Indoor "Outhouses"

[RobA]

LOL - I was just thinking of how many fantasy inn maps I've seen with indoor privies, and how many space ship deck plans I've seen without.

Thats because in the future, people don't have to go to the loo anymore...

After-all if all your meals are little pills and your environment is tailored to ideals, your body will not produce any waste 100% efficiency!

-Rob A>

[pyrandon]

Thats because in the future, people don't have to go to the loo anymore...

After-all if all your meals are little pills and your environment is tailored to ideals, your body will not produce any waste 100% efficiency!

-Rob A>

Where the *&%*&)) will men read the paper, then??

[jaerdaph]

After watching several episodes of Cities of the Underworld on The History Channel, I learned that the Romans apparently had indoor toilets. It's a shame that technology was lost in the Dark Ages.

[NeonKnight]

Roman indoor toilets were not 'common' place in every house. They were common in the bathhouses though, as the bath houses had water transported to them. The idoor toilets functioned by have many 'latrines' positioned over a channel of flowing water into which ones waste was dropped. They even had 'backside' scrubbers that made use of the water to cleanse oneself after the deed.

Here are some images of the roman latrines:

http://www.englishheritageprints.com...112_440440.jpg

http://www.sewerhistory.org/images/wm/wmj/wmj10.jpg

[pyrandon]

I found an interesting vignette about indoor plumbing in "Life in a Medieval City" by Joseph & Frances Gies:

"A woman who keeps a lodging house is summonsed for creating a 'vile nuisance.' She has had a wooden pipe built from the privy chamber of her house to the gutter, rendering it evil-smelling and sometimes blocking it up. The neighbors bring her into court, where she is fined six deniers and ordered to remove the pipe within forty days." (p. 204)

So evidently plumbing crimes were not unheard of, so great was the desire for indoor plumbing in France c. 1250 AD.

[RPMiller]

You know that could have worked if only she had water to pour down the tube after "the business" was down.

[Gamerprinter]

Unlike the movie "Gladiator", the Roman Emperor Commudus was not killed in the arena, rather his imperial guards threw him down the "guarderobe" of the imperial palace.

This is where we get the word "commode" for toilet.

So I guess the romans had something like a guarderobe in certain large buildings.