Thomas Crapper
Introduction of the U-bend trap: 1880
Thomas Crapper
Birth: 1836
Death: 1910
Rank: Plumber, Innovator
A Yorkshire Plumber
Plumbers don’t always get the attention they deserve. Their job, centering on ensuring the maintenance of drainage, sewage, and portable water systems, is not the most appealing, but without them, the modern world would be a far different place! Plumbing goes back thousands of years, as man has always had a need to create a steady supply of water, safe enough to consume. When it comes to taking a poo, we naturally turn to the modern flush toilet, which, with but a turn of a knob, carries our manure out of sight and out of mind. But history is not often kind to those whose work revolves around managing systems that conveniently transport human waste from those who generate said waste. Thomas Crapper is such a man, and when your name has become a euphemism for ‘doing the deed,’ as it were, it tends to blur your actual accomplishments behind a constant barrage of low browed wit.
While still an adolescent boy, Thomas Crapper walked several hundred miles from his Yorkshire home to London, looking for work. The almost two hundred mile trip, for a twelve year searching for employment, unchaperoned, is abhorrent to modern ears, but, as Crapper’s biographer Wallace Reyburn noted, “taking the country as a whole, regular work began between the ages of seven and eight…” making Thomas a late bloomer to the workforce. Indeed, the Factory Act of 1833 set limits upon the age of child workers, yet even these, by today’s standards, would be considered outright child abuse. Children nine and up spent their childhoods and early adolescents amidst the swelter of British industry, and while the Factory Act sought to curb the exploitation of these infant employees by limiting their working hours, their shifts still equal the average eight hour day of the modern workforce. The Act declared it unlawful:
for any Person whatsoever to employ, keep, or allow to remain in any Factory or Mill... for a longer Time than Forty-eight Hours in any One Week, nor for a longer Time than Nine Hours in any One Day...any Child who shall not have completed his or her Eleventh Year of Age…
This went on to include twelve and thirteen-year-olds. Into such an environment, the twelve-year-old Crapper ventured, in 1848, and while Crapper “was presumably ‘a victim of the vicious child labor system,’” Reyburn asserts, “it appeared to do him no lasting harm.” Apprenticed to a plumber, Crapper was lucky to avoid the factories altogether, beginning a lifelong career in the world of plumbing.
As a plumber, Crapper was responsible for inventing new mechanisms, based upon older designs. His u-shaped trap, designed to retain water within the pipes better than its predecessor designs, effectively replaced the original s-shaped trap, developed by Alexander Cummings a century earlier. Crapper bettered preexisting designs, bringing about advances in toiletry and sewage systems, even though they were not his own original ideas. Still, his reputation and technical acumen ensured that newer developments were integrated into existing models on a large scale.
This included Albert Gilbin’s flushing system.
Before Gilbin, flushing had taken an enormous amount of water, leading to unnecessary waste. Gilbin’s design successfully introduced a cistern, “whereby an effective discharge can be obtained when the cistern is in any state between about half-full and full.” Gilbin, so the sources say, was one of Crapper’s employees, enabling Crapper to easily buy the patent and mass produce them in his own well-established toilets. By this time, Crapper’s brand was well known and respected in Britain. His toilets and urinals made public across the land, and in championing homeowners to buy toilets for their own private use, Crapper helped establish a trend that is common today. After all, a house or apartment without a bathroom is deemed to lack basic living necessities. This was not the case a hundred years ago. It was thanks to men like Thomas Crapper that our bathroom experiences are so convenient, especially by the standards of world history, and those of contemporary underdeveloped countries.
Thomas Crapper
Introduction of the U-bend trap: 1880
Thomas Crapper
Birth: 1836
Death: 1910
Rank: Plumber, Innovator
A Yorkshire Plumber
Plumbers don’t always get the attention they deserve. Their job, centering on ensuring the maintenance of drainage, sewage, and portable water systems, is not the most appealing, but without them, the modern world would be a far different place! Plumbing goes back thousands of years, as man has always had a need to create a steady supply of water, safe enough to consume. When it comes to taking a poo, we naturally turn to the modern flush toilet, which, with but a turn of a knob, carries our manure out of sight and out of mind. But history is not often kind to those whose work revolves around managing systems that conveniently transport human waste from those who generate said waste. Thomas Crapper is such a man, and when your name has become a euphemism for ‘doing the deed,’ as it were, it tends to blur your actual accomplishments behind a constant barrage of low browed wit.
While still an adolescent boy, Thomas Crapper walked several hundred miles from his Yorkshire home to London, looking for work. The almost two hundred mile trip, for a twelve year searching for employment, unchaperoned, is abhorrent to modern ears, but, as Crapper’s biographer Wallace Reyburn noted, “taking the country as a whole, regular work began between the ages of seven and eight…” making Thomas a late bloomer to the workforce. Indeed, the Factory Act of 1833 set limits upon the age of child workers, yet even these, by today’s standards, would be considered outright child abuse. Children nine and up spent their childhoods and early adolescents amidst the swelter of British industry, and while the Factory Act sought to curb the exploitation of these infant employees by limiting their working hours, their shifts still equal the average eight hour day of the modern workforce. The Act declared it unlawful:
for any Person whatsoever to employ, keep, or allow to remain in any Factory or Mill... for a longer Time than Forty-eight Hours in any One Week, nor for a longer Time than Nine Hours in any One Day...any Child who shall not have completed his or her Eleventh Year of Age…
This went on to include twelve and thirteen-year-olds. Into such an environment, the twelve-year-old Crapper ventured, in 1848, and while Crapper “was presumably ‘a victim of the vicious child labor system,’” Reyburn asserts, “it appeared to do him no lasting harm.” Apprenticed to a plumber, Crapper was lucky to avoid the factories altogether, beginning a lifelong career in the world of plumbing.
