For many people, time spent in the bathroom is the perfect opportunity for reflection and introspection. And for many others, it’s when they get new high scores on Candy Crush. Okay, so maybe most of us use that time for procrastination, but even so, there have been a few significant events that occurred inside a bathroom.

10. The Death of Agamemnon

We’re going to start off with one event that is more mythology than history – the assassination of Agamemnon. Made famous in “The Iliad,” Agamemnon was the King of Mycenae who led the Greeks during the Trojan War. After the fall of Troy, he returned home triumphant, only to discover that his wife, Clytemnestra, had taken on a lover by the name of Aegisthus. 

According to the legend, Agamemnon had sacrificed one of his daughters, Iphigenia, in order to please Artemis and secure his victory at Troy, so it was understandable that his wife might bear a tiny grudge against him. She was probably hoping that he would die in battle, but now that he was back, Clytemnestra wanted Agamemnon dead and plotted with her lover to make it happen. In some versions, Aegisthus simply attacked Agamemnon with a band of assassins, but in others, Clytemnestra did the deed herself by stabbing her husband in the bath.

9. The Political Career of John Glenn

In 1962, astronaut John Glenn made history when he became the first American to orbit the Earth. Once he was done with the whole space thing, as one of the most popular people in the country, the world was his oyster. Glenn wanted to get into politics and, eventually, he did serve as a senator for Ohio for two-and-a-half decades. However, his first run was derailed thanks to an unfortunate slip in the bathroom.

In January 1964, Glenn retired from NASA and announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate. Just a month later, the former astronaut slipped in his bathtub and sustained a severe hit on the noggin. Left with a concussion and an inner ear injury, Glenn was unable to campaign and decided to quit the senatorial race since he felt that it would not be fair to ask for the people of Ohio to simply vote for a name on a piece of paper. 

The accident delayed Glenn’s political career by an entire decade. It wasn’t until 1974 that he finally won a seat in the Senate.

8. The Assassination of Edmund Ironside

There is a pretty long list of people who died on the toilet, but of them all, King Edmund Ironside probably had the most unpleasant way to go. The son of Ethelred the Unready, Edmund only reigned for half a year in 1016 during the Danish invasion of Cnut the Great. He earned the moniker “Ironside” because of the bravery and valor he displayed while fighting against a superior invading force. 

Edmund did not fall valiantly in battle, but was rather done in by treachery in the end, both literally and figuratively, assuming the account of historian Henry of Huntingdon is correct. According to him, the king was slain in his private privy while obeying the call of nature. The son of an enemy ealdorman named Edric snuck inside the castle and hid himself in the pit under the king’s privy. Then, when Edmund sat down to do his business, the assassin stabbed him upwards multiple times.

Cnut was not particularly impressed with this method of disposal. He had respect for Edmund Ironside, so when he heard what Edric had done to him, he had the ealdorman decapitated and his head placed on the highest battlement of the Tower of London.

7. The Work of Edmond Rostand

Bathrooms have not been solely the scenes of violence, bloodshed, and injuries. Occasionally, good things happen in them because some people use them as sources of inspiration. Benjamin Franklin was famously fond of spending a lot of time in the bath, musing on the world around him, and French poet Edmond Rostand did a lot of his writing while soaking in the tub.

Most famous for his play Cyrano de Bergerac, Rostand regarded working in the bathroom as the perfect solution to two of his problems. He hated being interrupted while he was writing but, at the same time, he was loathe to use this as an excuse to turn his friends away. However, if he were in the bathtub, nobody would take offense to being asked to return another time, so he could focus on his work without worries of interruptions.

6. The Demise of Elagabalus

Elagabalus is constantly ranked among the worst Roman emperors in history. Therefore, it’s not really surprising that he made a lot of enemies, including his own grandmother, Julia Maesa, who helped orchestrate his assassination. She decided to replace one nephew with another, so Julia convinced Elagabalus to adopt his young cousin, Severus Alexander, as his heir. 

The emperor accepted, but he quickly changed his mind when he saw that the people liked Alexander more than him. He wanted his young cousin gone, but the Praetorian Guard refused to cooperate. They’ve had enough of Elagabalus and asking them to assassinate Alexander was the final straw. They attacked the Roman emperor, who tried to hide in a latrine in vain. His mother was also killed at the same time. Afterward, “their heads were cut off and their bodies, after being stripped naked, were first dragged all over the city, and then the mother’s body was cast aside somewhere or other, while his was thrown into the river.”

