We'll dispense with the bathroom humor and just give you a detailed description of how we found the toilet's inventor: Step number one was a search on "toilet history."

The first site listed in the results, Sulabh International Museum of Toilets, offered some very interesting exhibits, along with a detailed history of toilets. There we learned that seated toilets with drainage systems date back to 2500 B.C.

However, it seems the idea of toilets went down the drain until the mid-1700s. Reading further, we found the answer to your question -- the first valve-type flush toilet was introduced in 1738 by a man named J.F. Brondel.

Of course, the "water closet" had been invented 150 years earlier by John Harrington, and the valve toilet would undergo many serious revisions before it came to resemble the modern bathroom fixture we use today. Thankfully, most of the incremental improvements are fully credited in Sulabh's toilet history.

Strangely, there was one name that didn't appear anywhere in the fascinating document: Thomas Crapper. We'd long heard stories about the toilet being invented by man named Crapper. Had we been taken in by a schoolyard myth?

We went back... and found a page titled "The History of Plumbing". It informed us that Crapper didn't invent the toilet, but was an English plumber from the late 1800s who held nine patents for plumbing products.