One of the most commonly known and albeit, cruder terms has to be the “bog”. Medieval Lingo At one point in time these names began to be used for describing a small, smelly restroom area inside of a house. It comes from the Latin word for wash, ‘lavare’. The word Latrine has its roots in both Latin and French. At that time, a commode meant a cabinet or chest of drawers, low enough so that it sat at the height of the dado rail (à hauteur d’appui).
The term originates in the vocabulary of French furniture from about 1700. Learn a new word every day. The expression, a ‘crapping ken’, meaning a privy or water-closet, was used in 1846 in The Swell’s Night Guide to social life in London, when Thomas was just ten years old. Thomas Crapper did not even set up his business until 1861, let alone become famous. The word has no connection with Thomas Crapper.
Rhymes for crapper
- As the first man to set up public showrooms for displaying sanitary ware, Crapper became known as an advocate of sanitary plumbing, popularising the notion of installation inside people’s homes.
- Thomas Crapper (1836–1910) is remembered as “the inventor of the flushing toilet”.
- Thirty water closets with cedar seats were installed, as well as flushing urinals for a room adjoining the billiards room
- Certainly, Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang records the word ‘crapper’ as a synonym for a toilet, in use from the 1920s.
- The slang word for toilet became more widely taken up and is still being used today.
Potti is a Tamil word meaning “deep respect for someone” and is used for Tulu-Malayali Brahmins. A toilet flange, also called a closet flange, is a pipe fitting that connects a toilet to the drainage system while also securing it to the finished floor. The word “loo” has interesting origins and can be traced back to Medieval Europe, when chamber pots had to be emptied from bedroom windows onto the street below. The name derives from sailing ships in which the toilet area for the regular sailors was placed at the head or bow of the vessel. In sailing vessels, the head is the ship’s toilet. It consists of one or several shallowly dug trenches into which people defecate.
He is sometimes even referred to as ‘Sir John Crapper’. Previously, if you wished to order sanitary ware, a salesman would visit your home with a catalogue and some samples only a few inches high. Thomas Crapper’s real achievement was that he helped to bring about a change in public attitude by his invention of the first bathroom showroom in the world in Chelsea. One of them, with an automatic flush and self-raising seat, was so accident-prone that it came to be known as the ‘bottom slapper’! His brother George was a master plumber in London. His father was the captain of a steamboat and his cousins were also in the shipping business, so it would have been easy for him to have gone by boat.
Where did the name crapper come from?
The company owned the world’s first bath, toilet and sink showroom in King’s Road. His notability with regard to toilets has often been overstated, mostly due to the publication in 1969 of a tongue-in-cheek biography by New Zealand satirist Wallace Reyburn. He founded Thomas Crapper & Co in London, a plumbing equipment company. Thomas Crapper (baptised 28 September 1836; died 27 January 1910) was an English plumber and businessman.
Origin of the word “crap”
Many myths began to grow around Crapper, most foundational of which was the legend that he had walked from Thorne to London to become a plumber at age 11. SSPL/Getty ImagesThomas Crapper & Co.’s “Cedric” wash-down closet as advertised in the company’s 1902 catalogue. Crapper found remarkable success within the first year as Prince Edward granted him Royal Warrants to renovate the bathrooms of several palaces. While his father Charles worked as a sailor, his older brother George would become a skilled London plumber who inspired the young Crapper to become his apprentice. Victorian Britain had suffered antiquated sewer systems for years when Crapper opened his sanitary equipment firm in 1861. Its first recorded application to bodily waste, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, appeared in 1846, 10 years after Crapper was born, under a reference to a crapping ken, or a privy, where ken means a house.
Thomas Crapper: Inventor of the Flush Toilet?
Interestingly, the word “crap” does not derive from “Crapper”. Today I found out why the toilet is also often called “The Crapper”. He handed his company off to his nephew George and his partner Robert Marr Wharam, and had a brief retirement at his Anerley home at 12 Thornsett Road — where he died of colon cancer on Jan. 27, 1910. In addition to founding the world’s first bath, toilet, and sink showroom, Crapper held a total of nine patents in his life. Cumming designed the S-bend or S-trap which created a water-based seal in the pipes to stave off smells.
What is the hole in the floor for a toilet called?
In 1966 the Crapper company was sold by then-owner Robert G. Wharam (son of Robert Marr Wharam) upon his retirement to its rival John Bolding & Sons. In 1904 Crapper retired, passing the firm to his nephew George and his business partner Robert Marr Wharam. In 1861 Crapper set himself up as a sanitary engineer with his own brass foundry and workshops in nearby Marlborough Road. In 1853, he was apprenticed to his brother George, a master plumber in Chelsea, and thereafter spent three years as a journeyman plumber.
