if you haven't visited the GR wiki lately....a hot find

[Mark Kohut]

 joke of flaming toilet paper taken from the book "Flushed With Pride": ''One must be frank and admit that not all of Crapper’s developments met with immediate success. What was called the Trough Closet was, it would have appeared, a dandy idea for an inexpensive yet efficient flushing system for rows of toilets ‘in Schools, Workhouses, Factories, etc.’ A huge cistern flushed the water down through all the toilets (‘Quotations given for any number of Persons’) and then into a trough underneath which, like a little underground stream, carried all away. But Crapper had not reckoned with the devilment of the boys in the workhouses, who had very little fun anyway. 
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  + Boys used to crumple up a big bit of paper, set light to it and drop it down the toilet upstream, to have the occupants leaping into the air with howls of anguish as it floated along to the outlet. This made it necessary for Crapper to bring out his Improved Trough Closet Range in 1902 in which each toilet had a water seal underneath and thus ‘all the objections hitherto raised to Trough Closets are removed’. 
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  + from Flushed With Pride, The Story of Thomas Crapper by Wallace Reyburn, published in the UK in 1969 and in the US in 1971.'' 
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