- Historic Sites The Bathroom: An Epic THE SEEMINGLY simple act
of bringing it inside the house required not only medical
revelation and technological revolution but the remaking of
human habits as old as time May/June 1999 | Volume 50, Issue 3
Indeed. What room of the house incorporates modern notions of
convenience quite so well as the bathroom? What one room so
delineates the house of today from the house of old? Yet in 1926
the bathroom was still far from universal. No one knows exactly
how many there were, but even when the U.S. Census Bureau began
tabulating such things in 1940, only a bit more than half of
American homes (55 percent) had at least one complete private
bathroom. By the mid-1990s bathrooms were very nearly universal,
and long forgotten was the slow process by which the bathroom
became an essential element of modern civilization. Take its
fundamental feature. Of all the standard conveniences of modern
life, perhaps none that is so simple took so long coming into
use as the toilet (or water