What do you know about the history of the toilet? The earliest known toilets date back to ancient Mesopotamia, some 5,000 years ago. According to the Nature magazine, these simple pit toilets were lined with a series of long ceramic tubes that prevented the solid contents from seeping into the surrounding soil, while also allowing liquids to slowly seep out through small holes.

More complex toilets first appeared nearly a millennium later in the ancient Minoan civilisation. These public toilets show the first evidence of water being used to carry away waste, a practice that was later accepted by the Romans. Although Roman toilets were very similar to their Greek predecessors in that they were rows of perforated benches located above the sewers, they did have one sophisticated innovation, which was centralised plumbing. This meant that instead of each individual washing their waste with water from a nearby ceramic pot, all the unwanted material was conveyed by slow-moving water to a centralised sewer where the waste was flushed into the same river.

The first modern flushing toilet Ajax was devised in 1596 by an Englishman, Sir John Harington,  a courtier to Queen Elizabeth I. It reportedly required 7.5 gallons (28 litres) of water to flush and notoriously lacked an S-bend, which meant that odours could waft back into the room without being curbed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ajax never really caught on with the public.

In 1775, Scottish inventor Alexander Cumming filed the first patent for a flushing toilet. His design included an S-bend and a more complex valve system, similar to those found in today's toilets.

Since then, toilets have developed increasingly modern and gradually they have become strongly associated with technology, greatly enhancing the quality of people's lives.