Major advancements in the technology of the flush toilet itself occurred throughout the 19th century, really starting with the S-trap in 1775 and including all sorts of different valves, traps, and pumps. The first public pay flush toilets opened in Hyde Park in 1851 as an exhibition, but stuck around after. The technology was popular and put into upscale hotels and homes that were being built new, as well as some older homes. However, what really needed to catch up was the system of running water and drainage. So, while you would have found flushing toilets in new buildings in more populated areas by the turn of the century, many other places had to wait or make due with flush toilets that were independent of this system and required refilling the water by hand and other regular cleaning. For Americans the major hookup to running water occurred in the first few decades of the 20th century, having made it's way fairly far out into the country by the mid-century with farmhouses relying on well-water pumps to supply their own system.

While the idea of having private bathroom in every hotel room was a goal by the end of the 19th century (and a bit of a bragging right) and some pre-made home designs featured the room as early as the 1850s, by the 1910s this was fairly standard practice for all new structures. It wasn't so easy for older structures or for tenement housing. In 1901 NYC ordered that each floor of a new apartment building be furnished with water. It was later expanded to every apartment. By the mid 1930s 89% of NYC apartments had a bath or shower, meaning running water and waste systems.

In Virginia City, a Nevada mining town founded in 1859 after one of history's richest gold and silver strikes. In 1860, when George Hearst built the mining superintendent's house/office for the Gould and Curry Mine, he installed what was apparently the community's first flush toilet (it was later called the Mackay mansion](http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/nevada/gou.htm)). In 1875/76, the community built the magnificent Fourth Ward School](http://fourthwardschool.org/), which included flush toilets. Because the school district feared that many children wouldn't know how to operate them, they had spring-loaded seats, which flushed the toilets automatically when someone stood up after business.

The mining district began to fail after 1880. I knew people born in the 1940s who said they were embarrassed to have acquaintances from nearby Reno and Carson come to Virginia City because many in the old mining district still used outhouses in the 1950s and 1960s. Their oral histories were part of a collection program I supported with a grant, with the results in the Fourth Ward School Museum archive and at Special Collections at the University of Nevada, Reno.

The example of this single western community shows a cross section of the possibilities when it came to flush toilets: a remarkable innovation in 1860s only for the wealthy; public health innovation that was still very much a novelty in 1876; a standard yet to be achieved by the 1950s.