HISTORY MUST HAVE HELD its breath that day in 1884 at the Health Exhibition in London. One can imagine the inventor’s subordinates gathered around, drained of emotion, brows furrowed. The room crackles with tension. Only Thomas Crapper himself, brimming with confidence, chain pull in hand and poised for the big test, seems ready to meet the challenge head-on.

Was there a countdown? We don’t know. But we do know that Crapper pulled the chain, and down went three wads of paper. Another chain-pull, and away went a sponge. Then four paper sheets stuck to the bowl with grease. And then, Mother of all Flushes, 10 apples.

It was mankind’s greatest hygienic breakthrough, the high-water mark of plumbing history. But the true, behind-the-scenes story of the flush toilet has been tossed in history’s garbage can. There was no Watson as there was for Bell, no flash in the sky like the one in the New Mexico desert that ushered in the Atomic Age, no invitation to the White House as there was for Edison.

Even more tragically, Thomas Crapper has been robbed of his good name. He has become the butt of jokes. His achievement has been lost in the lore of Latrinalia. The end result is that Thomas Crapper, the man who did more than any other to clear the air of the Western world, is in danger of being forgotten. His place in posterity hangs by the barest of threads.

History is in arrears on this matter of Thomas Crapper. It is time to get to the bottom of this great historic slight and make Thomas Crapper a household name as he deserves. Consider, first, the magnitude of his achievement.

The flush toilet, or water closet, as it is called in Crapper’s homeland, changed the course of history by allowing society to live with itself. It is more than valves and arms and floats that hiss and gurgle; the flush toilet is the very symbol of modern civilization. It has done more for public health than all the doctors since Hippocrates. Life without the water closet is, for most of us, a horror beyond imagination, so unspeakable and unacceptable that we cannot conjure up the prospect.

Over the years, many alternatives have been tried: compost toilets, oil-flushed toilets, bioelectric toilets, incinerating toilets and biological toilets.

But the old Thomas Crapper WC is still the best, head and shoulders above the rest. Lift off the lid of your own right now, and you’ll see this basic mechanism-the genius of Thomas Crapper, which has stood the test of time. In more than a century, neither the inner workings nor the basic shape of Crapper’s invention has changed.

Here now, to set the record straight, is the real story of the man who made it all possible. Thomas Crapper, plumber extrordinaire, inventor of the Valveless Water-Waste Preventer, founder of Thomas Crapper & Co., Sanitary Specialties, of Chelsea, London, est. 1848.

The best documentation is "Flushed With Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper," by Wallace Reyburn (Prentice Hall, 1971), a slim, useful volume originally published in England, which unfortunately has been out of print for many years. It is amply illustrated with photographs of Crapper and his products.

According to Reyburn, Crapper was born in Yorkshire in 1837, the same year Victoria ascended the English throne. He came to London at the age of 11, but rather than just bumming around, he found work as a plumber. In 1861 he started his own business as a sanitary engineer. London had just installed a sewer system, and Crapper and other plumbers were inundated with work.

In those days toilets were flushed by a cistern, and often water ran ceaselessly through the toilet. Authorities feared that this could dry up water supplies. Many plumbers were working on a more water-efficient toilet, but it was Thomas Crapper who perfected the flush toilet with his "Crapper’s Valveless Water-Waste Preventer. One Moveable Part Only. Certain Flush With Easy Pull. Will Flush When Only Two-Thirds Full."

There were flush toilets before Crapper came along, but none of them worked very well. Crapper’s genius was a mechanism that allowed water to flush the WC only when necessary. In short, he invented the valve that made flushing practical. Once word of Crapper’s triumph leaked out, every household in London wanted one.

Never before or since has necessity so mothered an invention.

IN HINDSIGHT, WE REALIZE THAT Thomas Crapper solved a problem that had plagued mankind right from the beginning. Indeed, the idea of a separate room for the disposal of bodily wastes goes back at least 10,000 years to the island of Orkney, off Scotland. And in 2000 BC in the palace of King Minos, at Knossos, on Crete, there was a splendid bathroom and latrine with a reservoir for flushing water. But there things stood for the next 38 centuries or so.

