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As Americans, we tend to take flushing toilets for granted, and why would we not? Only about 0.5 percent of U.S. homes now lack indoor plumbing, while many newer homes have three or more bathrooms. Flushing a toilet is a modern convenience, while around the world to whom our Kohlers, Delta and Totos would be an luxury.

Here are 15 amazing wonders regarding this most commonly used plumbing item in the states:


1. All sorts of resources online and otherwise give credit to ancient Crete's King Minos (18th century B.C.) as having the world's first flush toilet. In fact ,Britain's oldest known Neolithic village, the people of Skara Brae,  over 1,200 years before Minos had their own primitive flushing system.


2. The fill valve and flushing mechanism used in virtually all modern toilets was created for a hand-washing device by the Arabian inventor known as al-Jazari (or Kurdish)in 1206 A.D. Depending on your ball cock, or fill float assembly, general idea is still the same.


3. Until the 18th century, European city dwellers used "chamber pots" to catch bodily wastes, then casually threw the contents into the public streets where they mixed with horse droppings. If you think today's cities smell bad, imagine London, Paris or Prague circa 1600.


4. The first public toilets appeared at London's Crystal Palace in 1851. They were also the first-known "pay toilets," as patrons were charged a penny for their use. 


5. Contrary to the urban legend, London's Thomas Crapper (1836-1910) did not invent the modern toilet. Thomas Crapper did own a very successful plumbing company and was awarded numerous patents for his improvements to the plumbing system. English solders leaving for the trenches of WWI often passed through London where they saw signs for Crapper's company and adopted his name as a slang term for the device.


6. Slang terms or other names used for the toilet include head, commode, john, lavatory, can, porcelain throne, crapper, oval office,  loo, .


7. In fact, the word "toilet" itself is a euphemism. It comes from the French toilette, meaning the act of cleaning or grooming one's self.


8. It wasn't until the late 19th century when the germ theory of disease finally took hold that urban planners rushed to install sewer and clean water systems in their communities.


9. The modern closed tank and bowl didn't start to replace the older elevated tank design until around 1910.


10.  1950 roughly 25 percent of American households, mostly rural, still lacked indoor toilets.  That number topped 50 percent.


11. United Nations report still some 2.6 billion people around the world still lack indoor toilet facilities.


12. Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) was the first Hollywood film to show a toilet flushing. (Really?!) On TV, the first toilet appeared on the ABC sit-com Leave It to Beaver (1957-1963) (You would think this took quite sometime).


13. American toilets flush in the key of E Flat, some not all.


14. Toilet paper didn't appear until 1857. People cleaned themselves with what ever they could find.


15. Estimations have come that people spend 8 times per dy they go to the toilet, that is 3 years of your life in overall time!


16.  The aqua duct which brought fresh drinking water and help provide the early community toilets were developed over 2000 years ago by the Romans, and also a very basic sewage system to remove the waste from their public restroom areas.