Who invented the toilet: a dated history from Mohenjo-daro to the washlet
Who invented the toilet: a dated history from Mohenjo-daro to the washlet
By Ariel, last updated September 25, 2026.
Ask who invented the toilet and you will hear Thomas Crapper, Sir John Harington, or “the Romans.” The first is a myth a plumber’s advertising helped along, the second is real but incomplete, and the third is wrong in both directions, since the Indus cities had drains 2,500 years before Rome and the working flush toilet came 1,700 years after it. The honest answer is a chain of specific people making specific improvements over four centuries, on top of drains four thousand years older. Every link below carries its date and the patent, museum, or library record behind it; where a claim rests on tradition instead, it says so.
No single person invented the toilet
No single person invented the toilet. For the flush toilet as an idea, the name is Sir John Harington, who described and built a cistern-and-valve water closet, the Ajax, in 1596. For the flush toilet as something that works in a house, it is Alexander Cumming, whose 1775 patent put the S-shaped water trap under the pan, and Joseph Bramah, whose 1778 patent added the hinged valve that made it reliable enough to sell for a century. Thomas Crapper did not invent it; he started a plumbing firm in 1861, opened the first bathroom showroom in 1870, and patented improvements, one of them a ballcock.
Toilet paper is simpler. Joseph Gayetty sold the first packaged toilet paper in the United States in 1857 and the Scott Paper Company put it on a roll in 1890. The washlet, the electric bidet seat behind every smart toilet, is TOTO’s, from 1980. The 1.6 gallon flush comes from a 1992 federal law, the 1.28 gallon flush from the EPA’s WaterSense label, launched in 2006.
The timeline at a glance
| Date | Innovation | Who | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| ca. 2500-1900 BCE | Paved toilet areas draining to covered street drains, Mohenjo-daro | Indus city builders | Penn Museum |
| Middle Minoan IIA | Knossos drainage circuit with a latrine on it | Minoan builders | British School at Athens; Evans |
| Roman period | Public latrines over running water; the tersorium | Roman engineers | Corinium Museum |
| 1289 and 1313 | Garderobes in a chapel and a solar, Kent | Christ Church priory | Parker and Turner, 1851 |
| mid-1500s | Chamber pots in general use | London households | London Museum |
| 1596 | The Ajax: cistern, valve, pan, flush | Sir John Harington | Science Museum; Internet Archive |
| November 11, 1775 | Patent 1105: the S-shaped stink trap | Alexander Cumming | The National Archives |
| July 14, 1777 | Patent 1160: plunger-worked float valve closet | Lemuel Prosser | The National Archives |
| January 27, 1778 | Patent 1177: the hinged valve closet | Joseph Bramah | The National Archives |
| 1851 | Public flushing lavatories at the Great Exhibition | George Jennings | Science Museum Group |
| August 23, 1852 | Patent 14,273: pan and trap in one piece | George Jennings | The National Archives |
| 1857 | Gayetty’s Medicated Paper, flat sheets | Joseph Gayetty | Hagley Museum and Library |
| 1861 | Plumbing business opens | Thomas Crapper | Thomas Crapper & Co |
| July 25, 1871 | US patent 117,355: perforated paper on a roll | Seth Wheeler | Google Patents |
| 1883 | The Unitas, first one-piece porcelain pedestal closet | Thomas William Twyford | Science Museum (National Archives dates it 1884) |
| 1890 | First rolls sold specifically as toilet paper | Scott Paper Company | Kimberly-Clark |
| September 15, 1891 | US patent 459,516: the toilet paper roll | Seth Wheeler | Google Patents |
| 1906 | The Royal Flushometer, a tankless valve flush | William E. Sloan | Sloan |
| 1980 | Washlet G, the electric bidet seat | TOTO | TOTO |
| October 24, 1992 | Energy Policy Act: 1.6 gpf from January 1, 1994 | US Congress | govinfo; 42 U.S.C. 6295(k) |
| 2006 | EPA launches WaterSense; its 1.28 gpf toilet specification follows on January 24, 2007 | US EPA | Federal Register |
Before anyone invented anything: drains and seats, 2500 BCE
The oldest thing on this list is a drain.
Mohenjo-daro, in the Indus Valley of present-day Pakistan, was occupied between about 2500 and 1900 BCE. The Penn Museum, which dug there in the 1960s, describes “substantial buildings of baked brick with the paved washing (or toilet) areas and the elaborate drainage facilities typical of this civilization.” Waste left the house through an opening into a covered brick drain under the street. No flush, no trap, no valve, but forty-five centuries ago the idea that waste leaves through a channel instead of a bucket was already built into the city. Europe did not match that at city scale until the 1850s.