There were public latrines in Rome that had a long stick with a sponge tied to one end that was immersed in a bucket of water. The latrine user would cleanse his person with the sponge and return it to the bucket. This gave rise, no doubt, to the expression "the wrong end of the stick."

As you might suspect, there was a lot of plague and famine, but the ancients believed they were the result of divine retribution rather than a mere plumbing problem.

In the Middle Ages, we come across the first instance of euphemism in the matter of waste disposal. The privy came to be called the "garderobe," which actually was a kind of wardrobe. It’s the same thinking that in modern times led to this area being called the "cloak room."

Many castles kept the garderobes in small vaulted chambers within the outside walls; they discharged through the wall into the moat below, proving conclusively that medieval moats were not just defensive but offensive as well. And thus we realize that it took more courage for a knight to swim a moat in real life than Errol Flynn could ever imagine while acting in one of Hollywood’s knights-and-castles epics. These garderobes were a break in the defense system, and several castles were captured by invaders who climbed up the garderobe shaft.

There were two principal forms of privies in these days-the chamber pot and the close stool.

The chamber pot under the bed was an indispensable feature of homes in colder climates because it removes the need for a freezing nocturnal trip to the outdoor privy. Chamber pots became very elaborate and often had likenesses of enemies of the owner at the bottom. In England, some carried a portrait of Napoleon in the target area. Others came with poetry: "Use me well and keep me clean/And I’ll not tell what I have seen."

During this period, the British had an expression-"gardyloo!"-that was roughly the equivalent of the golfer’s "fore!" Gardyloo was a corruption of the French, garde l’eau, "watch out for the water." In his "English Social History," G.M. Trevelyan explains how it came about:

"Far overhead, the windows opened, 5,6, or 10 storeys in the air, and the close stools…discharged the collected filth of the past 24 hours into the street. It was good manners for those above to cry, "Gardy-loo!" before throwing. The returning roysterer cried back, "Haud yer han," and ran with humped shoulders, lucky if his vast and expensive full-bottomed wig was not put out of action by a cataract of filth."

Privies in the form of a box with a lid were called "close stools" in England and "necessary chairs" in France. Louis XIV had 264 of them scattered through Versailles, each one fit for a king. They were stool-like, and they played some official role at court. Kings (but not queens) treated it as a throne at which audiences could be granted, and it was from this position that Louis XIV announced his plans to marry Madame de Maintenon.

Jump forward now to the 1960s, and we learn from biographer Rober Caro that while he was in the White House, Lyndon Johnson granted similar audiences while thus enthroned to key subordinates, including Cabinet members.

But back to the 14^th Century, when latrines emptied directly into rivers and caused the Black Death, which wiped out between one-third and one-half of the total population of England. There was a public latrine on London Bridge that discharged into the Thames, giving rise to the saying that the bridge was built for wise men to go over, fools to go under. The White Friars of the Carmelite monastery nearby complained that the orders of the fleet River were so bad that they "overcome the frankincense burnt at the alter."

Flush toilets came on the scene in the 19^th Century, but they were in-efficient. An 1852 textbook offered this advice to architecture students on the placing of the privy: "A fashion prevails for thrusting these noisome things into the midst of sleeping chambers and living rooms, pandering to effeminacy and, at times, surcharging the house their offensive odor. Out of the house they belong; and if they, by any means, find their way within its walls proper, the fault will not be laid at our door."

There were water-closet patents before Crapper’s, but each was plagued by improper valves that kept sewer gases in the house or resulted in backups. And so the problems continued. There were cholera epidemics around the middle of the 19^th Century that claimed 30,000 lives in London alone. For several especially sultry days in 1859, Parliament was suspended while the Thames reeked and seethed in the boiling sun.

INTO THIS MESS LEAPT THOMAS Crapper. About 1870 the British Board of Trade put the word out that it needed a more efficient flush toilet, and it was Crapper who came up with the best solution. You can still see it today in the comfort of your own home: a float, a metal arm and a siphonic action to empty the reservoir.

