About Thomas Crapper
Thomas Crapper (baptised 28 September 1836 – 27 January 1910) was an English plumber and businessman. He founded Thomas Crapper & Co in London, a plumbing equipment company. His notability with regard to toilets has often been overstated, mostly due to the publication in 1969 of a tongue-in-cheek biography by New Zealand satirist Wallace Reyburn. Crapper held nine patents, three of them for water closet improvements such as the floating ballcock. He improved the S-bend plumbing trap in 1880 by inventing the U-bend. The firm's lavatorial equipment was manufactured at premises in nearby Marlborough Road (now Draycott Avenue). The company owned the world's first bath, toilet and sink showroom in King's Road. Crapper was noted for the quality of his products and received several royal warrants. Manhole covers with Crapper's company's name on them in Westminster Abbey have become one of London's minor tourist attractions. As the first man to set up public showrooms for displaying sanitary ware, Crapper became known as an advocate of sanitary plumbing, popularising the notion of installation inside people's homes. Its first recorded application to bodily waste, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, appeared in 1846, 10 years after Crapper was born, under a reference to a crapping ken, or a privy, where ken means a house.
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