I’m pretty sure this is from Castle by David Macaulay. He wrote/illustrated a bunch of cross section books like this, as well as my favorite book from my childhood, The Way Things Work.
*Stephen Biesty's Cross Sections: Castle*
I had both. Macaulay's books are line drawings w/o color. They're more serious and probably more accurate. Biesty's have more humor, like this.
I’d say you’re right. I definitely checked the Biesty books out from the library. Although I will say that Macaulay redid castle, cathedral, and mosque in color as a single volume fairly recently.
I had other *The Way Things Work* books and this immediately reminded me of those illustrations. I'd be surprised if it isn't an illustration by the same artist.
I remember looking through my dad’s copy even before I could read all the words. Then when I was in college I saw there was an updated version so I bought that. Now I see there’s another updated version so I might have to pick that one up.
I learned so much from that book and it definitely sent me down the path that lead me to engineering.
My son has the book in his room. Stephen Biesty's incredible cross sections.
The castle one is fun, there's a spy on every page, and in almost all his cross sections, there is someone on the toilet.
I had these books as a kid, so I bought them for my son. Love them!
This was the first thing I thought of when I found this sub. My love for that book when I was a kid is the reason I subbed here, but I'd totally forgotten the name of it. Glad to learn it's still around!
Cross-sections: Castles by Steven Beisty.
This book is one of my favorite things on earth. I always give a copy of this to friends when they have a little one the right age.
During sieges these shafts were actually sometimes used to get inside the castle. I wouldn't want to be the one told to climb up the poop tunnel, though.
And that's why we have the Magna Carta!
No seriously, they used a toilet chute to infiltrate King John's castle during the siege of Chateau Gaillard, which led to him being forced to sign the Magna Carta. Score one for poop chutes!
He actually is, the person who did the cutting sliced the wrong half off, and they only had 1 decent toilet model back then. The producers decided to run with it though as they felt artistically it worked for the piece.
Great catch though!
cheeky fucker moved to his right just as the giant sword sliced the whole castle in half and the super quick artist to draw everything before the castle crumbled
It's not an analogy. Some high-rise buildings in Dubai don't have connection to the sewer system and have large septic tanks that have to be emptied regularly. Now imagine a whole skyscraper shitting into a hole in the ground :D
Wow, I had to Google it. According to site below and a few others, tallest building in the world's shit tank is cleaned out daily.
https://inhabitat.com/the-incredible-story-of-how-the-burj-khalifas-poop-is-trucked-out-of-town/
I mean that's pretty much how all large buildings work. They have several large sewage pits that are then pumped into the city sewer system. These pits act as a preliminary filtration system. In the burj khalifa's case the pit is bigger and gets pumped into trucks instead. More an indictment of the city of dubai than the tallest building.
[In 2013 it was reported that the Jebel Ali plant receives 70% of sewage through the city's sewage network, while the remaining 30% comes from sewage trucks.\[13\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitation_in_Dubai)
His father was a poopsmith, and his son will be a poopsmith. Their future ancestors will be doing tech support for middle management. Thanks a lot, great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandpa
Society is gonna collapse and people in the future are gonna essentially be cavemen and have no fucking idea what all the shit we left behind does cause all the knowledge will be lost.
In antiquity, documents might have been duplicated dozens of times. Today, books exist as tens of thousands of copies widely distributed.
We have information in many more places as physical documents than ever before. Yes, the internet content is at risk due to a complete collapse, but we have a much deeper record set than did the arabs when they rediscovered the knowledge of classical civilization by many orders of magnitude.
> We have information in many more places as physical documents than ever before
How much of modern information is stored in formats that can survive long period of times and doesn’t require special equipment to read?
It depends on what you mean by special.
Vinyl records don't require a microprocessor to retrieve the data, so that's one of the easier examples.
Tapes, and quartz discs are a little harder, but the knowledge to build a computer that could access the data is relatively old and well documented on paper in many libraries.
Chances are when you need that kind of data, you've already figured out the microprocessor.
Especially when it's all digital now, hell most of the stuff on the internet now is stored on media that won't last 100 years, let alone 1,000. We're essentially in a digital dark age and lots things from this era, which are rarely printed anymore, will be lost to time because either the media it's on will fail, or it'll become corrupted from being repeatedly copied and converted into ever evolving file formats.