Crapper wasn’t content to sit on his laurels. He had many other inventions, including an automatic flushing urinal and the self-rising toilet seat, designed to offset the problem of splashy males. He was commissioned to install the bathrooms at Edward VII’s new country home at Sandringham, and his firm was granted three other royal warrants.

One of his WCs was installed at the Angel Hotel in Doncaster, and when Queen Victoria came to town, she made use of it. This royal flush made Crapper even more famous, though it put the hotel in a quandary; numerous hostelries advertised that "Queen Victoria Slept Here," but a sign along the same lines capitalizing on Her Highness brief visit to the Angel seemed out of the question. And so it remained Victoria’s original secret.

Thomas Crapper passed away on Jan. 17, 1910. If ever a man left the world a better place than he found it, it was he. Or, to borrow Churchill’s phrase, never have so many owed so much to one man. But almost immediately, a conspiracy began taking potshots at him.

Since his death, there has been a deluge of books and articles that make an end run around Crapper’s achievement, either by diluting it or not mentioning it at all. Indeed, there have even been claims that Crapper never existed.

Slowly but surely, the lid is coming off the controversy. Jerry Tucker, publisher of the respected American trade magazine Plumbing & Mechanical, traveled to England in 1986 to seek enlightenment on what his magazine calls the "Continuing Crapper Controversy." Tucker came to the conclusion that Crapper did exist and was prominent in the plumbing field.

Research at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago concludes that there was a Thomas Crapper, that he lived from 1836 to 1910, that he founded a plumbing-fixture company in London in 1861 and that he made many innovations in his products, all of which bore his name.

When the Bathroom Readers Institute, Berkeley, Cal., claimed that Crapper was a hoax in 1988 book, "Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader," it got a flood of letters from readers protesting the claim, and as a result, the BRI has turned the other cheek.

Today, the head of the institute, John (he swears that’s his first name) Javno, concedes: "Thomas Crapper is a real person, and he really did own a company and manufactured flush toilets and made many improvements on them. People familiar with scholarly research into this subject have confirmed this, and I certainly believe it. But whether he invented the flush toilet as we now it is probably lost to history. It’s a good example of the fact that the things that are ordinary in our lives, or at least that we take for granted tend to get overlooked historically."

Dr. Robert H. Bell, English professor at Williams College, also has plunged into the controversy. He recently studied London’s Registry of deaths and found no mention of Crapper, but he was advised that at least 5 percent of all deaths during the period were unrecorded. Then Bell went to the Library of Congress, where he got his hands on "The Post Office London Directory for 1897," and there, on page 525, was, "Numbers 50,52 and 54 Marlboro Road: Crapper, Thomas and Co., sanitary engineers."

Professor Bell came away firmly seated in the Crapper camp-though he wonders how the word "crap" could come into recorded use in 1846-when Crapper was only 9 years old. "I still have moments, sitting in the smallest room in my house, when I wonder: Did destiny or coincidence give the inventor a name that already meant excrement or defecation?"

INTERESTINGLY, THE WORD "crapper" is better known in the U.S. than in England. Thomas Crapper did a lot of installations for the British military, and when American troops came to England during World War *, they invariably noticed that the toilets were manufactured by "T. Crapper, Chelsea." Probably the only reason British troops didn’t use the word was that the sight of the name "Crapper" was already a very familiar one to them.

Sadly, "crapper" has been shortened to "crap" in America- and become principally a synonym for non-sense as when Willy Loman says in "Death of a Salesman," "I’m not interested in stories of the past or any crap of that kind."

For all its richness, the English language lacks a single non-euphemistic word for Thomas Crapper’s invention. Toilet? That’s from the French toilette, which means dressing room. Other common terms for this place are john, potty, restroom, lavatory, bathroom and head. The British call it a WC or a loo (probably from the old warning, "gardyloo!").

One of the most unusual euphemisms is "humoresque," which went out of vogue with rail passenger service. But restrooms of passenger trains almost invariably had a sign that read, "Passengers Will Please Refrain From Flushing Toilets While the Train Is Standing in the Station." As everyone knew, those words could be sung to the tune of Dvorak’s "humoresque" if you added "I love" to accommodate the last three notes. Try it.