Crete is next. Sir Arthur Evans’s 1921 excavation report on the palace at Knossos includes a plan and section of a latrine in the Domestic Quarter and the stone drainage circuit it sat on. A 1988 study in the Annual of the British School at Athens went over that system stone by stone and dated its construction to the Middle Minoan IIA phase, early in the second millennium BCE on the conventional chronology, with the main job of draining the Central Court of rainwater. The latrine was a passenger on a storm drain, which is worth remembering when a listicle calls Knossos “the first flush toilet.” The Science Museum adds a roughly 5,000-year-old drainage system in Orkney. None of these had an inventor; they had builders.
Rome: the public latrine and the sponge on a stick
Roman towns built multi-seat public latrines: a bench with keyhole openings over a channel of running water and a gutter of clean water at your feet, still standing at Ostia, the port of Rome.
The Corinium Museum describes the cleaning tool: “you may have used a sponge (Latin: tersorium) to wipe. These ancient devices consisted of a stick with a vinegar- or salt water-soaked sponge attached. They were often shared!” The vinegar was the disinfectant. What the Romans lacked was a trap and privacy: sewer gas came straight up through the seat, and the room was full of neighbours.
The long middle: garderobes, chamber pots, and the nightmen
After Rome, western Europe went without plumbing for most of a millennium, and what it had instead was gravity and a shovel.
In a castle or manor house the fixture was a garderobe: a stone seat in a small chamber, often corbelled out from the wall, over a shaft that dropped to a pit or the moat. Parker and Turner’s 1851 survey of English domestic architecture records a prior of Christ Church, Canterbury, building “a new chapel with a garderobe” in 1289 and “a new solar, or upper chamber with a garderobe” in 1313 at Godmersham, a Kent manor house, and Parker’s 1859 continuation of the series describes a fifteenth-century brick tower whose walls “are 14 or 15 feet thick, with passages and garderobes in them.”
For everyone else there was the chamber pot. The London Museum dates general use to the mid-sixteenth century, silver for the rich and pewter or ceramic for most, emptied each morning into a cesspit, a stream or, often, the street; the cesspit was emptied by nightmen, who worked after dark. The same museum records a 1328 complaint from William Sprot, whose neighbour’s cesspit had come through his wall. The Science Museum is blunt: chamber pots and cesspits “continued to be the most common choice of waste depository until the late 1800s,” and until the 1850s London’s waste “mainly consisted of cesspits beneath houses or ditches that led waste into the Thames.” A flushing toilet with nowhere to flush to is a chamber pot with extra steps.
1596: Sir John Harington and the Ajax
Sir John Harington was a courtier and a godson of Queen Elizabeth I. In 1596 he published A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, called the Metamorphosis of Ajax, the title punning on “a jakes,” period slang for a privy. Alongside the satire is a description with diagrams of a water closet: a cistern above, a pan below, a valve at the bottom of the pan worked by a lever, and water to wash the pan out. The Internet Archive holds the Early English Books record of the 1596 edition, STC 12779.
He built it. The Science Museum notes one at his home in Bath and a working model for the Queen at Richmond Palace, and gives the numbers that explain why it went nowhere: about 7.5 gallons per flush, and Harington’s claim that it could serve up to 20 people before flushing. Without piped water, someone carried those gallons upstairs in buckets, and with no trap under the pan the cesspit’s smell came back up the pipe whenever the valve was dry.
So the 1596 date is real. What Harington did not make was a toilet anyone would want in their house; that took two patents, 179 years later.
1775 to 1778: the three patents that made the toilet work
The National Archives at Kew holds the original patent rolls, and its collection page on toilet design quotes them, catalogue references and all. Three matter.
On November 11, 1775, Alexander Cumming, a clockmaker whose work the Science Museum also displays, was granted patent 1105 for “the shape of the pan or bason, the manner of admitting the water into it, and on having the stink trap so constructed that its contents shall or may be totally emptied every time the closet is used.” The stink trap is the S-shaped bend in the outlet pipe. After a flush, water settles in the bottom of the S and forms a plug that sewer gas cannot pass. Every toilet you have used has that plug in it; the trapway in our anatomy guide is Cumming’s 1775 idea cast in vitreous china. His closet also had a sliding valve under the pan to hold water in the bowl between uses.
