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Indoor plumbing is only about 100 years old. The first flushing water closet dates back to 1500–1000 B.C. in Crete, where the people created sophisticated underground sewage and drainage systems. During the Middle Ages, most people used chamber pots and tossed their waste out of a window, regardless of who was walking below.
Sir John Harrington invented a flush toilet in 1596 for his godmother, Queen Elizabeth I, though she wouldn’t use it because of the sounds it made. The US Patent Office issued the first patent for a flushing toilet in 1775 to Alexander Cummings. In the late-19th century, a London plumbing impresario named Thomas Crapper manufactured one of the first widely successful lines of flush toilets. Crapper did not invent the toilet, but he did develop the ballcock, an improved tank-filling mechanism still used in toilets today.