Replacement Toilet Lids and Seats - Welcome to Texas — A Woman With Her Hand Stuck in a Toilet Has to Get Rescued By Firefighters - This Old Toilet 800-658-4521

A woman from our great state of Texas got her HAND stuck in a toilet recently.  Apparently it got clogged and she didn’t have a plunger . . . so she tried to BAREHAND it.  But she put her arm too far down, her watch got caught, and she had to call the fire department.  (Firefighters had to break the toilet off the floor, carry it out to the yard, and break the toilet into pieces with a sledgehammer so she could pull her hand out.)

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Replacement Toilet Lids and Seats - High-tech toilets - This Old Toilet 800-658-4521

This photo from TOTO shows a NEOREST 750H high-tech toilet. 

Toto’s top-of-the-line toilet, a tankless wonder with all the gizmos,

 comes out this fall priced at around $10,000.

NEW YORK – Every so often a revolution transforms something truly basic, rendering the

 status quo somewhat, well, primitive.

First came covered sewers, then indoor plumbing and flush toilets. Now, one bathroom

 at a time, another major shift in toilet hygiene is quietly underway. A new generation of

 toilets may one day make toilet paper – and the need to put one’s hands anywhere

 near the unspeakable – seem like chamber pots and outhouses: outdated and

 somewhat messy throwbacks reserved for camping trips.

Unlike traditional toilets, the high-tech version washes from behind and – if desired –

 in front with water. Better models allow for temperature, direction and pressure control, 

and have retractable spritzing wands and automatic driers as well. The best feature

 warm seats, automatic motion sensors to raise the lid, buttons to raise the seat, 

nightlights, self-cleaning mechanisms, music to mask unpleasant sounds, deodorizer

 spritzers and other conveniences.

“Paper just distributes the problem,” said Lenora Campos, a spokeswoman for 

Georgia-based Toto USA. Toto, the Japanese company that pioneered the modern

 electronic toilet seat, has sold 34 million of them globally. “We wash most things with 

water and wouldn’t dream of wiping a dish or anything else with a piece of paper and

 calling it clean. So why should personal hygiene be any different?”

Toto began marketing the Washlet in Japan in 1980. Now 74 percent of Japanese 

households have toilets of the high-tech persuasion, making them more common 

there than home computers.

The concept of electronic toilets that cleanse with water – widely known as bidet 

toilets or Washlets – has spread internationally over time, and dozens of companies

 around the world, including Inax, Brondell and Kohler, are producing them.

Although most popular in Asia, basic versions are becoming standard in much

 of the Middle East and South America, where cleansing with water has long been 

preferred to paper. They are finally becoming more popular in Europe, where

 “boudoir paper” was introduced in the 19th century, and in equally

 paper-centric North America. They have been a long time coming.

In the United States, “bidets were always seen as European, and an oddity 

of the French,” said Rose George, author of “The Big Necessity: The

 Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters” (Metropolitan Books, 2008).

In addition to general squeamishness about discussing the way we clean

 ourselves, some in the U.S. worried about the high-tech toilets’ requirement

 that a grounded electrical outlet be nearby, or thought the early control panels

 made the toilets look clumsy.

That said, the predecessor to modern high-tech toilets was actually invented 

in the United States, by Arnold Cohen

source: http://www.observer-reporter.com/20170415/high-tech_toilets 

by Katherine Ross

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Replacement Toilet Lids and Seats - It Was Once Someone’s Job to Chat With the King While He Used the Toilet - This Old Toilet 800-658-4521

"Groom of the Stool” could be a crappy role, but it came with great benefits.

In the 1500s, the King of England’s toilet was luxurious: a velvet-cushioned, portable seat called a close-stool, below which sat a pewter chamber pot enclosed in a wooden box. Even the king had one duty that needed attending to every day, of course, but you can bet he wasn’t going to do it on his own. From the 1500s into the 1700s, British kings appointed lucky nobles the strangely prestigious chance to perform the king’s most private task of the day, as the Groom of the Stool.

This is not the glamorous job you normally would imagine in a palace, but being Groom of the Stool—named for the close stool, the king’s 16th-century toilet—was actually a highly coveted position in the royal house. Every day, as the king sat on his padded, velvet-covered close stool, he revealed secrets. He asked for counsel, and could even hear of the personal and political woes of his personal groom, and offer to help.

Believed to be a portrait of Sir Anthony Denny, Groom of the Stool to Henry VIII. ARTIST UNKNOWN (IN THE COLLECTION OF TUDORPLACE)

The job likely began as a rather less prestigious position. In The Private Lives of the Tudors, Tracy Borman quoted the earliest mentions of the job: a written order from 1497 for Hugh Denys, “our Groom of the Stool,” which included “black velvet and fringed with silk, two pewter basins and four broad yards of tawny cloth” for him to construct a close stool. Borman also points to instructions from 1452 in the Book of Nurture for “The office off a chamburlayne,” which included a little rhyme to help new grooms to the task:

See the privy-house for easement be fair, sweet, and clean;
And that the boards thereupon be covered with cloth fair in green;
And the hole himself, look there no board be seen;
Thereon a fair cushion, the ordure no man to vex.
Look there be blanket, cotton, or linen to wipe the nether end,
And ever he calls, wait ready and prompt,
Basin and ewer, and on your shoulder a towel.

