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| American
Sanitary Plumbing Museum |
In our tour of strange museums, we stop at a museum in Worcester,
Massachusetts that flushes out a particular part of the
human experience: a place that visitors shower with praise,
but that might give you a sinking feeling. The American
Sanitary Plumbing Museum is the butt of a lot of jokes. It's
also a shrine to the history of plumbing.
The joke is that in most museums you generally have to search
for a toilet. Here, toilets abound, some of them dating back
to the early nineteenth century. You'll see ornate porcelain
toilets, chain-pull toilets with high wooden tanks, and an "earth
cabinet" that collected the user's waste in lime instead of
water. There's even toilet paper from the 1800's, referred to
back then as "boudoir paper."
Listen:
From corncobs to paper - the evolution of toilet tissue.
The museum was founded by Worcester plumbing equipment distributor
Charles Manoog in 1979. Manoog was getting ready to retire and
says he wanted to give something back to the profession. Today,
his son Russ Manoog runs the distribution business. Down the
street, in a refurbished warehouse, Russ's wife, B.J. Manoog
curates the only known plumbing museum in the world.
If you'd like to tour the American Sanitary Plumbing Museum
in Worcester, Massachusetts and learn all you've never known
about the subject, you'll have to wait until fall. The museum
is closed for the summer, and re-opens in September. Visiting
hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
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