On July 14, 1777, Lemuel Prosser was granted patent 1160 for “A water closet, upon an entirely new construction, which will always remain free from any offensive smell,” using a plunger-worked float valve. Most histories skip him; the archive does not.
On January 27, 1778, Joseph Bramah, a locksmith, was granted patent 1177. Cumming’s sliding valve jammed and leaked; Bramah replaced it with a hinged flap linked to the flush so that “two valves are simultaneously acted upon by the movement of the handle. The one valve is placed under the bottom of the basin, and when closed retains any water.” The Science Museum calls the Bramah closet “one of the leading designs for the next century” and holds a Bramah-pattern closet made by Tylor of London as late as 1880.
If you want one date for when the flush toilet was invented as a working appliance, 1778 is the defensible answer. It still needed a water supply and a sewer, and most of Britain had neither.
1851 to 1888: Jennings, Crapper, and Twyford make it public, plumbed, and porcelain
The Victorian half-century turned Bramah’s luxury into an industry. Three names carry it.
George Jennings, a sanitary-ware maker, installed flushing public lavatories at the Great Exhibition in 1851; he called them Monkey Closets. The Science Museum Group holds a sales model of his patent closet and records that in the 1870s he built underground public conveniences around London, arguing for “conveniences suited to this advanced stage of civilisation.” The story that visitors paid a penny, and that this is where “spend a penny” comes from, is repeated everywhere; no primary record carries the fee, so treat it as tradition. On the record is his patent of August 23, 1852, number 14,273, for a closet with pan and trap in one piece, arranged so “there shall always be a certain quantity of water retained in the pan itself.”
Thomas Crapper started his plumbing and sanitary engineering business in 1861 and opened what his company still calls the world’s first bathroom showroom in 1870. The Science Museum credits him with nine patents, among them a ballcock (the float-operated fill valve that stops the tank overflowing) and an unsuccessful self-rising seat, and with adapting Cumming’s S-pipe into the U-bend. He did not invent the toilet, the S-trap, the valve closet, or the syphonic flush his adverts implied was his; the museum attributes that to Albert Giblin, whose design Crapper’s firm sold. The museum’s blog dates Giblin’s patent to 1819, which cannot be right, since the patent record is British patent 4,990 of 1898, “Improvements in Flushing Cisterns,” filed by Giblin on March 1, 1898 and published that April. The word “crap,” the museum notes, was in use long before Crapper’s lifetime.
Thomas William Twyford, of the Staffordshire pottery family in the sanitary trade since 1849, made the toilet into the object you would recognise. In 1883, per the Science Museum, he introduced the Unitas, the first one-piece porcelain pedestal closet: pan and trap fired as one piece, freestanding, with a hinged seat and no wooden cabinet. Before it the bowl sat inside joinery, and joinery around a toilet rots. The National Archives dates the Unitas to 1884, and some trade histories to 1885, so treat the window as 1883 to 1884 rather than a fixed year. The same archive holds Twyford’s registered design for the later Deluge basin, dated June 22, 1888. A one-piece toilet in a 2026 showroom is a Unitas with a smaller tank.
The American thread: paper, valves, and a law
Britain built the fixture. The United States built the things around it.
Joseph Gayetty of New York introduced Gayetty’s Medicated Paper in 1857, sold as flat sheets, according to the Hagley Museum and Library. Kimberly-Clark’s history adds that he called it “therapeutic paper” and sold packs of 500 for 50 cents. His broadside, held by the Library of Congress, tells readers to “learn what is in ordinary paper”; he was selling a hemorrhoid remedy as much as a convenience.
Seth Wheeler of Albany is the reason it comes on a roll. US patent 117,355 of July 25, 1871 covers paper perforated along the sheet divisions “so as to be easily torn apart,” and patent 459,516 of September 15, 1891 is filed under the title “Wrapping or tolier paper roll” (the scan misspells “toilet”).
The Scott Paper Company of Philadelphia, by Kimberly-Clark’s account, became “the first company to market rolls of tissue specifically for use as toilet paper” in 1890, when merchants would not display it and publications would not advertise it. Scott Tissue followed in 1913, and Kimberly-Clark bought Scott in 1995.
William E. Sloan founded the Sloan Valve Company in Chicago in 1906 with the Royal Flushometer, a valve that delivers a metered flush from the supply line with no tank. Every commercial restroom toilet descends from it, and so do the pressure-assist models in our tankless toilet guide.
