November 19 is World Toilet Day. Billions of people around the world do not have a toilet or running water. They do not have a sewer system to carry away dirty water. This can be bad. It means that they may not have clean water to drink.

Toilets did not always flush. What did people use before they had flushing toilets?

There were public toilets in bathhouses. The toilets were made of stone. The toilets were all in one room. No one had any privacy. There were no stalls or walls.

A chamber pot is a kind of toilet. A chamber pot is really just a big bowl. Chamber pots were emptied outside. In big cities, they were emptied in the street.

An outhouse is another kind of toilet. An outhouse is a small house that is outside of a person’s home. An outhouse has one toilet and is built over a hole in the ground. This is where the waste goes.

The first flushing toilet was made in 1596. This toilet was made for royalty and was only owned by kings and queens. But the toilet was very smelly. The straight pipe that carried out the dirty water didn’t block the smell.

In 1775, the toilet got an upgrade. Someone invented a new kind of pipe bent in the shape of a U. Today, this pipe is called a U-bend. The pipe’s bend is important because it traps the smelly water. This invention made people want a flushing toilet in their house.

Flushing toilets changed the way we build homes. In the past, homes were built without bathrooms. Toilets were mostly outside. Now, people needed a room just for the toilet. They began to build homes with an extra room just for the toilet. Since people needed lots of running water for both toilets and bathtubs, they put both in one room. They began to call this room a bathroom.