- Thomas Crapper, said an article in Plumbing and Mechanical Magazine, “should best be remembered as a merchant of plumbing products, a terrific salesman and advertising genius.”
- Thomas Crapper’s real achievement was that he helped to bring about a change in public attitude by his invention of the first bathroom showroom in the world in Chelsea.
- One of them, with an automatic flush and self-raising seat, was so accident-prone that it came to be known as the ‘bottom slapper’!
- By this time, Crapper had taken out nine patents related to sanitary ware, copies of which are held in Kensington Library.
However, Crapper’s nephew, George, did improve the siphon mechanism by which the crapper water flow starts. Crapper’s advertisements implied the siphonic flush was his invention. The new U-bend plumbing trap was a significant improvement on the “S” as it could not jam, and unlike the S-bend, it did not have a tendency to dry out and did not need an overflow.
Manhole covers with Crapper’s company’s name on them in Westminster Abbey have become one of London’s minor tourist attractions. Crapper held nine patents, three of them for water closet improvements such as the floating ballcock.
When Crapper opened the Marlboro Works showroom in 1870, it was considered scandalous to put such private matters as functioning toilets on public display. With a raised cistern and downward pipe, however, it failed to prevent the stench of waste from rising back into the bathroom. The brass foundry and workshop on Marlborough Road offered “sanitary specialities” such as the “improved lavatory basin,” and would grow along with Britain’s desire for healthier and more appealing bathrooms. He spent the rest of the decade as a journeyman plumber and garnered enough experience to last him a lifetime. Thomas Crapper & Co.Crapper founded his company in 1861 and opened the world’s first bath, toilet, and sink showroom in 1870.
As the first man to set up public showrooms for displaying sanitary ware, Crapper became known as an advocate of sanitary plumbing, popularising the notion of installation inside people’s homes. Alexander Cummings is generally credited with inventing (or, at least, patenting) the first flush mechanism in 1775 (more than 50 years before Crapper was born), and plumbers Joseph Bramah and Thomas Twyford further developed the technology with improvements such as the float-and-valve system. But although Thomas Crapper may not have been a man of importance to his contemporaries, he was indeed a real person, a sanitary engineer in 19th century London who ran his own plumbing concern, who owned several patents on plumbing-related devices, and whose name can still be spotted on manhole covers around London. The head is the bathroom, and the term comes from the fact that in old square-rigged sailing ships, the wind was almost always from astern (Connell and Mack). Latrine is a word often used to describe the bathroom in the United States armed forces and in several former English colonies in other parts of the world.
His business Thomas Crapper & Co. was famously commissioned by Prince Edward to modernize palatial bathrooms. When American servicemen were stationed overseas during World War I, they reportedly noticed the word “Crapper” embossed on the cistern of nearly every toilet. The word crap is actually of Middle English origin and predates its application to bodily waste. One such advertisement read, “Crapper’s Valveless Water Waste Preventer (Patent #4,990) One movable part only”, even though patent 4,990 (for a minor improvement to the water waste preventer) was not his, but that of Albert Giblin in 1898. As a part of his business he maintained a foundry and metal shop, which enabled him to try out new designs and develop more efficient plumbing solutions. He also helped refine and develop improvements to existing plumbing and sanitary fittings.
While none of them concerned the flushing toilet that Cumming had patented himself, they did contribute to the design we know today. Nonetheless, customers being able to try out their wares saw the flushing toilet grow nearly ubiquitous during the following two decades. Sir John Harington, a courtier and godson of Queen Elizabeth I, had described and built the first flushing toilet in 1596.
crapper
Founded in 1861, Thomas Crapper & Co. began as a humble plumbing and sanitary engineering business. Opening the world’s first bathroom showroom in 1870, he mass-marketed modern toilets to historic success. Wikimedia CommonsThe London showrooms and sanitary equipment of Thomas Crapper helped eradicate the stigma that indoor toilets were unhygienic. A common version of this story is that American servicemen stationed in England during World War I saw his name on cisterns and used it as Army slang, i.e., “I’m going to the crapper”. It has often been claimed in popular culture that the vulgar slang term for human bodily waste, crap, originated with Thomas Crapper because of his association with lavatories. Crapper held nine patents, three of them for water closet improvements such as the floating ballcock, but none for the flush toilet itself.