As a plumber, Crapper was responsible for inventing new mechanisms, based upon older designs. His u-shaped trap, designed to retain water within the pipes better than its predecessor designs, effectively replaced the original s-shaped trap, developed by Alexander Cummings a century earlier. Crapper bettered preexisting designs, bringing about advances in toiletry and sewage systems, even though they were not his own original ideas. Still, his reputation and technical acumen ensured that newer developments were integrated into existing models on a large scale.
This included Albert Gilbin’s flushing system.
Before Gilbin, flushing had taken an enormous amount of water, leading to unnecessary waste. Gilbin’s design successfully introduced a cistern, “whereby an effective discharge can be obtained when the cistern is in any state between about half-full and full.” Gilbin, so the sources say, was one of Crapper’s employees, enabling Crapper to easily buy the patent and mass produce them in his own well-established toilets. By this time, Crapper’s brand was well known and respected in Britain. His toilets and urinals made public across the land, and in championing homeowners to buy toilets for their own private use, Crapper helped establish a trend that is common today. After all, a house or apartment without a bathroom is deemed to lack basic living necessities. This was not the case a hundred years ago. It was thanks to men like Thomas Crapper that our bathroom experiences are so convenient, especially by the standards of world history, and those of contemporary underdeveloped countries.
Thomas Crapper
Introduction of the U-bend trap: 1880
Thomas Crapper
Birth: 1836
Death: 1910
Rank: Plumber, Innovator
A Yorkshire Plumber
Plumbers don’t always get the attention they deserve. Their job, centering on ensuring the maintenance of drainage, sewage, and portable water systems, is not the most appealing, but without them, the modern world would be a far different place! Plumbing goes back thousands of years, as man has always had a need to create a steady supply of water, safe enough to consume. When it comes to taking a poo, we naturally turn to the modern flush toilet, which, with but a turn of a knob, carries our manure out of sight and out of mind. But history is not often kind to those whose work revolves around managing systems that conveniently transport human waste from those who generate said waste. Thomas Crapper is such a man, and when your name has become a euphemism for ‘doing the deed,’ as it were, it tends to blur your actual accomplishments behind a constant barrage of low browed wit.
While still an adolescent boy, Thomas Crapper walked several hundred miles from his Yorkshire home to London, looking for work. The almost two hundred mile trip, for a twelve year searching for employment, unchaperoned, is abhorrent to modern ears, but, as Crapper’s biographer Wallace Reyburn noted, “taking the country as a whole, regular work began between the ages of seven and eight…” making Thomas a late bloomer to the workforce. Indeed, the Factory Act of 1833 set limits upon the age of child workers, yet even these, by today’s standards, would be considered outright child abuse. Children nine and up spent their childhoods and early adolescents amidst the swelter of British industry, and while the Factory Act sought to curb the exploitation of these infant employees by limiting their working hours, their shifts still equal the average eight hour day of the modern workforce. The Act declared it unlawful:
for any Person whatsoever to employ, keep, or allow to remain in any Factory or Mill... for a longer Time than Forty-eight Hours in any One Week, nor for a longer Time than Nine Hours in any One Day...any Child who shall not have completed his or her Eleventh Year of Age…
This went on to include twelve and thirteen-year-olds. Into such an environment, the twelve-year-old Crapper ventured, in 1848, and while Crapper “was presumably ‘a victim of the vicious child labor system,’” Reyburn asserts, “it appeared to do him no lasting harm.” Apprenticed to a plumber, Crapper was lucky to avoid the factories altogether, beginning a lifelong career in the world of plumbing.
As a plumber, Crapper was responsible for inventing new mechanisms, based upon older designs. His u-shaped trap, designed to retain water within the pipes better than its predecessor designs, effectively replaced the original s-shaped trap, developed by Alexander Cummings a century earlier. Crapper bettered preexisting designs, bringing about advances in toiletry and sewage systems, even though they were not his own original ideas. Still, his reputation and technical acumen ensured that newer developments were integrated into existing models on a large scale.
This included Albert Gilbin’s flushing system.
Before Gilbin, flushing had taken an enormous amount of water, leading to unnecessary waste. Gilbin’s design successfully introduced a cistern, “whereby an effective discharge can be obtained when the cistern is in any state between about half-full and full.” Gilbin, so the sources say, was one of Crapper’s employees, enabling Crapper to easily buy the patent and mass produce them in his own well-established toilets. By this time, Crapper’s brand was well known and respected in Britain. His toilets and urinals made public across the land, and in championing homeowners to buy toilets for their own private use, Crapper helped establish a trend that is common today. After all, a house or apartment without a bathroom is deemed to lack basic living necessities. This was not the case a hundred years ago. It was thanks to men like Thomas Crapper that our bathroom experiences are so convenient, especially by the standards of world history, and those of contemporary underdeveloped countries.
