Toilet Multimedia
Download MPEG video, MP3 audio, and ringtones of a flushing toilet
Everyone on today's Internet is searching for free multimedia downloads. MPEG video files, MP3 audio files, and those oddly captivating ringtones.
Well, in the interest of educating the toilet-using public, and more importantly, increasing my advertising revenue, here is an movie of a flushing toilet. My toilet, actually.
Not only a downloadable movie, but here is the extracted audio track as a downloadable MP3 file, and also converted to a downloadable ringtone.
What's up with the green stuff? It's toilet bowl cleaner. I didn't have tubes of tofu like the ones in that National Geographic channel documentary "Secrets of the Toilet" (which, by the way, used one of my pictures!), but I needed to enhance the flush visualization in some non-offensive way.
Download the free MP3 audio file (248 kB).
Download the free QCP ringtone file (488 kB).
The MPEG, MP3, and ringtone are free for the downloading. But if you especially enjoyed them and would like to contribute to the operation of the site, here is a PayPal tip jar:
Wow!
How was this magic accomplished?
It was easy.
First, capture video with my Fuji FinePix A805, being careful to avoid dropping the camera into the water.
Second, rotate the AVI file by 90° using the mencoder tool, and then convert that from AVI to MPEG using the very powerful ffmpeg tool.
Third, extract the audio track from the MPEG video file and save it as MP3, again using ffmpeg. Then insert the MP3 metadata tags with mp3info.
Fourth, convert the MP3 to the QCP format used for low-fi ringtones. See this page for instructions for how to convert audio files with free software.
Rose George's The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters is a fascinating description of sanitation conditions around the world. "2.6 billion people don't have sanitation. [....] Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box. [....] Poor sanitation, bad hygiene, and unsafe water — usually unsafe because it has fecal particles in it — cause one in ten of the world's illnesses. [....] Diarrhea — nearly 90 percent of which is caused by fecally contaminated food or water — kills a child every fifteen seconds. The number of children who have died from diarrhea in the last decade [1998-2008] exceeds the total number of people killed by armed conflict since the Second World War.
In September 2009, Morna Gregory and Sian James published a book titled Toilets of the World. It's pretty much the same theme that you find here — photographs and commentary on other people's plumbing.
The Porcelain God: A Social History of the Toilet, by Julie Horan, contends that civilization began with the toilet.
Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, edited by Laura Noren and Harvey Molotch, has essays by anthropologists, sociologists, and architects on the importance of the toilet, especially for urban dwellers.
Latrinae Et Foricae: Toilets in the Roman World describes the toilets of the Roman Empire from Iberia to Syria, and from North Africa to Hadrian's Wall in Britannia.
Toilets, Bathtubs, Sinks, and Sewers: A History of the Bathroom, explains the history of personal cleanliness and hygiene to children in grades 5-8.
| A Sani-Flush blue border indicates a toilet that I've used. |
How long have my Toilets of the World pages been around? I'm not exactly sure, although they started in the mid 1990s as a single page on a Purdue University server. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine lets you see what that looked like as far back as January 17, 1999.
My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001, although the Wayback Machine didn't notice its one enormous Toilet of the World page until January 17, 2002. Some time soon after that I split it into categories, and the collection has grown ever since.
In December, 2010 I registered the toilet-guru.com domain and moved the pages to a dedicated server.
If you're not bored yet, you might be interested in (or at least tolerate):