5. The End of King Haakon’s Reign

The reign of King Haakon VII defined Norway during the first half of the 20th century, with him ruling for over 50 years between 1905 and 1957. He is now remembered as one of the country’s greatest leaders, although he did have an ignominious end thanks to an accident in the bathroom that marked the end of his reign.

King Haakon sustained a very bad fall in 1955, shortly before his 83rd birthday. It didn’t kill him, but it left him confined in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He survived for two more years after that, but he turned into a shell of his former self. Despite being an octogenarian, Haakon had previously maintained an active lifestyle, mainly as a skier. Now, he was forced to give up the things he loved, while his reduced mobility ensured that his health continuously deteriorated. Haakon became a recluse with little interest in state affairs or social occasions. His son, Crown Prince Olav, took up most of his ceremonial duties until his father passed away and he became the new king.

4. The Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat

Jean-Paul Marat was one of the central figures of the French Revolution, becoming one of the leaders of the Jacobin faction which was opposed by the Girondins. And yet, he is best remembered for his assassination while taking a bath at the hands of a Girondin sympathizer named Charlotte Corday.

On July 13, 1793, Corday showed up at Marat’s apartment, claiming to have information about other Girondins who were on the run. His fiancee, Simonne, was suspicious of the young woman and did not want to let her in, but Marat insisted. The revolutionary was in the bathtub, where he spent a lot of time due to a debilitating skin disease. He took out a pen & paper and a wooden plank to write on and started taking down the information that Corday provided. When she was finished, she pulled out a kitchen knife from her dress and plunged it into Marat’s chest. His last words were “Help me, my beloved,” but by the time Simonne entered the bathroom, Marat was already dead.  

Corday made to attempt to escape. She was arrested and executed by guillotine a few days later.

3. The Medical Breakthrough of King George II

“On the 25th of October he rose as usual at six, and drank his chocolate; for all his actions were invariably methodic. A quarter after seven he went into a little closet. His German valet de chamber in waiting heard a noise and, running in, found the King dead on the floor.”

That is the description of how King George II of Great Britain kicked the bucket in 1760, at the venerable age of 76, as reported by his personal physician, Frank Nicholls. In the process, George II joined a long and illustrious line of people who died while straining at stool, but besides the obvious consequence of leaving Great Britain without a king, there was an unexpected benefit – it allowed Nicholls to provide us with the first clear account of an aortic dissection. 

Nicholls was tasked with opening and embalming George II and he observed and described in detail the deadly aortic disease that fell the king: “…the pericardium was found distended with a quantity of coagulated blood, nearly a pint…; the whole heart was so compressed as to prevent any blood contained in the veins from being forced into the auricles; therefore the ventricles were found absolutely void of blood…; and in the trunk of the aorta we found a transverse fissure on its inner side, about an inch and a half long, through which some blood had recently passed under its external coat and formed an elevated ecchymosis.”

Following Nicholls’s account, the disease began being studied by the medical community, although it would be almost two centuries before a surgery for it was developed. 

2. The Louisiana Purchase

The Louisiana Purchase is a crucial moment in the history of both France and the United States and, if Lucien Bonaparte is to be believed, his brother Napoleon decided to sell Louisiana while taking a bath.

According to Lucien’s memoirs, both he and his brother Joseph were against the idea of the Louisiana Purchase. One day in 1803, Napoleon summoned both of his siblings at the Tuileries Palace in Paris and received them while he was bathing. He was definitely not happy with them, and when Joseph indicated that he might oppose Napoleon on the matter, the latter acted out like a petulant child by falling back into the tub and splashing his brothers with the bathwater. 

At that point, Lucien told his sibling that “If I were not your brother I would be your enemy,” to which Napoleon once again responded in a bad-tempered way by smashing a snuff box on the floor.

1. The Eureka Moment

When it comes to notable events that occurred in the bathroom, none can compare to the iconic “Eureka” moment when Archimedes figured out water displacement.

Here’s the story: when Hieron II became King of Syracuse, he commissioned a gold crown for himself. He gave a bar of pure gold to the goldsmith, but when the latter returned with the crown, the king feared that he had been cheated. It wasn’t unheard of back then for dishonest smiths to mix in some silver and keep part of the gold for themselves. But the question was – how to prove it?

Hieron tasked Archimedes with finding a solution. The mathematician pondered on the problem during a bath, when he noticed that the more he sunk into the tub, the more water spilled out. He then realized that there was a relationship between the volume of his body and the volume of water displaced by his body. Archimedes was so jubilant with his discovery that he leaped out of the bath and started running down the streets naked, shouted “Eureka.”

