Vsauce! Kevin here.
Hang on a second.
Ah, man. Ah, now I have to pee.
Wait.
Why do we pee and poop in clean water?
I did disinfect the bowl and refill it because the toilet could contain harmful bacteria -
but the water is fine.
So how did artificial rivers flowing in and out of a tiny artificial pond
become the most common way to remove waste? And how does an English poet’s attempt to
sweeten air and an Austrian holocaust survivor's dirt toilet factor into what a British Medical
Journal poll revealed to be the most important health problem of the last 150 years?
Poop.
Humans can either poop in the ground and cover it with dirt or poop in water and walk away.
We’ve pooped in water by building toilets over canals like the Romans in 4th century
BC, building toilets on bridges like the London Bridge privies in 1382, or using a hanging
toilet, which is basically a chair at the end of a dock with a hole in it. Water is
the quickest, easiest way to get poop out of sight and more importantly to our ancestors,
out of smell.
For much of history, bad smells weren’t just unpleasant - they were thought to carry
illness. Before the discovery of germs in 1880, the miasma theory was dominant -- it
held that sickness like Cholera, which is acquired by drinking water contaminated with
feces, was actually caused by breathing smelly, poison air. The word malaria, a disease commonly
transmitted by mosquitos, comes from the Italian “mala aria” meaning “bad air.”
The bad air from dead bodies was thought to spread the plague. The Black Death killed
almost a third of Europe in the 14th century. 1348’s Ordinances For Sanitation In A Time
Mortality in Pistoia set strict rules on sealing dead bodies in coffins and establishing the
specific depth of their burial. During England's Great Plague in 1665, the Mayor of London
attempted to prevent plague-ridden stench from infecting the living by mandating that
bodies must be buried six feet deep (1,82 meters) .
Over two hundred years later, in the wake of pioneering germ research from Louis Pasteur
and Robert Koch, French biologist Alexandre Yersin finally found the plague's cause -
bacterium carried by fleas living on rodents.
Smells don’t carry sickness, but they can signal
a biological warning to help us avoid something dangerous.
Pathogens in human feces cause illnesses ranging from typhoid fever to hookworm, and we believe
the dislike of odors from bodily fluids is an evolutionary response to avoid disease.
Odor molecules bind to specialized receptors in the back of the nose located on millions
of olfactory neurons - which go straight to the brain where they’re deciphered. Fresh
food is typically safe and typically smells good. Rotten food is often dangerous and often
smells bad.
And preventing stench and sickness was the motivation for the john.
The Sir John.
Sir John Harington, an English poet and prominent member of Queen Elizabeth I’s royal court,
wrote about his flush toilet invention in 1596. But his desire to sweeten the air would
go unfulfilled for centuries.
One reason his technology was ignored was that the rich simply had no need for a complicated
toilet - they had servants. The Groom of the Stool, a job which later gave way to the Lady
of the Bedchamber, not only disposed of waste by emptying the chamberpot, but also literally
wiped their royal butts.
But you don’t have to be royalty to not want to deal with waste. Individuals generally
leave their waste in the nearest water source, or a hole in the ground until it becomes someone
else’s problem…
which it usually does.
The Tragedy of the Commons is an economic theory that describes how everyone acting
in their own self-interest can destroy a resource used by an entire community. Victorian economist
William Forster Lloyd coined the term in 1833 to illustrate the problem with cows grazing
on shared land. If each individual grazed their cows without limits, they'd eventually
bring more and more cows until the land became so overgrazed that no one could use it.
Now imagine a city tripling in population from one to three million people in just half
a century, with everyone dumping industrial and human waste into one river. Combine that
with an unusually hot summer and you get stink.
In London, 1858, it was the Great Stink.
Outbreaks of cholera were blamed on the smell from the banks of the River Thames. Chancellor
of the Exchequer Benjamin Disraeli described the river as, “a Stygian pool, reeking with
ineffable and intolerable horrors,” and English physicist Michael Faraday said, "Near
the bridges the feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface."
Social scientist George Godwin documented piles of untreated waste on the banks as being
up to six feet deep.
The average male height at the time was about 5 foot 4 (1,65 meters).
The government accepted a proposal from civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette to build an elaborate
sewer system that carried waste to six different outlets, each emptying into the ocean.
It took twenty years to complete, but one hundred years later, the Thames was declared dead.
After wartime bombing destroyed parts of Bazalgette’s sewer, the Manchester Guardian described the
Thames as a "badly managed open sewer," and in 1957 the Natural History Museum declared
it biologically dead. Despite resistance to cleanup, including a member of the House Of
Lords stating in 1959 that breaking up sewage gave rivers, “something to do,”
waste treatment improved
Advances involved screening and cleaning the waste before releasing the
filtered water back into waterways -- and today the Thames once again supports wildlife.