During the reign of Henry VIII in the 1500s, the king’s closest men of court were given the title, often as a group. Prestigious gentry and noblemen hung out with the monarch in his privy room, acting as his personal secretaries with his undivided attention while he sat on his close stool. Later kings, including Henry VIII, appointed one person to the task, who would travel with the king and his portable stool if he went on a journey. Only monarchs in exile were denied a Groom of the Stool, though they did get grooms who helped with the general bedchamber.

The Groom of the Stool was in charge of all the activities and affairs of the king’s bedchamber and other private rooms; making sure the king was well-dressed and bathed, his bed was made, and even that his personal finances were in order. Borman wrote that sometimes the grooms had control to spend cash. Before private rooms and privacy became associated with actually being alone, monarchs were surrounded by servants and attendants at all hours of the day, often sleeping in the same room as attendants. Some kings kept their close stool in “more private” rooms than others, but even private rooms would allow a handful of people, with the Groom of the Stool always among them.

At the deathbed of Henry VIII, with his Groom of the Stool Hugh Denys (circled) one of the chosen attendees. DRAWN BY SIR THOMAS WRIOTHESLEY, GARTER KING OF ARMS/BRITISH LIBRARY

Grooms of the Stool were often feared by other members of court; they held highly confidential knowledge about political and personal affairs and, importantly, the king’s ear. Sir Anthony Denny, groom to Henry VIII*, was even given the responsibility of Henry VIII’s stamp, which acted as his signature for documents. Lucy Worsley wrote in If Walls Could Talk that the Groom of the Stool got a special golden key attached to a blue ribbon to handle, of which no other copies could be made, just for the king’s personal rooms. Personal attendants in general were proud about their status symbols as such, she added, and often bragged about it—but to be the king’s groom was most coveted of all.

In the early 17th century, Sir Thomas Erskine was King James I’s captain of the yeoman of the guard, and eagerly combined this job with being Groom of the Stool, which, as Keith Brown wrote in his book on noble power in Scotland, gave him “crucial influence over the king.” Grooms were sometimes embroiled in other areas of political power, too—Henry VIII’s groom Sir Henry Norris was politically involved with the queen, Anne Boleyn, and was executed along with her after she fell from her husband’s favor. According to Worsley, both James I and his successor King Charles I were so swayed by their grooms’ counsel that in some respects, political discussions of the king’s privy helped fuel the 17th-century English Civil War.

In Sovereign Ladies, Maureen Waller noted that queens tended not to employ this royal particular service, though they could marry into a powerful position through a Groom of the Stool. A woman named Katherine Ashley held the position for Queen Elizabeth I in the 1500s, though she was actually Chief Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber, and attended to the queen in her private day room, helping her bathe and wash her hair. In modern times and as of 2006, the queen often has her own private bathroom, Waller added.

There have been three female Grooms of the Stool, Elizabeth Boyle (not pictured) to Queen Dowager Henrietta Maria, and to Queen Anne: Sarah Churchill (left) and Elizabeth Seymour (right). SARAH CHURCHILL BY CHARLES JERVAS; LADY ELIZABETH PERCY BY SIR GODFREY KNELLER/PUBLIC DOMAIN

During the mid 1700s, using a Groom of the Stool at the close stool itself began to fell out of favor. Sir Michael Stanhope for Edward VI was the last to perform the full job; the last Groom of the Stool was technically James Hamilton for the Prince of Wales in the 1800s, though by then the position had shifted to dressing duties, and was renamed “Groom of the Stole” referring to the latin word for clothing, stola. Victorians, it seems, were a little more interested in true privacy.

source: http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/king-toilet-attendant-england

by Natalie Zarrelli

http://www.thisoldtoilet.com

Replacement Toilet Lids and Seats - The best time to go to the toilet on a plane - This Old Toilet 800-658-4521

Using a public toilet is a struggle at the best of times, but there’s nothing worse than having to go on a plane, where the space is cramped and the air flow is minimal.

If you’ve worried about this in the past, or just want to know when there will be the least amount of toilet traffic, then pay attention because former flight attendant Erika Roth is in the know and has some wisdom to share.

According to Roth, it’s important to know exactly when the best time to go to the toilet on a plane is, to make sure there’s no one else waiting in a queue behind you and do your business in peace.

Roth says the best time to go is “as soon as the seatbelt sign is off, before drink service begins,” she says.

And if you’re worried about the ventilation problem in the bathroom, and the odour that either you or your fellow passengers have created, then Roth has another tip.

“Ask an attendant for packets of coffee grounds, then hang them up in the lavatory. The grounds will soak up the odour,” she says.

The flight attendants will understand what you’re up to, but your fellow passengers will be none the wiser and they’ll appreciate the gesture, too.

If you think that a few coffee grounds will go unappreciated, try telling that to the passengers and crew who were on the flight that had to be grounded because of the ‘pungent’ smell coming from the bathroom.

“Insane! Our BA flight to Dubai returned back to Heathrow because of a smelly poo in the toilet! 15hrs until next flight… #britishairways,” passenger Abhishek Sachdev Tweeted about the incident at the time.

source; https://travel.startsat60.com/#!/articles/the-best-time-to-go-to-the-toilet-on-a-plane

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