Once he understood this, the actual experiment was easy. If the crown was, indeed, made of pure gold, then it should have the same volume as the bar of gold with the same mass. If, however, it contained silver, then it would be less dense. Archimedes proved that the goldsmith did, indeed, try to cheat the king, and we can only imagine what unpleasant fate awaited him. 

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that the Eureka story actually happened like this. Archimedes himself never wrote about it and it was first mentioned by Vitruvius a few centuries later. But still, it remains a testament to the sparks of inspiration we can experience while in the bathroom.

As the title of one book famously proclaimed, everybody poops. That truism really is remarkable to think about. There is one experience shared by every person on Earth, and most people would rather dismiss or ignore it. That is unfair. A few trips to the bathroom were literal pit stops in history. The following list is ten of the most consequential things to ever happen on the toilet. It does not take much to redirect the flow of history. Sometimes, all it needs is a flush

10 The Bathroom Break That Saved a President

Even more than most presidents, Lyndon B. Johnson has a fairly mixed legacy. He is responsible for both groundbreaking domestic achievements like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965 and foreign fiascos like escalating the Vietnam War. Whether Johnson reshaped American society for better or worse is up to debate, but he almost did not do anything at all.

On June 9, 1942, Johnson was a just young sailor in the Naval reserve deployed on a bombing mission. He was initially assigned to fly on the B26 Marauder, the “Wabash Cannonball.” Moments before takeoff, Johnson departed the plane to visit the toilet. When he came back, Lieutenant Colonel Francis R. Stevens had taken his seat instead. Johnson was forced to board the next aircraft in line, another B26, the “Heckling Hare.”

It was a lucky break. The Heckling Hare saw limited combat and, shortly after, abandoned its mission. The Wabash Cannonball was not as lucky. It was shot down by Japanese forces, killing everyone on board. Johnson’s full bladder saved his life.^[1]

9 The Bathroom Break That Invented Computing

In 1968, Douglas Engelbart foresaw a new world. One of the first visionaries of the digital future, Engelbart imagined much of what would become the basics of modern computing, everything from graphic apps and video conferencing to word processing and linking files. However, he had help envisioning these new realities—LSD.

Like many fellow Californians of the time, Engelbart was an enthusiastic advocate for the mind-expanding benefits of LSD. As the head of the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute, he and his team took acid for inspiration. Engelbart was initially doubtful that any contraption he conceived while on the drug would have any use once he was no longer under the influence.

He was finally convinced of the drug’s possibilities when he came up with the “tinkle toy,” a miniature water wheel installed to the side of a toilet that would spin when peed on. It could be a fun and practical tool to help potty train young children. Now assured of LSD’s potential, he regularly took the drug while working. In those sessions, he conceived much of what would become the computer, even if he did not actually invent it. He did make one tangible breakthrough, though, a small strange rounded controller on the end of a wire that could move items on the screen. He called it a “mouse.”^[2]

8 The Bathroom Break That Helped Treat a Disease

Millions of lives have been shaped by pure luck. In 1899, Dr. Oskar Minkowski accidentally bumped into his colleague, Josef von Mering, in the university library. The conversation naturally turned to that classic icebreaker, pancreases. The two got into a friendly debate about if someone could theoretically survive with their pancreas removed. To find out, the two staged a little bet. Later that afternoon, Minkowski removed his dog’s pancreas. The dog was perfectly healthy. Minkowski had won the bet and beat his friend. The experiment was over. That was until he noticed one curious side effect.

While cleaning the dog’s kennel, Minkowski noticed an inordinate number of flies flocking to his dog’s pee. While most people would have just dismissed that observation as flies being gross, Minkowski started investigating. He discovered that the urine was now full of sugar, a clear sign that the dog was diabetic. Because the dog had no signs of diabetes before its pancreas was removed, Minkowski hypothesized that the organ must have some role in metabolizing sugar.

It took a while, but other scientists eventually figured out how the pancreas secretes insulin. Because of Minkowski’s medical breakthrough, diabetes went from a death sentence to a treatable disease. Some victories really are that sweet.^[3]

7 The Bathroom Break That Discovered an Element

The goal of all 17th-century alchemists was to discover the philosopher’s stone, an impossibly elusive elixir capable of turning base metals into gold and granting immortality. With powers like that, it is pretty understandable how someone would take extreme measures to find it. Even then, Henning Brand probably took things a bit too far.