Throughout much of the world, there is a general squeamishness about the place that Thomas Crapper made habitable. Architects are taught to hide the bathroom, because people do not like to be seen emerging from it, and in general most people say as little as possible about it-and that may help explain the decline of the Crapper name.

For the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953, a frightful scenario reared its ugly head: Planners feared that just as the crown was being placed on the royal head, all of the toilets in Westminster Abbey would flush, giving the ceremony a cascading and embarrassing symphony. Reliable troops and BBC technicians were called in to get a handle on the situation. After extensive tests, it was found that even in the unlikely event that all toilets were to be flushed at the same time, the sound could not be heard inside the abbey. Nevertheless, we’ve come a long way sine 1960, when Jack Paar, the host of NBC’s "Tonight Show," temporarily quit the program because the network cut him off the air for telling a story that involved a water closet. Paar didn’t even say "water closet," he said "WC." It was a huge national controversy with splashy headlines. But 30 years later, there was barely a ripple when Slash, the guitarist for the heavy-metal rock group Guns N’ Roses, staggered up on the stage at the American Music Awards Show and uttered the f-word-twice. If Jack Paar was watching, he must have made a run for the WC.

In her 1978 book "Temples of Convenience," Lucinda Lamton asks plaintively, albeit euphemistically: "The lavatory is an intimate friend to us all, and we should honour it as such. It is undeniable that a glorious throne with a welcoming wooden seat makes us laugh with pleasure; why then do we minimize its importance, making it a mere receptacle, a necessary evil?"

Time was when every public water closet was distinctive and had a "private badge," or name, like Orion, Cedric, Sultan and Aeneas. People would identify them and catalog them. The romance has gone out of the toilet long ago, but the trend may have bottomed out.

The Japanese have jumped into world leadership in toilet technology, enthroning the bathroom as a shrine for both inventiveness and artistry.

Consider the Toto Co.’s Washlet a deluxe toilet with built-in hot-water cleaning and hot-air drying mechanisms that could send Scott Paper stock plunging.

Toto also has developed a toilet that can check the users’ health on site. Instead of the urine going down the drain, it is whisked away for all kinds of tests. It also has a handy armrest that records body temperature, pulse and blood pressure. And once the results are in the can, they can be sent by computer modem to the doctor’s office for analysis.

Market research showed that Japanese women flush an average of 2.5 times per sitting to drown out embarrassing or offensive sounds, and so for them, there is the Sound Princess, which plays a recording of flushing water, a great conservation measure that would even make an old water-saver like Thomas Crapper stand up and take notice.

HOW IMPORTANT IS THOMAS CRAPPER’S invention? In 1973 America faced a nationwide shortage of toilets, and the housing industry ground to a halt, threatening the entire economy. The Baby Boom had fueled so many housing starts that toilet manufacturers got caught with their pants down and couldn’t keep up with the demand. New houses, landscaped and ready for occupancy, awaited the arrival of toilets. "You can’t settle on a house that doesn’t have a toilet," moaned one Realtor.

One of the biggest problems confronting planners for Philadelphia’s Bicentennial in 1976 was how to provide enough restrooms for when in the course of human events it became necessary for tourists to…The restrooms were the most-visited attraction of the celebration, well ahead of Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell.

So versatile is Thomas Crapper’s invention that it has been used in public opinion polling. In 1980 an Iowa radio station set up operations in the Emmesburg water plant and asked all those who were voting for Jimmy Carter in the Democratic presidential primary to flush their toilets. Then they watched the water level at the town tower. It dropped one-tenth of one foot, indicating 300 flushed. Then they asked for Ted Kennedy supporters to do the same, and there was no appreciable drop in the pressure indicating, accurately as it turned out, that Kennedy was in deep water in Iowa.

Officials in Ocean City, Md, have used a similar method to estimate how many visitors come to the Atlantic playground. A city agency has developed a mathematical formula, called Demonflush, that figures population on a given day in the beach season by the number of toilet flushes.

The toilet also shows promise as a television rating system, at least for commercials. In Buffalo, several water mains broke this year during an NFL playoff game between the Bills and the Miami Dolphins because everyone flushed during commercials and time-outs.

