14 Weird and Wonderful Facts About the Bathroom You (Probably) Didn’t Know

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We spend a lot of time talking about bathroom renovations, offering buying advice, and giving a helping hand to whirlpool bath owners. So, with today’s blog post, we thought we’d do something a little bit different. Our team has plumbed the depths of the web to find the weirdest and wackiest bathroom facts we could find — and here are our 14 favourites.

The average person visits the toilet 2500 times per year, which means we’ll spend about 3 years of our lives in the bathroom. Good thing we invented smartphones, right?
Talking of smartphones, polls suggest that 75% of us now use our phones while using the toilet. Which is fine… as long as people are washing their hands.
Of those people who do use their smartphone while sitting on the toilet, statistics suggest that 7 million of those handsets end up being dropped in the loo every year.
We now have our very own “World Toilet Day”, which has been officially sanctioned by the United Nations. Taking place of November 19^th 2019, the day is designed to raise awareness of sanitation problems across the globe.
The oft-repeated suggestion that Thomas Crapper was the man who invented the flushing toilet isn’t strictly true. He wasn’t the first, (more on that in a moment), but he did improve the design of the flushing mechanism.
While there is some controversy on this particular topic, most historians believe that the world’s first flushable toilet was described by Sir John Harington in 1596. It’s from this gentleman’s name that we derive the slang, “Going to the john”.
Every flush of your toilet uses approximately 15 litres of water.
The world’s first whirlpool bath wasn’t a whirlpool bath at all. It was, in fact, a portable unit which anyone could drop into their tub to create the effect. It wasn’t long until the its makers, Jacuzzi, created a fully integrated version in 1968.
The world’s most expensive toilet cost $19 million to create. It’ll be tough to see it in action, however, because it’s located on the International Space Station.
Back in 2011, a Delta airline pilot triggered a mid-air terror alert by accidentally locking himself in the bathroom. When a passenger with a heavy accent tried to alert the cockpit about the pilot’s plight, the co-pilot panicked and triggered a security alert.
There is a museum in Suwon, South Korea dedicated to the toilet. Its name is, quite fittingly, “Mr. Toilet House”.
By the time the fifth century rolled around, there were approximately 900 public baths in Rome. Originally designed to be used exclusively by the city’s poorer residents, they eventually became social venues for wealthy folks too.
Do you know why you “prune” when you soak in the bath too long? One theory suggests that the dead dry cells on the surface of your skin absorb water and become larger, causing the skin to fold in on itself in that recognisable pattern.
There is a world record for the longest game of Monopoly ever played in a bathtub. How long did the game last? 99 hours! We can’t help but wonder how much of an issue pruning was for these folks.

Well, there you have it — and we hope you learned something new. We certainly did! Don’t forget, if you have any (slightly more normal) questions about your whirlpool bath, you can always call us.