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Comment by Tharkun | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how long it took for westerners to stop throwing their "night soil" out the window and start installing and using toilets.

What always struck me as strange is that the Romans had and used public toilets, but afterwards Europe went back to shitting in a bucket and throwing it out the window. Puzzling.

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Don't mix up "Romans" and "Europeans." A better question is if the residents of Rome and other cities that had public facilities went back to the bucket or if they continued to use and maintain the public toilets. The rest of Europe likely never had public facilities to begin with, and the fall of the Empire might have delayed that technology transfer I suspect.

There was a collapse of urban civilization. Rome's population went from around a million to about 50 000 people. Sanitation gets more important the higher the population density is.

The Romans took their technology to the end of their empire. You can see Roman toilets and plumbing in Britain.

Recall that a lot of Roman Engineering was based off of what they learned as they colonizes/conquered. Meaning these sort of civilized solutions likely existed in other parts of Europe.

I think they went back to using lower-level solutions because of the collapse as dimitar mentioned.

Around 1854.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outb...

Which about ten years later resulted in the Victorians building over 100 miles of sewers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_sewerage_system

that's only 163 years ago ... that is distressingly recent

New York was even later. Paris though began to built sewers in the middle ages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_sewers

You know something, Jon Snow! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLpzHHbFrHY

This is one of the famous cases, in 1854: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_ou...

See Edward Tufte's take on it too http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/tufte_snow.html

I seem to remember that Roman toilets were often in the kitchen...

> I seem to remember that Roman toilets were often in the kitchen...

Not unusual for buildings in Europe or the US built around the turn of the last century either.

These days, they're typically renovated so that there's a wall in between and the bathroom door leads off of an incredibly narrow kitchen, but a hundred years ago, those were in the same room.

(And those were the ones who were lucky, because they actually had a private bathroom).

And a private kitchen!!

https://www.google.com/amp/porch.com/advice/brief-history-ki...

Still, buckets and "out the window" are better than "everywhere"

Where is "out the window"? People are going to be walking through that and it will flow downhill towards the water table and into well water. "out the window" is "everywhere" for most purposes.

Better than shitting in people's pots and then loading them up with food and soup.

Did anyone ever do that?

Victorian English drank that shit

https://www.google.com/amp/pictorial.jezebel.com/some-fun-na...

There's a pretty good show on life during the era, one of the jobs they feature is people scowering the shit in the streets to find dog shit because it has different useful properties than horse shit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIjBywdLcgI&list=PL72jhKwank...

Wow. Should have just made a deal with the dog owners lol.

That's an outstanding article and highly relevant, thx.

It has been said the knowledge was lost in the dark ages.

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