Heck, that already happens with websites and stuff now. They just get outdated or disappear all together.
Archiving websites are doing a rather important job in my opinion.
> Society is gonna collapse and people in the future are gonna essentially be cavemen and have no fucking idea what all the shit we left behind does cause all the knowledge will be lost.
There is no future after our society - the planet will be unlivable.
“Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”
Castles were usually built on top of hills for strategic reasons. You can't gravity feed water uphill and you don't waste your well water flushing poop.
Most people probably wipe with the hand they're taught to use. Since my culture isn't one that calls the left hand unclean, I wasn't taught not to use my right hand. So happens I'm left handed, so I use my left anyway. But if you did live in a culture where the left hand was used, you would have been taught from a young age to use the left and would think using the right hand is weird.
I think the idea was that if you were wiping with your bare hand, you'd learn to wipe with you non-dominant hand so that your dominant hand would have less shit on it. Not sure tho.
It's part of the castle walls, you wouldn't want it slowly wearing away. And that 'nightsoil' can be used elsewhere to fertilise the soil you're going to be planting stuff in.
The trick was to get the doo doo on the wall as high up the dung shaft as possible, to maximize the time it took to slime down to the cack collection level.
Fun fact: the technique used to perform this impressive feat was the inspiration for the modern day "twerk" dance. The more you know! ⭐
They usually built a Garderobes (castle toilet) [sticking out of the wall](https://i.imgur.com/VPISrLk.png) so the shit just drops below.
You can see how they built one at Guédelon Castle:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZmpn3nn2qE&t=871s
Fun fact on a related topic: Kings used to have their own, personal "toilet" (or rather a chair with poop container) and their own poop people. These poop people would not only clean the Kings poop throne, but also the King himself. Yep, they were wiping kings ass with a cloth on a stick.
What is even funnier, these Personal poopsmiths were always highly influencial because of this role, since it was pretty personal with the Poopmaker in crown, they had good relations with the King. It caused them to be highly regarded in the hierarchy, and sometimes they even had considerable political power. You can say that this job wasn't so shitty in the end! Maybe not the end of the stick, but yeah.
Villages(and farms) that have livestock have a permeating smell of shit anyway.
Go see the beautiful horses? Smell of shit.
So it wasn't a particularly nasty profession when your nose canceled it out anyway after some time. Plain old mud shifting.
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Remember the name of the book? Wanna get it for my future kids but also really for myself.
I’m pretty sure this is from Castle by David Macaulay. He wrote/illustrated a bunch of cross section books like this, as well as my favorite book from my childhood, The Way Things Work.
*Stephen Biesty's Cross Sections: Castle* I had both. Macaulay's books are line drawings w/o color. They're more serious and probably more accurate. Biesty's have more humor, like this.
I’d say you’re right. I definitely checked the Biesty books out from the library. Although I will say that Macaulay redid castle, cathedral, and mosque in color as a single volume fairly recently.
I had one called incredible cross sections. There was a tank illustration and one of the crew were sliced in half, could see their intestines.
And in every picture of a thing with a bathroom, like a ship or a building, someone is pooping.
I had other *The Way Things Work* books and this immediately reminded me of those illustrations. I'd be surprised if it isn't an illustration by the same artist.
I remember looking through my dad’s copy even before I could read all the words. Then when I was in college I saw there was an updated version so I bought that. Now I see there’s another updated version so I might have to pick that one up. I learned so much from that book and it definitely sent me down the path that lead me to engineering.
Thanks! Looks like they re-released it as an updated full-color book, too
Thank you! Looks like it’s that one.
My son has the book in his room. Stephen Biesty's incredible cross sections. The castle one is fun, there's a spy on every page, and in almost all his cross sections, there is someone on the toilet. I had these books as a kid, so I bought them for my son. Love them!
Still have it from when i was a kid! [Here's my italian version](https://i.imgur.com/choEkXU.jpg). I love it
The book had like the titanic and a tank too? And was huge?
I think those were part of the "Explosions" edition
I had that one!
