If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or email alerts. Thanks for visiting!
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.
by Patrix | on Sunday, February 25th, 2007 at 12:33 pm | 
Design, Technology . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
February 25th, 2007 at 2:24 pm reply
Illuminating ! But..errr…. the last line was too much information :-)
February 25th, 2007 at 3:11 pm reply
Bongo, what? you never had any illuminating thoughts on the pot?
February 25th, 2007 at 4:56 pm reply
Well ok I’ll give you that….one can argue that all great ideas are generated there ;-)
February 25th, 2007 at 5:09 pm reply
Priceless!
And I second Pat, you get the best ideas while purging the system. Wonder if that has anything to do with it.
February 25th, 2007 at 6:15 pm reply
It is quite simple actually. The more crap you get out of your system, the more it is likely to get original thoughts which otherwise was completely obscured by all that crap :)
February 26th, 2007 at 11:33 am reply
The cauldron of great thoughts…
February 26th, 2007 at 12:03 pm reply
Now is this a “potboiler”? :p
February 26th, 2007 at 12:13 pm reply
What is your take on the indian toilet bowl ?
February 26th, 2007 at 2:05 pm reply
Ashutosh, somehow the word ‘cauldron’ conjures up weird-colored boiling liquids :)
Twilight, boiling again? what’s with the ‘hot’ connection. Garam maal hai, maalum hai!
Bloghopper, damn! had a few puns thought of for Indian style pans. Maybe next time.
February 27th, 2007 at 12:59 pm reply
[...] that a toilet bowl could well be a piece of art owing to its “smooth rounded and elegant curves.” As a control engineer, I want to [...]