Thomas Crapper Day
Yes its true. Today we celebrate the man behind the porcelain throne – Thomas Crapper.

Though credited by many as the inventor of the flush toilet, Crapper was not, but he did popularize the WC (water closet).

He was a shrewd businessman, salesman and self-publicist. In a time when bathroom fixtures were barely spoken of, he heavily promoted sanitary plumbing and pioneered the concept of the bathroom fittings showroom*

Crapper did hold numerous patents that helped modernize indoor plumbing. His company, Thomas Crapper & Co. Ltd., is still creating reproductions of his original designs.

BTW – About the word Crap …

…is old in the English language, one of a group of nouns applied to discarded cast offs, like “residue from renderings” (1490s) or … probably extended from Middle English crappe “chaff, or grain that has been trodden underfoot in a barn” (c. 1440), deriving ultimately from Late Latin crappa, “chaff.”

Yet another purported explanation is that Crapper’s flush toilet advertising was so widespread that “crapper” became a synonym for “toilet” and people simply assumed that he was the inventor.*

photo credit: public domain (via wikipedia)
*link: wikipedia – Thomas Crapper

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 at 12:15 am and is filed under Dailys, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.