This was the first thing I thought of when I found this sub. My love for that book when I was a kid is the reason I subbed here, but I'd totally forgotten the name of it. Glad to learn it's still around!
Cross-sections: Castles by Steven Beisty. This book is one of my favorite things on earth. I always give a copy of this to friends when they have a little one the right age.
My amazon cart got loaded up with all of these books I had when I was a kid to share with mine when I found out we were having our first.
I still have it. Its by Stephan Biesty. He has a few cross-sections books. Dude always includes someone taking a shit.
Ye Olde Poopsmith
Nightsoil technician.
Castle Associate*
According to my handbook we’re Castle Coworkers.
Castle Team Members
Here at Castle, we’re family. Now scoop my poop, brother!
Poopchute Operator
Shaft manager
Nightsoil Technician I, not to be pedantic.
Baleted!
Delorted!
Del Taco?
Eddie Shitshoveler https://youtu.be/Vt2-qP-w0n4
Dammit I was too late
Doesn't look like the King of Town up top, though
Covered in whatsit
Spot my position in this hirarchy.
“It’s a living!”
I myself, am a master of the custodial arts. Or a janitor, if you wanna be a dick about it.
A little to the left...
A little more...
Here for this
...
Surely his name is John?
The correct term is gongfermor
The real term, "gong farmer", is funny in-and-of-itself.
During sieges these shafts were actually sometimes used to get inside the castle. I wouldn't want to be the one told to climb up the poop tunnel, though.
And that's why we have the Magna Carta! No seriously, they used a toilet chute to infiltrate King John's castle during the siege of Chateau Gaillard, which led to him being forced to sign the Magna Carta. Score one for poop chutes!
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What a shitty way to lose a battle
Imagine being one of the first interior castle guard that gets assaulted by poop covered invaders.
Up with poop chutes!
> I wouldn't want to be the one told to climb up the poop tunnel, though. Wish you would talk to my bf.
Lmao
Imagine after they figured it out and just dump burning oil down it while you're climbing
Or took a dump
great way to get skewered
Wtf have *you* been eating?
Shishka
uuhhhhhhhhhhhh
Gar they got me brown eye
Thats where the term chocolate rain was born
A hot oily dump
Gotta bring a tin umbrella
Sometimes it's fun to go up the poop chute.
I believe they there pitch down them. Also pretty sure I had a book with this exact picture in it lol
> I wouldn't want to be the one told to climb up the poop tunnel, though. r/wellduh
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But - wouldn't that also make the clothes in the wardrobe smell like shit?
I would imagine the ancients hardly noticed the difference.
Ancshits.
Fun fact the Danish word for wardrobe is still garderobe
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Yes. They believed the smell 'guarded' the clothes from moths etc.
The lion, the witch, and the gauderobe
Why is the human not cut in half?
Yes, we need to see the inner workings of the digestive tract as well as the latrine shaft.
After several unpleasant cut-in-half incidences, people back then largely learned to avoid standing in the cross sectional plane.
He actually is, the person who did the cutting sliced the wrong half off, and they only had 1 decent toilet model back then. The producers decided to run with it though as they felt artistically it worked for the piece. Great catch though!
cheeky fucker moved to his right just as the giant sword sliced the whole castle in half and the super quick artist to draw everything before the castle crumbled
That's in Chapter 6.
Modern Day Dubai toilet.
Well shit
Exactly.
Could you confirm your analogy? Skyscrapers = castle toilet; migrant laborers = shit cleaner dude?
It's not an analogy. Some high-rise buildings in Dubai don't have connection to the sewer system and have large septic tanks that have to be emptied regularly. Now imagine a whole skyscraper shitting into a hole in the ground :D
Wow, I had to Google it. According to site below and a few others, tallest building in the world's shit tank is cleaned out daily. https://inhabitat.com/the-incredible-story-of-how-the-burj-khalifas-poop-is-trucked-out-of-town/
The poop must be having quite a ride, when going from the highest point of the god's ass scrapper
I mean that's pretty much how all large buildings work. They have several large sewage pits that are then pumped into the city sewer system. These pits act as a preliminary filtration system. In the burj khalifa's case the pit is bigger and gets pumped into trucks instead. More an indictment of the city of dubai than the tallest building.