Starting in 1669, Brand collected more than 1,500 gallons of urine from his neighbors and friends. He baked and boiled the urine until the residue was all that was left. The experiment followed a certain kind of perverse logic. Water, he presupposed, is the basis of life; therefore, the cure for a longer life would be found in water. If that water passed through a person, it would have even more of a mystical connection to life. Put that all together, and it is not that absurd to think the philosopher’s stone might be lying among kidney stones.

While he never found gold in his “golden treasure,” he did find something arguably more valuable. The final distilled product was a white powder that glowed in the dark. Named for the Latin for light-bearer, Brand dubbed his discovery phosphorus. Phosphorus is, of course, a bedrock of modern life. Industries from fertilizer to steel production rely on phosphorus to exist. So next time you go to the restroom, feel free to light a match, something only possible because Henning Brand did the same thing all those years before.^[4]

6 The Bathroom Break That Started a War

By 1937, the tension between Japan and China had reached a breaking point. A series of escalating military maneuvers over the past decade pushed the two nations to the brink of conflict. Every time before, cooler heads prevailed, and soldiers retreated before things spiraled into all-out war. That was until the Marco Polo Bridge incident.

On July 7, 1937, Japanese troops gathered around the city of Wanping in a clear antagonistic display. During the exercise, a private of the Japanese Imperial Army, Shimura Kikujiro, broke ranks to relieve himself. Because there were no appropriate facilities nearby, he ducked into the woods. Once finished, he tried to rejoin his unit, but they had already left. Lost in the darkness, it took him a while to find his way back to base. He did not know it, but his bowel had started a movement.

In the meantime, Kikujiro’s absence caused the army to panic. Japanese officers dispatched troops to Wanping to find their missing soldier. When the Chinese refused to let the Japanese enter Wanping, a small Japanese infantry tried to breach the city’s walls. They were successfully repelled. Forty-five minutes later, a larger group tried to siege again and fired the first shots of the Second Sino-Japanese War.

The Japanese had the excuse they had been looking for. The minor skirmish became the pretext for a full-scale invasion of China. The resulting conflict was the largest Asian war of the twentieth century. By the time of Japan’s surrender in September 1945, the war had claimed the lives of more than 33 million soldiers and civilians.^[5]

5 The Bathroom Break That Created America

King George II was not a particularly popular ruler, but he got things done. His reign from 1727 to 1760 was marked by firm leadership in foreign policy and military appointments. On domestic issues, he acquiesced most power to Parliament. He was too busy gorging himself in his castle. As far as last meals go, it’s hard to beat hot chocolate.

On October 25, 1760, the King finished a nice cup of hot chocolate and retired to his chambers. Moments later, his body was discovered slumped over the toilet. He had so strained himself that he caused an aortic aneurysm. While the doctor on the scene could not save the king, he did help save many others. The doctor’s extensive notes on the King’s condition contained the first known description of an “aortic dissection.” With those findings, other doctors had the knowledge to diagnose a secret killer before it was too late. Today, thousands are saved from something that is silent but no longer deadly.

His death had another unintended consequence. Logically, King George II was succeeded by King George III, an infamous reign marked by moments of erratic behavior and insanity. To treat his condition, doctors tortured the king with a series of painful and unnecessary experiments. Burdened by personal problems, George III delegated much of his responsibilities to Parliament.

Without guidance from the King, Parliament enacted strict taxes on their colonies in North America. Perhaps a more present and invested leader would have asserted more control over Parliament or taken the leadership to quell the insurrection forces in the American colonies before it escalated into a war. It is impossible to know how George II would have handled the crisis, but the distracted King George III failed to respond as the gears of revolution were set in motion.^[6]

4 The Bathroom Break That Won a War

During World War I, the brilliant mathematician and physicist William Lawrence Bragg was stationed in France. He thought he could better serve the war effort with his intelligence rather than fighting. As great as his brain was, his most important inspiration came from a different place.

In 1915, Bragg visited an outhouse in a field. The room was completely closed off from the outside world, except for a pipe that ran under the toilet. While Bragg was using the toilet, a British six-inch gun 1,000 feet (304 meters) away fired a round. The energy traveled through the air until it shot up the pipe. A puff of energy lifted Bragg’s bare bottom off the seat. Surprised that something was coming up from the drain instead, Bragg tried to track down the source of the energy.

