Toilet

A toilet is a piece of sanitary hardware built to collect human urine and feces for disposal, either using water as a flush toilet or working without water as a dry toilet, and designed for either sitting or squatting use. The earliest known toilet dates to about 3200 BC in Uruk in Mesopotamia, and by around 2800 BC the Indus Valley Civilization had built private toilets connected to underground sewer networks across its cities. The modern flush toilet took shape around 1770, with Alexander Cumming's S trap an important part of making it practical, though indoor water closets did not become common until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sanitation access remains a live global issue, since roughly 419 million people still practice open defecation for lack of a toilet, poor sanitation continues to spread diseases such as cholera and dysentery through the fecal oral route, and the United Nations has made sanitation access a target under Sustainable Development Goal 6.