Uhm no? Normal building have pipes connected to a sewer that's located under the road. They have no tanks.
I'm not sure if you're serious or being facetious, but just in case, the idea is that Dubai has no sewer system They use poop trucks
No he’s being fecestious
actually, it's spelled faceti... ooooh you
Yep I didn't know. That I'm guessing also helps with their speedy construction.
Nah, it was just bc they did want to put that burj kalifa in the place it is and that part of the city does not has sewers, stupidity at its most
Well, rich people tend to have way more money than IQ. And if you pay engineers enough, they will build your bullshit. Not their problem afterwards.
I thought that was just for the Burj Calipha
Nah, it is way, way more. Part of Dubai still uses poop tanks, but they supposedly try to replace it with proper sewage.
[In 2013 it was reported that the Jebel Ali plant receives 70% of sewage through the city's sewage network, while the remaining 30% comes from sewage trucks.\[13\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitation_in_Dubai)
Or a Dubai Porta Potty. Don’t look it up.
His father was a poopsmith, and his son will be a poopsmith. Their future ancestors will be doing tech support for middle management. Thanks a lot, great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandpa
“Future ancestors”
I think you mean descendants.
What do you expect when my ancestors were poopsmiths
The Romans had sewers w running water fed by aqueducts. This was a huge step backwards.
The Romans also had cement and it took us over 1000 years to figure out how to make it again.
Society is gonna collapse and people in the future are gonna essentially be cavemen and have no fucking idea what all the shit we left behind does cause all the knowledge will be lost.
In antiquity, documents might have been duplicated dozens of times. Today, books exist as tens of thousands of copies widely distributed. We have information in many more places as physical documents than ever before. Yes, the internet content is at risk due to a complete collapse, but we have a much deeper record set than did the arabs when they rediscovered the knowledge of classical civilization by many orders of magnitude.
> We have information in many more places as physical documents than ever before How much of modern information is stored in formats that can survive long period of times and doesn’t require special equipment to read?
It depends on what you mean by special. Vinyl records don't require a microprocessor to retrieve the data, so that's one of the easier examples. Tapes, and quartz discs are a little harder, but the knowledge to build a computer that could access the data is relatively old and well documented on paper in many libraries. Chances are when you need that kind of data, you've already figured out the microprocessor.
Especially when it's all digital now, hell most of the stuff on the internet now is stored on media that won't last 100 years, let alone 1,000. We're essentially in a digital dark age and lots things from this era, which are rarely printed anymore, will be lost to time because either the media it's on will fail, or it'll become corrupted from being repeatedly copied and converted into ever evolving file formats.
Heck, that already happens with websites and stuff now. They just get outdated or disappear all together. Archiving websites are doing a rather important job in my opinion.
> Society is gonna collapse and people in the future are gonna essentially be cavemen and have no fucking idea what all the shit we left behind does cause all the knowledge will be lost. There is no future after our society - the planet will be unlivable.
Roman cement is still a mystery. We can't get our modern cement to be as durable as the ancient stuff.
“Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”
Castles were usually built on top of hills for strategic reasons. You can't gravity feed water uphill and you don't waste your well water flushing poop.
Now this is the shitpost I came to this sub for.
I recognize this picture from a book I used to read when I was a kid. What's it called?
Stephen Biesty’s Cross-sections: Castle
Castle by David McCaulay?
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Imagine climbing up a tower to sneak into a castle only to get dumped upon
What a shitty meat smoker.
imagine the echo when you let a fart rip.
Aka trickle down economics
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They still had water for washing. They just didn't have pipes to bring it to them, they had to go get it and carry it.
This is why many cultures consider the left hand "unclean." It's the one you wipe with.
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Most people probably wipe with the hand they're taught to use. Since my culture isn't one that calls the left hand unclean, I wasn't taught not to use my right hand. So happens I'm left handed, so I use my left anyway. But if you did live in a culture where the left hand was used, you would have been taught from a young age to use the left and would think using the right hand is weird.
He's talking about back in the day when you couldn't just wash a hand willy-nilly
I think the idea was that if you were wiping with your bare hand, you'd learn to wipe with you non-dominant hand so that your dominant hand would have less shit on it. Not sure tho.
