Thomas Crapper was a real master plumber and sanitary maker in 19th-century England, but he did not invent the flush toilet. He popularized it and made improvements, including inventing the floating ballcock. He was not knighted and did not coin the word “shit.” The association of his name with the product came after his death, likely due to American soldiers during World War I.
There is nothing worse for a researcher than misinformation and innuendo masquerading as fact, and that is the case with the 19th-century English scholar and plumber known as Thomas Crapper. Some even argue that there was never a real person with this name, only the active imagination of a fictitious biographer who published a book about his life called Flushed with Success. In fact, there really was a master plumber and sanitary maker named Thomas Crapper, born in 1836 and born in 1836 in his native England.
As a child, Crapper apprenticed to a master plumber. After several years of training as a journeyman, he became a master plumber at the age of 20. Crapper did plumbing work for a number of prominent English citizens, including members of the royal family. Eventually, he formed his own plumbing and sanitation company, which became one of the first to have a public showroom.
Contrary to popular belief, however, he did not invent the modern flush toilet. The flush toilet, also called a water closet, was already in use long before Crapper was born. What he really did was popularize the flush toilet and make several small improvements to its form and function. The plumber invented the floating ballcock, a device that automatically shuts off the flow of fresh water once the tank is full. Versions of his floating ball valve are still in use today, although the tanks themselves are no longer mounted on the wall above the user’s head.
The other popular myth is that Crapper’s plumbing work was so admired by the royal family that he was officially knighted. While it is true that his company supplied much of the fixtures and plumbing for the royal quarters, Thomas himself was never knighted.
While Crapper’s name appears forever tied to the bathroom fixture he promoted so heavily, he doesn’t even get credit for coining the word shit. The word “shit” in the sense of waste products goes back to English and Dutch words roughly translated as “chaff”. By the second half of the 19th century, the word “shit” had largely disappeared from popular usage in England, but not in America. Crapper’s surname happened to coincide with a slang word for defecation.
It is widely believed that American soldiers stationed in England during World War I noticed the company logo “T. Crapper” emblazoned on British bathrooms and created the link between form and function. When these soldiers returned to America, the term made its way into the popular vernacular. The man himself died in 1910, several years before the association of his name with the product itself became popular.
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