A famous sanitary engineer

He was so famously good at his job, not only did two kings of England commission him to do important plumbing work for them at some of their castles, but his name has become immortalised in the English language. He most likely would have preferred to see his name used in a more positive sense, than it turned out. But at least his legacy did not all go down the proverbial toilet – even if it did not quite have the spark of another contemporary inventor.

Our first subject of investigation this week is the London sanitary engineer Thomas Crapper who plied his trade in England during the second half of the 19th century.

Contrary to widely held popular belief, Thomas Crapper did not invent the flush toilet, although his surname became a generic, more or less in between a polite and rude, reference to that convenience.

The honour for inventing the system that allowed us to conveniently and hygienicallybring the crap from the outhouse with its smelly bucket into our homes, goes to another Englishman John Harrington in 1596. In truly maverick styke – something that will become clear further on – it was Joseph Braman who first in 1778 registered a patent for the water closet, as it also became known.

Thomas was, however exceptionally good at his job and even had a number of enhancing patents for the water closet registered to his name. He was also an excellent marketer and pioneered the concept of the bathroom fittings showroom.

In the 1880s, Prince Edward (later Edward VII) acquired his country seat of Sandringham House in Norfolk. He commissioned Thomas Crapper & Co. to supply the plumbing, including 30 water closets with cedar wood seats and enclosures.

This was the first Royal Warrant Crapper received. Others would follow from Edward as king and later also from George V, both as Prince of Wales and as king.

At his retirement Thomas Crapper's company went to a nephew and a partner. The company would survive for anther two generations. It finally disappeared in 1969 when the company John Bolding & Sons, who had taken it over a few years earlier, went into liquidation.

The once proud sanitary engineering company might have gone down the crapper,

but its founder, Thomas Crapper lives on in many expressions as it developed ­– and that is no crap!

Some spark

Another man who managed – maybe with a bit more spark than Crapper – to get his name immortalised in an everyday term, is Allesandro Volta. He gave us the standard of measuring the unit of electrical pressure.

There were some professional sparks ­- or disagreement if you wand – early in the 19^th century between Volta and Luigi Galvani about the galvanic response that Galvani advocated. Volta in response developed what was called the Voltaic pile, which produced a steady electric current en was the frontrunner for our modern batteries.

Volta established that the most effective pair of dissimilar metals to produce electric current is zinc and silver. In acknowledgement of his contribution the International Electrotechnical Commission in 1880 approved the volt as the unit for electromotive force.

While Volt's honour and materialization came via official intervention and formal recognition, in the case for Crapper it came via informal adoption  by ordinary folk. Now, I don't want to talk to much crap about the subject, but I think one can have quite a sparkling debate which one is the more deserving route of the two.

Piet Coetzer