Sir John Harington and the water closet

By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

An idea before its time: in 1596, Sir John Harington*, godson of Queen Elizabeth, published a learned, amusing work, A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax.

An explanation

• A. the cistern
• B. the little washer
• C. the waste pipe
• D. the seat board
• E. the pipe that comes from the cistern
• F. the screw
• G. the scallop shell to cover it when it is shut down
• H. the stool pot
• I. the stopple
• K. the current
• L. the sluice
• M. N. the vault into which it falls: always remember that the chamberlain at noon and at night empty it and leave it half a foot deep in fair water. And this being well done, and orderly kept, your worst privy may be as sweet as your best chamber.

The title is a pun on "a-jacques," or what is still called a "john": Harington proposed a perfectly good model of a flush toilet, as illustrated here, complete with cistern and sewage outflow.

But the connection between sanitation and disease was not well established, and people of the period were not deeply concerned with such niceties; it was not until the nineteenth century that Thomas Crapper gave his name to a more successful model.