From "romantic city" to "the city of shit", open-air toilets show a real Europe.

If you have traveled to Europe, you can see this, this and this in the street. After a short wait, passers-by will use it in public. Although Europeans look relaxed when gathering people to urinate, if I were you, I would be embarrassed to blush on this occasion.

Why do Europeans, who call themselves "civilized people", like to gather people to urinate in the street so much?

In fact, Europeans have been urinating in the street for more than 2 years. If you have seen foreign historical documentaries, you will find that walking in the streets of most European countries was once a very disgusting thing. American writer Hoding Carter wrote in the book History of Toilets: "In France, potty emptiers sympathize with pedestrians outside. Whenever they dump, they will shout,' Be careful, water!

After a long time, the street will become a big cesspit, but the civilized European continent was so barbaric hundreds of years ago. "In many western classical novels, we often see people dumping their urine on the street, and pedestrians have to admit that they are unlucky even if they are splashed all over.

Because they have done this behavior themselves, although many people suffered from it, in the next thousand years, people didn't feel anything wrong with following it. Instead, they formed the habit of gentlemen walking more on the left side of women, because this way they could keep out the "dirty rain" that came from the volley at any time.

The world-famous classic Louvre was once the dirtiest place. Anthropologist Robert H. Lowie wrote in Civilization and Savagery that everyone can make convenience at will in the yard, on the stairs, on the balcony and behind the door.

Francis I, as the king of France, saw that the Louvre had become a "public toilet", and his face naturally hung up.

in 1539, when he issued a decree, "we are unhappy and worried about the terrible waste of the beautiful environment in Paris", and declared that people who dump excrement illegally, but this law didn't work at all. The painter Leonardo da Vinci once worked out a detailed plan for a sanitary city, and his plan was to build a sufficient number of public toilets for the problem of excrement.

finally, in the spring of 183, the municipal government of Paris, France decided to install the first public urinal on the main road. This open-air urinal is very convenient to separate from the surrounding buildings, and it can also provide a light public space.

So in the following decades, open-air toilets developed rapidly in France. In their heyday, there were more than 1,5 urinals on the streets of Paris, all of which were different in shape, size and structure. Dialectically, the development of toilets can be approximately equal to the development of human civilization. It was in the 199s that men and women first entered the public consciousness when they used toilets.

In the American drama ally mcbeal, colleagues of the opposite sex in the law firm talk about everything in the bathroom used by men and women. This kind of scene can be found thousands of years ago, that is, ancient Rome. The ancient Greeks invented the beautifully decorated chamber pot because of their ease and love of beauty, and they always took it with them at banquets and trips.

The Romans were different. They paid attention to reality and invented sewers. However, not everyone could enjoy such sanitary facilities. The use license was expensive and only owned by a few wealthy families. Ordinary Roman families could only rely on public toilets, so public toilets, like bathrooms, became an important communication occasion in Rome.

In the eyes of many ancient Romans, the toilet was not only a useful place, but also a very important social place for gossip and business talks. They talked about politics and gossip in the heavily decorated bathroom, but the sanitary facilities were far less exquisite than the appearance of the public toilet.

Ancient Rome prided itself on its perfect water circulation system, which made the ditches always have running water and little smell, so one of the favorite places of ancient Rome was the toilet.

There may be many viewers who don't believe it. In some places, there was a "high respect" for excreta. In the 1th century, Hever, the tribal leader of the Welsh people, specially set up the post of "Minister of Urine". As the name implies, the Minister of Urine is the post of managing urine. Hever believes that urinating is a very precious and useful thing, which should not be wasted, and various Welsh communities have also appointed "manure mayors".

Ancient people didn't regard going to the toilet as a difficult thing to talk about, but modern people changed their attitudes greatly, and regarded excrement as a filthy thing. In order to express the word "toilet" implicitly, euphemisms emerged one after another, including but not limited to swamp, dumping pond, gentleman's house, necessary place, relaxing place, the smallest room and toilet. Only the last one has been used to this day, and it seems to be the only word that is easy to understand now.