Then the law. The Energy Policy Act of 1992 was approved on October 24, 1992, and the standard it wrote into 42 U.S.C. 6295(k) says gravity tank-type toilets manufactured after January 1, 1994 may use no more than 1.6 gallons per flush. The common figure before was 3.5 gallons, and the Alliance for Water Efficiency estimates the change has saved about 18.2 trillion gallons. The first 1.6 gallon toilets flushed badly, which is why “low-flow” was an insult for a decade. The EPA launched WaterSense in 2006 and issued its tank-type toilet specification on January 24, 2007: a voluntary label for toilets that flush on 1.28 gallons or less and pass independent third-party certification for both performance and efficiency; our WaterSense toilet guide explains how to read it.
The washlet and the smart toilet, 1980
The last link is Japanese. TOTO launched the Washlet G in 1980, an electric seat with a warm-water wash, and its Washlet history page tracks the rest: a self-cleaning wand in 1983, a US launch as the Washlet S III in 1986, the tankless Neorest EX in 1993, and 70 million units by 2025. Every integrated smart toilet is a Washlet grafted onto a Unitas. Our smart toilet guide covers what is worth paying for, and how to use a bidet covers the part nobody explains at the store.
When was toilet paper invented
If you mean paper used for wiping, it is Chinese and old. Kimberly-Clark’s history says the first recorded mention is from fourteenth-century China, where the Bureau of Imperial Supplies made 720,000 sheets a year for the emperors. That is a manufacturer’s telling rather than a primary record.
If you mean the packaged product, it is 1857 for Gayetty’s sheets, 1871 and 1891 for Wheeler’s roll patents, and 1890 for Scott’s rolls in shops. The splinter-free claim belongs to the 1930s: Northern Tissue, now Quilted Northern under Georgia-Pacific, is said to have advertised it then, and the brand’s own 2020 television spot repeats that paper was not splinter-free until the 1930s. No museum or company archive holds the original ad, so the decade is brand lore until someone produces it.
What did people use before toilet paper
Water, mostly, and in most of the world it still is. Across South Asia, the Middle East, and much of Southeast Asia the norm is water, poured from a vessel or sprayed from a hand-held bidet shower, with the left hand doing the work and soap afterward. The electric bidet seat is the plumbed-in version of the same habit, which is the context for our bidet pillar.
Where water was not the habit, people used what was to hand. Kimberly-Clark’s list runs “grass, leaves, fur, mussel shells, corncobs, newspapers, sponges and even the Sears catalogue and the Farmer’s Almanac,” and the Sears part is not a joke. Smithsonian Magazine quotes a Long Islander who grew up in the 1930s: “we used the Sears catalog as toilet paper in the outhouse behind our home. But only in case of emergency.”
You will also read about pottery sherds in Greece and moss in medieval Britain. Both are plausible, and neither is tied to a museum object or an excavation report, so treat them as folklore.
Who invented the toilet: the honest answer
Three myths, in the order you are most likely to meet them.
Myth: Thomas Crapper invented the toilet
He did not, and his company does not claim he did. He went into business in 1861, eighty-three years after Bramah’s patent. His real contributions are a showroom, a ballcock, a U-bend, and a great many cisterns with his name cast into them, which is how the legend started.
Myth: the toilet was invented in 1596
Harington described one and built two. It had no trap, needed 7.5 gallons carried by hand, and did not catch on. The fixture that works dates to 1775 and 1778; the fixture you would buy dates to 1883.
Myth: Americans invented the flush toilet
The flush valve chain is British from end to end: Harington, Cumming, Bramah, Jennings, Twyford. The American inventions are packaged toilet paper in 1857, the perforated roll in 1871 and 1891, the flushometer in 1906, and the 1.6 gallon standard in 1992. The washlet is Japanese, from 1980. If you want an American who changed how your toilet works, it is Sloan, or it is Congress.
So the answer is nobody, and everybody on the table above. The most defensible single names are Harington for the idea, Cumming for the trap, Bramah for the valve, and Twyford for the object.