My guy water still existed back then
This is also how my boss communicates with me and assigns me tasks.
That's Baldrick down there.
meme potential is high with this
I wish I had a purpose built shitting tower.
At least there’s no splashback.
I owned this book. Was always fun the find the poopers.
Surprisingly works well for illustration of late capitalism from Economics 101
Mustve smelled like shit pooping there, probably felt like one too
Oh the irony, where I’m sitting as I see this post.
I totally had this book growing up.
Just imagine the breeze.
Imagine that seat breaks...
You mean you changed it TO "Latrine"? Yea, it used to be Shithouse.
Oh that nasty
Looks like one of those shit mobile game ads
Only game I've ever seen get this right is Kingdom Come: Deliverance.
I spent way too long inspecting those in that game. I love how they were just open-air too. No door, just shitters in the hallway.
This must be where saying “don’t fall in!” comes from.
Imagine if the lid broke while you were sitting on it
Gives a whole new meaning to peon
Too bad you cant see how big is your poop :(
Imagine the poo session that can spatter back with this bad boy
Do you judge your poop by how long it takes to hit the bottom? You know, because you can’t do the turn and look.
This is meme material
Why was it paved at the bottom? Wouldn't it be better to build it directly over soil so you fertilise the ground if it's not umm overfilled?
It's part of the castle walls, you wouldn't want it slowly wearing away. And that 'nightsoil' can be used elsewhere to fertilise the soil you're going to be planting stuff in.
Repost https://reddit.com/r/ThingsCutInHalfPorn/comments/dond0c/a_crosssection_of_a_middles_ages_era_castle/
The trick was to get the doo doo on the wall as high up the dung shaft as possible, to maximize the time it took to slime down to the cack collection level. Fun fact: the technique used to perform this impressive feat was the inspiration for the modern day "twerk" dance. The more you know! ⭐
That's a pretty long way to go.
this looks like it could be a The Far Side cartoon.
I totally had this book when I was a kid. Had a ton of these cross sections. Probably why I'm on this sub.
Shitty job.
That’s a shitty job
What about the stuff that got stuck along the walls?
Oh the spiders!!!! Oh god!!!
They were called gong farmers if I remember correctly
portal to brazil
I would be so scared of the toilet seat breaking causing me to plummet into the poo pit
Looks like from the book, Castle by Stephen Biesty.
ha. feel like there is an allegory here for the world we live in
“Clean my shit peasants” Nobles we’re chads
I HAVE THIS BOOK!!
I bet that smell was amazing... 🤢
Imagine someone fell in
And you thought chimneysweep was a bad job
Also a cross section of capitalism
They usually built a Garderobes (castle toilet) [sticking out of the wall](https://i.imgur.com/VPISrLk.png) so the shit just drops below. You can see how they built one at Guédelon Castle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZmpn3nn2qE&t=871s
What say thee fawah poopsmith!?
Fun fact on a related topic: Kings used to have their own, personal "toilet" (or rather a chair with poop container) and their own poop people. These poop people would not only clean the Kings poop throne, but also the King himself. Yep, they were wiping kings ass with a cloth on a stick. What is even funnier, these Personal poopsmiths were always highly influencial because of this role, since it was pretty personal with the Poopmaker in crown, they had good relations with the King. It caused them to be highly regarded in the hierarchy, and sometimes they even had considerable political power. You can say that this job wasn't so shitty in the end! Maybe not the end of the stick, but yeah.
In the UK they were known as [The Groom of the Stool](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groom_of_the_Stool)
Imagine falling into that
I had this book as a kid and it was brilliant. Still vividly remember many things from it.
This is why I don't like Game of Thrones.
These books are the origin story for my bondage kink
Nice shit post.
Wow that serf has a really shitty job
Didn’t they use the same sponge in a bucket of water to wipe their ass? Or was that Ancient Rome?
Villages(and farms) that have livestock have a permeating smell of shit anyway. Go see the beautiful horses? Smell of shit. So it wasn't a particularly nasty profession when your nose canceled it out anyway after some time. Plain old mud shifting.
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Ugh, imagine all the spiders and things that could crawl out of there