Bathrooms were a fairly new concept in the 19th century. Most people did their business in an outhouse, sometimes shared with other households. Wash basins were for bedrooms or maybe the kitchen if you had one. The rise of the bathroom only started when municipal water and sewer systems began to be built, but even then, progress was slow because those systems are expensive. Early bathrooms were furnished with wood, as other rooms were, including a wooden cabinet over a toilet, or a chamber pot if you didn’t have a sewage system. But while water systems were spreading, so was the knowledge of germ theory.
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The cover of a 1912 sales pamphlet from the Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company (later renamed American Standard) features renderings of American bathrooms dating back to 1875. Though only 37 years had passed between the design of the two rooms, they are starkly different: the former covered in wood, and the latter not all that different from bathrooms as we know them today. “Ideas of sanitation and hygiene apparently unknown but a few short years ago have become so imbred [sic] in our daily lives,” the pamphlet reads, “that were we for any reason, compelled to forgo them, we would feel that we had retrogressed for centuries, instead of the only twenty-five to fifty years in which present day sanitation and hygiene have come into being.”
During that era, medical professionals realized — and then convinced the public — that indoor toilets connected to the public sewer system were far more beneficial to stop the spread of infectious disease. And as tuberculosis and influenza continued to kill indiscriminately among the classes, bathroom design evolved to help stop their spread.
So the use of porcelain instead of wooden furnishings was developed to make a bathroom easier to clean. But that wasn’t the only way germ theory influenced the form of the modern bathroom, and the process still goes on. The next step predicted is a sink in a home’s entryway. Read about how disease prevention inspired bathroom design at CityLab. -via Damn Interesting
Source: neatorama