A Toilet for Automatically Exhausting Odious Air
Nat Thompson's 2002 patent hides a fan inside the toilet bowl. It switches on when you sit down and sends the smell down the drain with everything else, instead of into the room.
US6499150 was granted to Nat Thompson of Corona, New York, on December 31, 2002. The title, exactly as printed on the patent, is "For a toilet for automatically exhausting odious air therefrom." The stray "For a" at the front is on the official record.
The idea behind it is simple. The smell should leave the bathroom the same way everything else does: down the drain.
How it works
Thompson's toilet has a small fan in a housing built into the bowl itself. The housing connects the inside of the bowl to the waste pipe through a second trap, separate from the main trap that carries the waste away.
The fan switches on when someone sits down. It draws air out of the bowl, pushes it through the housing and the second trap, and into the waste line. The odor goes down with everything else instead of rising into the room. Giving the air its own trap matters, because a trap is what stops sewer gas from coming back up a pipe, and the fan's route into the drain would otherwise be an open path in the wrong direction.
A long line of ventilated toilets
Thompson was not the first person to want this, and the patent says so. It cites toilet ventilation patents going back to 1934, along with a later multifunction toilet whose odor exhaust was wired to a switch so that it ran only while someone was seated.
What Thompson claimed was a particular arrangement: the fan and its housing inside the bowl, with the air sent into the waste pipe through a trap of its own rather than out through a duct or a vent in the wall.
What it tells us
Most buildings settled the bathroom smell problem long ago with an exhaust fan in the ceiling and a vent stack in the plumbing. Patents like this one keep arriving anyway, because a ceiling fan deals with the whole room after the fact, and the person in the room would rather the problem never left the bowl.
It is a small, earnest, slightly comic solution to a universal annoyance, filed under a title that reads like the first line of a sales pitch someone forgot to finish.
See the original
The full patent, with its drawing and claims, is on patents.us.
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