Page 92 - BBC History The Story of Science & Technology - 2017 UK

People & Personalities / Daily life

WAKING UP WITH

Sleep like a Whistle as Spend a penny Exercise your
1 2 3 4
log, on a stone you wake on a potty right to take
Our plastic toilet seat is not too a shower
Since time immemorial, the We are certainly not the first to
morning routine has begun in be startled from our slumber dissimilar to the stone models
bed. Sleep has always been by a timekeeping gadget. used by the ancient Egyptians, The modern shower was
a physiological necessity and Allegedly, the first alarm clock though the flushing loo didn’t invented by William Feetham
the oldest evidence for a bed was invented by Greek arrive until Queen Elizabeth I’s in 1767. Curiously, some
comes from the Middle Stone philosopher Plato, who lived godson, Sir John Harrington, versions were mounted on
Age. Dating to 77,000 years about 2,400 years ago. We designed one in the 1590s. Yet wheels, meaning the user had
ago, the remains of a hand- don’t know what this device he was too busy scribbling to be careful not to roll away
stitched mattress, woven out looked like, but it may have scandalous poetry to market on what was effectively a
of leaves and rushes, have been a water clock that used his invention. So it wasn’t until moistened skateboard. The
been found by archaeologists a draining mechanism to force the arrival of Josiah George following century also
in South Africa. These cave air through a small gap, Jennings’s washout toilets, witnessed the bizarre arrival of
dwellers presumably rolled thereby producing a whistling unveiled at the Great Exhibi- the velodouche – a shower
out their mat on the floor, but sound to rouse Plato’s tion of 1851, before the middle that only sprinkled water if you
if we jump to Neolithic Orkney snoozing students. class could abandon the potty pedalled on an exercise bike.
(5,000 years ago), the Mechanical clockwork in favour of plumbing. But hygienic washing
inhabitants of Skara Brae was miniaturised in the We wouldn’t dream of using almost certainly extends back
slept on elevated beds carved 17th century, thanks to the the toilet today without wiping to the Stone Age. And, by the
from stone. discovery of the pendulum, our bottoms, and it was no Bronze Age, the people of
At the same time, in ancient allowing Charles II’s subjects different for our Stone Age ancient Pakistan, the Harap-
Egypt, the nobility preferred to own pocket watches. But it ancestors, who probably used pans, were perfecting a public
beds that sloped downwards, wasn’t until the 20th century moss and leaves on their sanitation infrastructure that
or bowed in the middle. Oddly, that alarm clocks began backsides. Somewhat more was arguably unrivalled until
while the poor slept on piles of loitering on bedside tables. unnervingly, Roman public the 19th century. Though the
cushions, the wealthy rested Indeed, factory workers in toilets were equipped with a Romans and Greeks built
their heads on curved pillows Victorian Britain were awoken sponge, fixed on the end of a huge public bathhouses,
carved from wood, ivory or by a knocker-upper who stick, which was used by heated by elaborate hypo- TOPFOTO/ALAMY/CORBIS/GETTY
alabaster. This was to protect tapped on their windows successive lavatory visitors. caust systems, the Harappans
their elaborate hair styles from with a long pole. The Chinese were wiping delivered running water to
morning bedhead. with hygienic paper in the most of their homes 2,500
ninth century, but the west years before ancient Athens
was a millennium off the pace. was at its peak.
It took until 1857 for Joseph
Gayetty to mass-produce
THIS PAGE, LEFT TO RIGHT: modern toilet roll impregnated
The remains of an elevated bed with aloe plant extract for
at the Neolithic site of Skara
Brae in Orkney; a knocker- hygienic lubrication.
upper prepares to wake
workers from their slumbers
in 1936; latrines in Roman
baths at Leptis Magna,
Libya; this shower washed
well-to-do Georgians in early
19th-century England

92 The Story of Science & Technology