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The Invention of the Toilet
Marc Angelo Alcantara
January 26, 2026
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Morning Toilets!
No no no.
First of all, that’s a western toilet.
So for our non-western audience, here is your toilet:
Second, both of those are too modern for all intents and purposes here at Smart Nonsense.
The first toilet looked something more like this:
Haha yes…
A massive hole that drops straight down a shaft.
Aka the poop shoot
Now, this creates quite the problem when enemy knights would literally climb up the poop shoot:
Andddd sneak attack:
Oof.
Now, rich people had fancier “garderobes” - fancy rooms with a hole:
Where servants threw buckets down to flush it
But in 1596, this dude Sir John Harrington invents the FLUSHABLE toilet for Queen Elizabeth
We’re talking water tank, flush valve, the whole kit and caboodle.
Here it is in real life:
But..
There was no plumbing, so literally nobody could use this thing for the next 250 years.
We good now!
Stay Poopy,
Henry & Dylan 🌈
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MarketingIdeas.com is one of the best marketing newsletters out there.
60,000+ subscribers. Written by Tom Orbach, Director of Growth at Wiz (a $32B startup). Read by CMOs at companies like HubSpot, Google, and Shopify.
Every Thursday, it breaks down one campaign that's working right now. The viral posts, the positioning tricks, the weird A/B tests that 10x'd conversions. All with the exact playbook to copy it.
Recent issues covered: how to reach customers when 90% of the internet is AI slop, how to recruit an army of micro-influencers, how to make journalists write about you (for free), and what to do if your marketing sucks.
One idea per week. Zero fluff. Takes 3 minutes to read.
Join 60k readers at MarketingIdeas.com