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Comment by piyush_soni | Hacker News Reader

Scientists have found it only now, but I have always thought about it. :D ... I have always wondered why no one has invented a toilet with an auto-closeable, auto-cleanable "inner lid" (sitting collapsed just below the seat) that closes only while you're flushing so that all that flush water tsunami doesn't come out on my floor and everywhere else.

If a potential founder and creator is interested, I have a design in mind for the same. :)

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When I was a kid (almost 40 years ago) the family we went camping with had this setup. A toilet that that put over a long drop, and when you sat on the seat the the pressure would open the inner seat, effectively splitting it in two and pulling it away to open the hole below.

I’d assumed it was some standard pro camping kit. By no amount of searching just now has been able to turn up a device like I’m trying to describe!

My Airhead composting toilet has an inner door that's opened by a small handle once you are ready to make your deposit.

Wow. That should have become a household design by now.

Scientists have know that particles come up for a long time. This study visualized them. Here's an excerpt from this article:

> Researchers have known for over 60 years that when a toilet is flushed, solids and liquids go down as designed, but tiny, invisible particles are also released into the air.

Do we need to come up with something new? What if we start closing the lid that is already there before flushing?

Yes, I was mostly kidding that Scientists found out only now. But we definitely need a new design. Closing the lid is ugly (someone who has always thought about invisible splashes falling up on the floor and toilet seat wouldn't think about that?). When you close the lid and flush, all those tiny little particles are sticking on the lid instead now. And when you open that again and sit, unintentionally some part of our backs (/clothes) do touch that - not helping much. Also ideally it doesn't save the toilet seat as well since even when closed the lid is still above the seat. That's why an auto-closeable inner lid that seats beneath the toilet seat is a solution (or like someone else suggested, it always remains closed but opens up only by the pressure of someone sitting on it).

It would be nice if the solution to this did not require any effort.

Part of the problem with any automatic thing is that it is more prone to failure. Toilets are so ubiquitous that if something like this were to have an impact, it would need to be close-to-unbreakable.

No this thread got me sitting here thinking about toilets and trying to come up with a design that solves this, and an outhouse comes to mind. <grin>

This experiment was done on a public-style (commercial) toilet. They do not have lids.

Any idea what proportion of public toilets in the US do not have lids?

100%?

At least, I’ve never seen a public toilet with a lid.

I'm definitely not a plumber but I know toilets with a rather slow flush which probably wouldn't throw much plume - although that might be a different design than the US ones and require wider drain pipes.

There are designs where the flush button is on the front of the cistern, so in order to flush, you have to close the lid.

For urinating, Larry David beat you to it with his innovative 'Pee Cube' design.

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