January 03, 2004

A German chamber pot museum explains a little about the humble thunder mug. Consider the mighty chamber pot and the benefits it offered our recent ancestors. Here are some lovely (and utilitarian) examples of this relic of our unplumbed past.
posted by tracicle 20 years ago
  • The paperless workplace. The bathroom. Progress. We really aren't getting anywhere, are we? Those are lovely and certainly outshine my Friday night (or Saturday morning) empty pop bottle. How many gallons of water do you spend every year as you piss?
  • "Unplumbed past!" Well done! The Getty link ("relic") doesn't work for me, but searching the site for "chamber pot" leads you to what I think must be the example tracicle wanted - first on in the results. From convenience to buggery, though, it seems to me that the benefits mentioned are for men. My guess is that it wasn't quite so beneficial for women. You'd have to squat down even lower than for a modern toilet, and support yourself while doing so. Women with arthritic knees must have hated them. Or, did they stand above the pots and hope for the best? And, if you didn't have a slave or a servant to empty the pots, who would have done that? Since women were the keepers of the inside of the house, I think it was them. Maybe Thomas Crapper was an early feminist.
  • "Two litres per day" - but it surely isn't all at night. In the daytime I doubt that they used chamber pots.
  • The paperless workplace. The bathroom. Put the two together and ... aaargh!
  • So here I go, telling a personal story. :) My grandparents had a house in the middle of nowhere that was built as a holiday retreat and had little in the way of "amenities". The toilet was a longdrop (NZese for "hole in the ground with a seat and four walls") and was at the bottom of the garden down a hillside. Daytime was fine but my grandparents kept a chamberpot under my bed for nights. Quite a nice ceramic one, I might add, although not as pretty as the china ones in the links above.
  • The Getty link had an extra tag in there somehow.
  • Thinking about and surfing because of this post I encountered the wonderfully poetic word: "Nightsoil".
  • "...human excretions of the order of 900 million litres of urine and 135 million kilogrammes of faecal matter per day..." *shudders*
  • And that's just India. :-)
  • ...900 million litres of urine... Where's an underused bottling facility when you need it?