Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future

by Johan Norberg

Flush toilets have been used in many civilizations, including the Roman Empire, but the modern water closet was invented in 1596 for Queen Elizabeth I by her godson Sir John Harrington. In the absence of an extensive sewer system it wasn’t very useful. Indoor plumbing and widespread installation of water closets would take another 300 years. There are contemporaneous accounts of aristocrats soiling the corridors of Versailles and the Palais Royal. Indeed, the reason why Versailles’s hedges were so tall was so that they could function as toilet partitions. One eighteenth-century writer described Versailles as ‘the receptacle of all of humanity’s horrors – the passageways, corridors and courtyards are filled with urine and faecal matter’.4 Until modern times, taking a bath was rare, even controversial. The Spanish saw it as a Muslim custom, and the French thought that it softened the body and opened the pores to disease. It was seen as more hygienic for the élite to change clothes often and wear them tight. But there were some early adopters. Queen Elizabeth I is said to have taken a bath once a month whether she thought she needed it or not, and one member of the British élite wrote in his diary in 1653 that he would start experimenting with an ‘annual hair wash’.5 As late as 1882, only two per cent of New York’s homes had water connections.6