Even if men and women don't separate toilets, public toilets in the city are always much better than open toilets. The semi-open space of street toilets will still bring people a sense of tension, but even if the shortcomings are so obvious, they have not been eliminated by indoor public toilets. This is to talk about the inconvenience of European public toilets.

Europeans love cleanliness, so the environment in public toilets is very good. However, a considerable number of toilets need to be charged, or there are staff at the door to sell tickets, or they need self-service coin-feeding. For many ordinary people, it is better to solve it in the open toilet.

If you are in China, if you are in a hurry when you are shopping, you will basically not be refused to borrow the toilet at any store. However, in Europe, passers-by must first become their customers if they want to use the toilet in the store. For example, McDonald's once printed the password of the toilet door in the store on the small ticket. Since European people like the open-air toilet so much, designers naturally have to innovate it.

In recent years, many new open-air toilets have been an eye-opener, and their privacy and convenience have been greatly improved. For example, the open-air urinal in France uses a spiral design instead of a door lock, which not only protects privacy, but also is convenient and rapid, and is specially designed for women.

The lift toilets in the Netherlands

On weekdays, they are disguised as sewage manhole covers, and when they need to be used, the small rooms with better sealing will slowly rise from the ground. However, many users of open-air toilets still have to face such an episode. When you go to the toilet, you watch the scenery, and people watching the scenery in the street are watching you. The appearance of toilets not only saves human civilization, but also makes Europeans and Americans live more decently.

In the United States, the cholera epidemic in the Civil War made people realize that it was not appropriate to throw the contents of urinals out of the window at random, and they began to have a deep sense of responsibility for public health.

In the 16th century, the British poet John Harrington invented the toilet, which gradually replaced the urinal.

In the 19th century, Thomas Kleppa, a plumber, improved the traditional toilet.

After the end of 19th century, public toilets became a common place in America.

Since then, human waste discharge has entered a modern period. Hoding Carter once praised: "The most obscure heroes in human history are the wise men who invented sewers and the humble plumbers." French artist Duchamp once brought a urinal to an art exhibition and named it "Spring", which became an anecdote in the history of art.

Toilets are popular in Europe and America, and Queen Victoria of Britain regards beautiful toilets as status symbols. In the United States, toilets represent a new way of life. In Far East Japan, the first flush toilet appeared in the old Iwasaki Mansion near Shinobazu Pond in Ueno, Tokyo, which is the residence of the eldest son of Iwasaki Yataro, the founder of Mitsubishi Consortium.

When it comes to toilets, you have to mention "asian squat" and "European Sit"!

The toilet brings out the grace of going to the toilet. With this elegant posture, people can sweep away the filth without effort, and at the same time block the bare body parts. Even if they appear in the scenes of film and television dramas, they will not feel dirty and embarrassed.

Squatting may not be possible, but even if it is considered as an indecent way to go to the toilet, Asians prefer squatting, with their feet completely on the ground, their hips close to their ankles, and their bodies kept stable. In the eyes of westerners who can only land on their toes, this posture is called "asian squat".

Europeans are also at a loss about squatting toilets. On well-known foreign video websites, some netizens "naively" thought that squatting pits were used to wash feet, and that "asian squat" and "sitting in Europe" only needed their own things. Japanese writer Masayoshi Saito, known as "Asian toilet critic", wrote in "Tokyo's Notes":

Use squatting toilets to defecate.

According to statistics, everyone spends about 15 minutes on "convenience" every day. In other words, people spend about one year in the toilet in their life.

In the past 2 years, modern public health facilities have prolonged the average life span of human beings by 2 years, and toilets have thus become the most important factor to prolong the life span of human beings. Every time you invest in public health facilities in 6 yuan, you can get an average return from 42 yuan in terms of saving medical expenses and improving productivity.

at least for now, human beings have never stopped trying and exploring to solve the urgent problems.