ABSTRACT
More than 2,800 years ago, the fabled King Minos of Crete had a water closet installed, complete with a wooden seat. Around the fourth century bc, Romans created the Forum, draining the marshes at the foot of the Palatine Hill. In the second century bc, the Romans built the Cloaca Maxima, a still-used, gigantic terra-cotta sewer. In 1594, Sir John Harrington built a “privy in perfection” for his godmother, Queen Elizabeth. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, though, open gutters or covered trenches drained rain runoff and kitchen slop. Indeed, the putrid stink of sewage in the Thames River in 1858 (“The Year of the Great Stink”) forced the closing of Parliament.
