Word: modernizing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...must sing in French, English words are banned from advertising, half of all TV shows on air must be European, and so on. It's no surprise that France's colorful antiglobalization activist José Bové, who happens to sport a Gallic handlebar mustache, has been dubbed a modern-day Asterix for his campaigns against McDonald's and genetically modified foods...
...case you didn't know (and honestly, why would you?), Nov. 19 is World Toilet Day - an event hosted by the World Toilet Organization to raise awareness for the 2.5 billion people around the world who live without proper sanitation. But even for those of us with access to modern plumbing, how often do we really think about our toilets? From outhouses to water closets - even former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain's $35,000 "commode on legs" (technically a table, not a toilet) - humans have been devising creative ways to go to the bathroom since, well, the first person...
Garderobes and public toilets were eventually replaced with something slightly more recognizable to the modern-day defecator: a box with a lid. France's Louis XI hid his toilet behind curtains and used herbs to keep his bathroom scented; England's Elizabeth I covered her commode in crimson velvet bound with lace...
...England lept into modern sanitation when Sir John Harrington, godson of Elizabeth I, published Metamorphosis of Ajax, in which he described a new kind of water closet: a raised cistern with a small pipe down which water ran when released by a valve. The Queen installed Harrington's invention in her palace at Richmond, but it took another 200 years before a man named Alexander Cummings developed the S-shaped pipe underneath the basin to keep out foul odors. At the end of the 18th century, the flushable toilet went mainstream...
...pictures of the making of modern China...