Thomas Crapper did not actually invent the flush toilet, but he was a wildly successful Victorian plumber who relentlessly promoted sanitary plumbing and proudly stamped his name on manhole covers across London.

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Thomas Crapper did not actually invent the flush toilet, but he was a wildly successful Victorian plumber who relentlessly promoted sanitary plumbing and proudly stamped his name on manhole covers across London. The actual modern flush toilet was invented much earlier by Sir John Harington in 1592 for Queen Elizabeth I, but Crapper's aggressive marketing in the 1880s permanently linked his surname to bathroom activities. American soldiers stationed in England during World War I saw the word "Crapper" cast into the iron cisterns and brought the slang term back home. History is incredibly unfair, completely ignoring the true royal inventor just to memorialize a shameless corporate self-promoter who happened to have the funniest possible name for the sanitation industry