It took nearly three hundred years, improvements in civil engineering and a public disaster
for Sir John Harington’s flushable toilet to be widely adopted. And now the water in
toilet is the same water that comes from the tap. Which, in many areas is perfectly drinkable.
The end.
But wait. Billions of people lack access to flush toilets. And whether the ground is too
frozen, the land is too dry, or a community is too poverty-stricken, complex water sewage
systems don’t exist in much of the world. 1.8 billion suffer every year from ingesting
water contaminated with waste.
Flying toilets are used in the slums of Kenya and Haiti. They’re plastic bags used as
toilets and then flung as far as the user can throw them. Hitting people, piling on
roofs and bursting open when they hit the ground - clogging drainage systems and contaminating
water. In India, where more people have cell phones than access to a toilet, newly-installed
toilets are often ignored because of taboos regarding cleaning them out. The government
and World Bank developed a “No toilet, no bride” campaign to influence families to
have a proper toilet before getting married.
The future of poop requires a paradigm shift, described by American physicist Thomas Kuhn
as a fundamental change in the basic concepts of a scientific discipline. While spiderwebs
of water pipes pushing waste for centralized processing was rated the greatest medical
advance in 150 years - Friedensreich Hundertwasser advocated for a different approach. His solution
was pooping kinda like cats.
Litter boxes play on a cat's natural instinct to defecate in soft, sandy soil by making
a cat toilet out of moisture and odor-absorbing material. But instead of throwing the waste
away like owners do with cats, Austrian painter and architect Hundertwasser’s wanted human
poop to return to its natural purpose.
The humus toilet is a composting toilet that works by having a layer of humus, at the bottom
of a bucket and then scooping some fresh humus on top of the poop after each use. With no
bad smell, Sir John Harington would approve. A double bottom allows for air flow and a
drip-trough and eventually the contents during turn into fertilizer called humanure.
The word human actually derives from the latin word humus meaning earth and ground and humanus
meaning man. And the humus toilet, according to Hundertwasser, represented a direct cycle
of life between people and planet. His concern was that flush toilets divorce humanity from
a basic circle of life - with waste turning into fertilizer for plant life. The death
of food becomes the birth of vegetation. Saying, “What comes out of us is not waste, but
the building block of the world…” And while poop might not exactly be Lego, it was
worth some money.
Human excrement entering sewer systems was actually opposed in mid-19th century France
by night soil collectors. Named because they did their dirty work at night, they didn’t
want to lose their job gathering and selling poop to be made into fertilizer and pee to
be made into the saltpeter used for gunpowder.
Companies around the world are starting to see the dollar signs in doody. Utilizing waste
from urban sewage treatment facilities is gaining steam as technology advances for turning
biosolids into fuel and energy. And toilet reinventions are underway, including a solar
toilet from the California Institute of Technology that generates hydrogen and electricity, and
the Cranfield nano membrane toilet which separates and cleans water from waste. The leftover
is covered in wax to seal pathogens and help it dry out to be later used for energy.
Waxy poop balls might not be the direct cycle Hundertwasser desired, but toilet reinventions
represent the unique marriage between humanity and the planet -- the engineering of Sir John
Harington with the ecological philosophy of Hundertwasser.
A direct theme of Hundertwasser’s work was his rejection of straight lines. Preferring
spirals and squiggles, he believed straight lines were a human construct that separated
us from nature -- and a straight line was the design flaw in Harington’s toilet.
A straight pipe allowed gas to rise up directly into the water closet from below. Alexander
Cumming invented the S-trap in 1775, which allowed standing water to block the foul air.
A squiggly line perfected Harington’s toilet.
But Hundertwasser cared about people and improving the most basic parts of their lives, saying,
“I want to make people happy. Not depressed. I don’t want to burden them with more problems
-- they already have enough." He knew problems, having survived the Holocaust when at least
69 of his family didn't -- and thought that returning to a state of beauty in our interactions
with nature would ensure our survival.
Hundertwasser believed in the Earth’s cycle so strongly he used himself as fertilizer.
When he died of congestive heart failure in 2000, he was buried without a coffin, under
a tulip tree only two feet deep. No one visits his grave - they visit his tree.
Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s circle is complete.
And through this perspective of death and rebirth, we re-invent our waste and our bodies
- sewage becomes energy, and we become a forest of the living dead.
And as always
thanks for watching.
Special thanks to Neil Bromhall for the stoning nature footage.
And a extra special thanks to everyone at The Hundertwasser Foundation.