Nosy Parker for the rest of his life and it didn’t stop when he died. Whenever you or I wail, “You Nosy Parker” at someone we are remembering Matthew and his proboscis.

  REGARDING HENRY VIII

  Nosy lived through the reigns of no fewer than six monarchs: Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Lady Jane Grey (who reigned for 9 days at age 15), Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

  Nosy was ordained as a priest in 1527 and in 1537 was appointed chaplain to the hapless, and soon to be headless, Anne Boleyn, the second of Henry VIII’s six wives. Once Anne was done away with, Nosy became Master of his alma mater, Corpus Christi College. Nosy loved Cambridge and fought like a dog when Henry VIII, having separated England from the Pope and the Catholic Church, tried to break up the old colleges mainly in the interest of smashing up a perceived power base and running away with the spoils.

  Sherlock Holmes mystery writer Arthur Conan Doyle was an opthalmologist.

  UNDER MARY, THEN ELIZABETH

  Bloody Mary (who gave her name to the cocktail) was bad news for Nosy when she became the aggressively Catholic and angry queen in 1553. She quickly took away all of Nosy’s privileges because he wasn’t a Catholic. Not wanting to be thrown into the Tower to be tortured—or worse—Nosy wisely lived in hiding for the five years of Mary’s reign.

  But it was different once Mary was succeeded by the Virgin Queen (for whom the state of Virginia was named—a bit more dignified than being remembered for a drink made of vodka and tomato juice). She brought Protestantism and calm to the throne, at least on the surface. Old Nosy promptly came out of his hidey-hole and Elizabeth asked him to be her Archbishop of Canterbury.

  LIVING UP TO HIS NAME

  It was then that he had to get nosy by nature as well as by name. Elizabeth wanted him to build an Anglican party that would be a middle way between the fiercely Protestant killjoy Puritans on the one hand and the emotional, dangerous Catholics on the other.

  Some task. Soon his agents were nosing into what he regarded as obnoxious Puritan practices. You could say he presided over a sort of Tudor anti-Puritan thought police. Corrupted by power, he unashamedly used it to get what he wanted.

  Needless to say, he wasn’t much loved. And 73 years after his death in 1575, when the Puritans under Oliver Cromwell were beginning to get the upper hand, poor old Nosy’s remains were dug out of their resting place in the private chapel at Lambeth Palace and buried ignominiously and gleefully under a dung hill. That, presumably, was to show him just what they thought of him in case the old chap happened to be nosily looking down from heaven—or sneaking a peek up from the other place.

  BUT NOSY LIVES ON

  Nosy Parker left more to us than a convenient way to tell people to mind their own business. He also left lasting legacies in his beloved Cambridge. Besides his contributions to his alma mater and a road called University Street that he had built, there’s a large, square, grassy area of common land near the city center known to this day as Parker’s Piece.

  We get the abbreviation “lb.” from the Latin word for pound: “libra.”

  WHEREWORDS: A QUIZ (The Bathroom)

  * * *

  Let’s take a quick trip down the hall and to the left. Where did all these bathroom sundries come from? Choose the best answer, then check it against our answers on the next page And don’t forget to wash your hands when you’re done.

  1. ASPIRIN:

  a. It was originally taken to ease breathing or “aspiration.”

  b. From the willow tree, whose Latin genus is “spirea.”

  c. First box was labeled A. S. Pirin, for the chemist inventor.

  2. LAXATIVE

  a. A former trademarked brand name from “reLAX AcTIVE.”

  b. Transliteration of “luxative,” a castor oil from Luxembourg.

  c. From Latin “laxus,” or “loose.”

  3. WITCH HAZEL

  a. Made from witch hazel plant.

  b. Named after a Salem witch.

  c. It was the original trademark for a brand of astringent.

  4. IBUPROFEN

  a. From its chemical name, “isobutylphenylpropionic acid.”

  b. Developed for the International Ballet Union in Germany: it was “IBU-proven.”


  c. From Swedish “ibu profen” for “no profit,” because the inventor forfeited the patent.

  5. SOAP

  a. The Middle English “sope,” meaning “to trickle or run out.”

  b. After Cheops’ sister Shoap, who bathed daily in 999 B.C.

  c. A recipe: it stands for Salt, Oil, Alkali, and Potash.

  6. SHAMPOO

  a. Nonsense name of a brand of soap used to wash dogs.

  b. From the Hindu “champo,” meaning “to massage.”

  c. From the French “champ eau,” meaning “water land.”

  7. COLOGNE

  a. First extracted from orchid flowers of the genus Colognus.

  b. Italian plural of “cologna,” the word for “bouquet.”