How the modern toilet inherits each idea
Open the tank and the whole timeline is sitting there. Our parts-of-a-toilet glossary names each piece; here is where each came from. The trapway, the S-shaped channel that holds a plug of water, is Cumming’s 1775 stink trap. The flush valve and flapper, a hinged seal that drops when you pull a handle, descend from Bramah’s 1778 valve. The standing pool in the bowl is Jennings’ 1852 water “retained in the pan itself.” The fill valve is the ballcock, one of Crapper’s nine patents. The one-piece glazed china body is Twyford’s 1883 Unitas. The 1.6 gallon tank is the Energy Policy Act, the 1.28 gallon tank is WaterSense, and the heated seat with a wand is the 1980 Washlet. Even the greywater question, whether flush water has to be drinking water, runs back to Indus houses flushed with whatever was poured on the floor; our greywater article covers what the code allows now.
FAQ
When was the toilet invented?
Depends on which toilet. Seated latrines over drains: Mohenjo-daro, around 2500 BCE. The first described flush toilet: Harington’s Ajax, 1596. The first patented flush toilets that worked: Cumming’s S-trap in 1775 and Bramah’s valve closet in 1778. The first one-piece porcelain toilet: Twyford’s Unitas, 1883.
When were toilets invented, if you mean the very first?
The oldest fixtures with a museum source are the paved toilet areas and brick drains of Mohenjo-daro, occupied from about 2500 BCE, and the latrine on the Knossos drainage circuit, built in the Middle Minoan IIA phase early in the second millennium BCE. Nobody invented these; they were built.
Who invented toilet paper?
Joseph Gayetty of New York, who introduced Gayetty’s Medicated Paper in 1857 as flat sheets. Seth Wheeler of Albany patented the perforated roll in 1871 and the toilet paper roll in 1891, and the Scott Paper Company was the first to market rolls as toilet paper in 1890.
When was toilet paper invented?
As a packaged product, 1857, the year Joseph Gayetty’s flat sheets went on sale in New York, per the Hagley Museum and Library. On a perforated roll, 1871, by Seth Wheeler’s US patent 117,355 for paper perforated so it tears apart, with Wheeler’s roll patent following in 1891 and Scott’s rolls reaching shops in 1890. The older Chinese claim, fourteenth-century sheets made for the emperors, rests on a manufacturer’s history rather than a primary record.
What did people use before toilet paper?
Water and the hand, which is still the norm across South Asia, the Middle East, and much of Southeast Asia, poured from a vessel or sprayed from a hand-held bidet shower. Where water was not the habit, people used what was nearby: Kimberly-Clark’s list runs grass, leaves, fur, mussel shells, corncobs, newspapers, sponges, and the Sears catalogue, and Rome had the vinegar-soaked sponge on a stick.
Did Thomas Crapper invent the toilet?
No. He started a plumbing business in 1861, opened the first bathroom showroom in 1870, and held nine patents for improvements including a ballcock, according to the Science Museum. The flush toilet was described in 1596 and patented in 1775 and 1778. His name was cast into the cisterns his firm sold, and that is where the legend comes from.
Sources & references
- The National Archives: Innovations in toilet design
- Science Museum blog: A flushing story
- Science Museum Group: Model of Jennings’ patent water closet, A131925
- Science Museum Group: Bramah-pattern water closet by Tylor, 1880
- Internet Archive: A new discourse of a stale subject, 1596, STC 12779
- Penn Museum, Expedition: Possehl, 2010 (date of Mohenjo-daro)
- Penn Museum, Expedition: Dales, 1965 (drains)
- British School at Athens: Drainage of the Domestic Quarter at Knossos (MacDonald and Driessen, 1988)
- Internet Archive: Evans, The Palace of Minos, vol. 1 (1921)
- Corinium Museum: Roman toilet paper
- Internet Archive: Parker and Turner, Domestic Architecture in England, 1851 and the 1859 volume (garderobes)
- London Museum: Early modern London’s sewage problems
- Thomas Crapper & Co: History
- Hagley Museum and Library: Toilet paper, the great debate
- Google Patents: US 117,355, Seth Wheeler, 1871 and US 459,516, Seth Wheeler, 1891
- Google Patents: GB 4,990 of 1898, Albert Giblin, Improvements in Flushing Cisterns
- Kimberly-Clark: The roll that changed history (PDF)
- Sloan: About Sloan
- Georgia-Pacific: Our history
- govinfo: Energy Policy Act of 1992, Pub. L. 102-486 (PDF)
- Cornell LII: 42 U.S.C. 6295(k)
- Alliance for Water Efficiency: 20 years of the Energy Policy Act
- Federal Register via govinfo: WaterSense notice, April 10, 2020 (2006 launch)
- EPA WaterSense: Residential toilets
- TOTO: Washlet history
- Smithsonian Magazine: the Sears catalog’s surprising products
