Crapper Story

As much as I enjoy a good story, I've never been a huge history fan. It's always so dry and hard to follow... Plus my history teacher had one of those lull-you-to-sleep type of voices.

But I love tours. Especially tours of weird places. Like ghost tours. Or underground city tours.

So when I heard about Seattle's Underground City tour, I had to check it out!

But at first, I was concerned. Pre-tour, they sat us down in this tiny room to talk about "the history of the city." Oh god, I thought. Bored-time.


Then they mentioned the toilets. (fair warning, this story is not for the squeamish.)

How can the history of a crapper relate to a whole city's past? Well, apparently back in the late 1800s, Seattle consisted of some mud flats leading down to the water, and some cliffs up around 3rd Avenue. As you might expect, the wealthier citizens lived up on the high-and-dry cliffs, and the not-so-well-endowed dwelled in the prone-to-flooding flats.

The wealthy people got a shipment one day, all the way from Europe, of Mr. Crapper's new invention. Indoor plumbing, hurrah! They opened the boxes to find brand-new porcelain thrones, ready to assemble and use (pics here are the genuine antique article, by the way). They assembled the pieces, went to connect it to the city sewer system, and... huh.



Realized there was no city sewer system. So they went down to the lumber mill, pulled out some planking, and built a big tube, about 4x4 feet. They ran this tube down the hill from the cliffs, across the mud flats, and straight out into the bay (because back then, this little thing called sanitation does not exist).

Huzzah! Problem solved. Toilets now flush properly. Everyone is happy.

... Until high tide the next morning. Right as the tide reaches its peak, when it swells to cover most of the mud flats, it fills the end of this wooden tube... And when a tube is blocked at one end by rising water, and having an entire town's worth of sewage pour into it from the other end, high up on a cliff... Well, that's going to build up a lot of pressure.

If you happened to be extremely unlucky, and moved to flush your toilet at that particular moment, pulling the chain to release the plug blocking your toilet from the rest of the sewer system...

Bam. Exploding toilet. Like, 4-6 feet of sewage bursting into the air in front of you.

Another cool tidbit? Until several years later when the town finally fixed the sewer system, know what saved people the messy business of having the sewer blow up in their faces?

The newspapers printed the tide charts for the week on the front page.*

This tour definitely taught me one thing. History isn't boring! ... As long as you aren't shy about the dirty, crappy details. That's the fun part, really.**

* Go newspapers!

** This story, and many others on the tour, were taken from Bill Speidel's book, Sons of the Profits, about the early history of Seattle. Basically, he noticed that a lot of young people like me were bored by their history classes. And he realized that it was because the history textbooks left out all the good parts (like how the "seamstresses" *coughladiesofthenightcough* saved Seattle). So he wrote a book to tell the honest history. Including the embarrassing bits.