Nerve Endings Firing Away

It is cleaning day on Saturday in our household (err…apartment-hold) and we usually alternate between taking turns at the kitchen and the bathrooms. It was my turn this weekend at the bathrooms. Now, I pride myself at cleaning things so everything has to be done not only to perfection but also in a systematic fashion even if it is a ewwww task like cleaning your toilet although I don’t take anything Gandhian pride in doing so. Armed with Chlorox swipes and a roll of Bounty, I tackle the sink first, the bathtub next and reserve the last for the WC. Usually all the cleaning is done before we had our baths. I don’t know about you but I like to stand back and admire my handiwork so much that I reluctantly use my nicely cleaned and sparkling toilet.

The china bowl of the toilet is a masterpiece of a sculpture that any sanitation engineer could have come up with. Although each part of the system that goes into making a toilet work is purely function, you cannot help admire the aesthetic beauty of the toilet bowl. I bet if a future civilization unearthered our ruins, they would definitely think that our toilets were a sculpture garden. No other part of the house has smooth rounded and elegant curves as the bathroom does. Go ahead, take a look and tell me I’m wrong. Right from your flush tank to the nahni-trap (wonder why they hunted grandmothers), the entire system is a perfect example of ‘form follows function yet form kicks ass.’ The only innovations after that have been offering toilets in shocking pink or shaping the flush tank to look like an egg; none of which satisfies my design sensibilities.

Do you know that the toilet bowl is as close to perfection as design can get? It hasn’t been drastically improved ever since the current form was created sometime in the 1920-30s. Contrary to popular notion, Thomas Crapper didn’t invent the toilet. I know, the loss of that irony is incalculable. It was in fact, Thomas Twyford who built the first trap-less toilet in one-piece china design in 1885 [source]. This was revolutionary in a way that airplane parts were made from aluminum instead of wood. But it was only after Charles Neff and Robert Frame worked on the siphonic wash-down water closet that was perfected by Fred Adee. Subsequent developments have been in installing a vacuum-like toilet in airplanes or flush tanks equipped with “3.3 inch motor and a .2 horsepower pump” to jettison your crap into another universe. But the basic bowl shape has remained the same.

So next time, you decide to insult someone by saying, your mind is in the toilet, remember that you aren’t insulting them. Yup! this post was made thought of while seated on my sparkling white recently-cleaned perfectly-sculpted toilet bowl.