He soon realized that the pressure was caused by the gun’s low-frequency infrasound. If these unique frequencies could be traced back to their source, Bragg could locate any enemy artillery. He created a small empty wooden ammunition box with a thin platinum wire that could detect infrasound. With this device, the Allies could pinpoint enemy weapons within 150 feet (45 meters). The new technology was a crucial development that helped turn the tide of the war, securing victory four years later.^[7]

3 The Bathroom Break That Ended Segregation

On February 12, 1946, 26-year-old African American veteran Sergeant Isaac Woodard returned to the U.S. from fighting abroad in World War II. He boarded a Greyhound bus toward his home in Winnsboro, South Carolina. Along the route, he asked the bus driver if he could pull into a rest stop. Furious over having to make the stop, the bus driver called the police on Woodward. The police forcibly removed Woodard from the bus. In custody, they beat him unconscious and gouged out his eyes. Denied medical care for three days, Woodard was left permanently blind.

Such brazen police brutality was a political awakening for President Harry S. Truman. Spurred by Woodard’s blinding, Truman created a presidential commission on civil rights. Per its recommendation, he issued Executive Order 9981, the order that formally desegregated the U.S. military in 1948.

Another federal official was similarly moved by the injustice against Woodard. Judge Julius Waring, the judge presiding over the case against the police officers, was outraged when they were acquitted of all charges. He dedicated the rest of his life as a fierce advocate for civil rights. His judicial decisions played a key role in dismantling school segregation. His dissent in Briggs v. Elliott was the first federal case to argue that segregation violated the fourteenth amendment.

When the NAACP’s defense lawyer—and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice—Thurgood Marshall lost the case, Waring was the one who encouraged him to appeal the decision. That appeal ultimately culminated in the landmark Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education. Segregation was officially unconstitutional.^[8]

2 The Bathroom Break That Caused 9/11

In 1946, 13-year-old Charlie Wilson could not get control of his dog. The little mutt kept straying into his neighbor’s flower bed. Eventually, the neighbor had enough. Because the dog could not stop peeing, he would have to stop breathing. The neighbor buried some shards of glass into the dog’s food bowl. Wilson vowed to avenge his dog’s death. His first method of payback, burning down the flowers, would only sting for a little bit. So he had to stick it to him where it would really hurt.

The neighbor was a Texas councilman named Charles Hazard, who was up for reelection. Wilson organized a campaign to oust the dog-murderer. He went door-to-door, telling people about what happened to his dog and asking them to vote against Hazard. In total, he swayed 95 voters or nearly 25% of the total electorate. As a result, Hazard lost his reelection bid by a mere 16 votes. Gloating at Hazard’s loss, Wilson went to his house and told him he “shouldn’t poison any more dogs.”

That personal victory inspired Wilson to spend his life in politics. He eventually climbed all the way up to become a Congressional Representative. In that role, he spearheaded America’s covert operations in the Soviet-Afghan War. He funneled funds and training for the Afghan Mujahedeen. While the Afghanistan forces helped America score a decisive victory in the short run, the sect soon broke off into splinter groups, including the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, that victory soured. A new age of terrorism had begun.^[9]

1 The Bathroom Break That Made Life Possible

Unlike all the other entries on the list, this last one is not about any particular trip to the toilet. Instead, this one focuses on an uncoordinated series of millions of participants stretched over eons. The only thing that connects them is that they really needed to go. Although to be fair, there wasn’t much else going on.

Most of the Earth’s history is nothing. For three billion years, simple primordial organisms littered the planet. They ate, pooped, and made more cells. That was it. Then, suddenly, there was life. During the Cambrian explosion, clumps of single-celled bacteria rapidly evolved into complex life with nervous systems, internal organs, and backbones. It is arguably the most important event to ever happen. Yet, no one can explain it.

The rapid divergence has baffled generations of scientists. There is no settled answer, but one theory proposed by Australian geoscientist Graham Logan has gained some acceptance. According to him, the incredible beauty of life exists from its most disgusting elements.

Before the Cambrian explosion, the oceans were full of carbon but void of oxygen. Any oxygen-photosynthesizing plankton produced was quickly offset by the slower sinking carbon. The chain was finally broken with the rise of multicellular organisms. When multicellular organisms ate the bacteria, they processed the waste into carbon-rich feces. As the carbon fell to the ocean floor, the oxygen levels rose. Oxygen threw the ecological gates open. Animals finally had a chance to grow and take form. So if you ever feel like your life is pretty crappy, take solace in knowing it has always been that way.^[10]