The lack of public water closets is considered by many to be a factor in the decline of the downtowns of many American cities. "The price for not providing public facilities may be further discouragement for many people from the urban center,: the New England Journal of Medicine said a few years ago.

Everyone probably wonders how the space-shuttle astronauts do it. Well, things have come a long way since 1961 when astronaut Alan B. Shephard Jr. wet his space suit as he sat helplessly strapped in the Freedom capsule waiting to become the first American in space. It's tricky because there's no gravity up there. You've seen those pictures of stuff floating in the cabin. Well, NASA sent out a call for several contractors to come up with a solution. It was sort of an elimination contest, and General Electric brought in the winner - a space-age WC that defies gravity.

Lest we take Thomas Crapper's genius lightly, the nation's top space engineers said they had more trouble developing a zero-gravity toilet that any other piece of equipment. The system is complicated but the astronauts claim it handles the stuff right. The latest version installed in the space shuttle Endeavor for its flight last January cost the whopping $23.4 million.

America is only a few generations out of the outhouse, but nowhere has Thomas Crapper's invention been embraced with more vigor. The water closet has touched its very soul. It's America's favorite reading room. The one place where cleanliness is next to godliness. Is it any wonder that American travelers often step on foreign soil with trepidation about the bathroom arrangements. Indeed, when President Busch went to Turkey last July, they installed a good old Crapper-style toilet for him in a reception room at the palace. Turkish toilets, it seems, don't have seats.

Toilets are good for the economy. Americans spent $2.9 billion on toilet paper alone in 1990. Are they good for business? Bet your bottom dollar. One of the most profitable shopping centers in the United States is the Cherry Creek Mall in Denver, and when market experts sought the reason for its success, it came down to the public toilets: clean and posh.

There are some signs that the long neglect of Thomas Crapper is coming to an end. In 1978 the Greater London Council considered placing a historic plaque on the original plumbing shop, but the area on King's Road in Chelsea where he worked was bombed during World War II and redeveloped, and it was impossible to find the Crapper workshop. In 1988, British officials began a drive to upgrade public toilets by offering a prize for the most sanitary loo installed in all England - the Thomas Crapper award. In America, V.E. Mauck Plumbing Supplies, in Martinsburgh, West Virginia, has celebrated Thomas Crapper Day annually since 1983 with special sales and promotions on January 17^th, the anniversary of his death.

But these are piddling gestures, given the magnitude of the man. Today, only one in five American patents is issued to individuals; the rest go to corporations. The rugged, seat-of-the-pants individual inventors like Thomas Crapper toiling away in his garage, is a thing of the past. Crapper's name belongs with those of giants like Wright, Morse, Fulton, Marconi, and Edison. Who among these men built a better mousetrap and had the world beat a path to their door?

Ironically, the name can be found in Westminster Abbey among the great tombstones of England's greatest figures. The inscription "Thos. Crapper, Sanitary Engineer, Chelsea" is on their manhole covers.

It's time for Thomas Crapper to take a seat in the National Plumber's Hall of Fame at Skokie, Illinois beside such legends as Walter Kohler, R.T. Crane, and John Hammes (inventor of the garbage disposal). Indeed, let's rename it the Thomas Crapper Hall of Fame. Time to call to account those historians who have ever credited his work to someone else.

Let's get the Postal Service to come out with a Thomas Crapper commemorative stamp (mailing the first-day issue from Flushing, NY), build a Rodin-like statue in Johnstown, PA, and observe each Jan 17^th as Crapper Day with a 21-flush salute and a toast to Thomas Crapper. Bottoms up.

But nothing would honor the inventor of mankind's greatest convenience more than to incorporate his name into the language, lower case, as we've done for Rudolf Diesel, James Watt, Lord Chesterfield, the Earl of Davenport, Henry Shrapnel, John B. Stetson, Sylvester Graham, Cummingham Boycott, William Russell Frisbie, the Earl of Sandwich, Arnold Ruben, Amelia Jenks Bloomer…..

The Crapper name must live on!