It is Mark Twain to whom the quote “Write what you know” is most often attributed. It’s advice I try to live by — writing about my personal experiences, passions and areas of expertise. But there are times when journalism requires that I step beyond my own realm of comfort and knowledge to better understand the most pressing issues of our modern day.
This week that step beyond was into a men’s restroom. Metaphorically. I didn’t actually walk into a men’s restroom. Though I have before — a couple of times on accident and once when the line for the women’s room was really long and I needed to change a baby’s diaper immediately. On the latter occasion, a man walked in, saw me, shrugged, and proceeded to use the urinal.
How nice it must be for men, I thought at the time, to have the ability to relieve themselves without having to wait in a lengthy line for a stall. How nice to not have to worry about the cleanliness of toilet seats or the bacteria that may be lurking on the stall handles and locks. Men have it so much easier, I concluded. What I didn’t realize, though, is how much grosser men have it.
Imagine my horror upon learning that an estimated 1 million liters of urine splashes onto public bathroom floors every day in the United States thanks to urinal splashback. And worse, that the urine sometimes splashes back onto the … um … urinator.
I’ll be honest, my initial reaction upon learning this frankly horrifying fun fact was to judge. To ask the entire male species, “How can you live like that?”
But then I remembered my hero, Jane Goodall, and the way in which she studies chimpanzees without judgment and advocates for conditions that would better their existence. Does she judge chimpanzees for baring their teeth when afraid? No. Instead, she works to create an environment where chimps need not feel threatened.
So, too, am I refraining from judging men for walking out of the restroom with droplets on their pants or shoes, and am instead advocating for a better way. A better urinal, more specifically, and I have great news.
There’s a new urinal design in town. Move over, inventor of the television Philo T. Farnsworth, there’s a new greatest invention to come out of Utah. Two, actually.
Weber State associate professor Dr. Randy Hurd and his collaborator Zhao Pan at the University of Waterloo in Canada have created two new urinal designs — the Cornucopia and the Nautilus — that reduce splash back to 1.4% of the typical urinal model.
“I think anyone who’s used a urinal has noticed that this is an issue,” Hurd said during our phone interview. “Or just look around the floor in any men’s bathroom,” he implored. “There’s pee all over the ground. It’s clearly secondary droplets being splattered everywhere.”
I’m going to refrain from looking around the floor in any men’s bathroom and instead take Hurd’s word for it. Because if anyone’s qualified to understand this issue it’s him. Hurd has a Ph.D. from Utah State University in mechanical engineering and his dissertation was on fluid dynamics, specifically impact events related to fluid dynamics.
Together he and Pan discovered that the solution to the issue that has plagued male pee-ers for centuries came down to what Hurd describes as a “simple” math problem. “If we assume that the droplets are coming from an origin, we can basically figure out where the line will intersect at a defined plan at the given angle,” he said. Then, mercifully, explained, “If you can’t hit the porcelain at a bad angle, then you can’t create splatter.”
“If a train of droplets is impacting a flat surface, as the angle between that train and the surface varies, so do the splash conditions,” he said, then explained that as that angle becomes more oblique then the splatter reduces and eventually goes away.
The Cornucopia, which Hurd said looks like a urinal from Star Trek, is a three-dimensional solution to the splashback problem that reduces the angle of the stream. And the Nautilus is a more simple, two-dimensional solution that is both easier to clean and not height-dependent.
The designs are pending a patent, which, for the sake of the men in my life, is a process I hope goes quickly. But in the immediate, Hurd can take satisfaction in knowing that he identified a solution to a problem that men have dealt with for, in my opinion, far too long. “It’s like the glass ketchup bottle,” Hurd said. “Sure, you can get ketchup out of it, but it doesn’t make it easy. Why not make an inverted plastic ketchup bottle? That solves the problem. So I guess my argument would be, why not make it easier?”
And my argument would be, “Why did none of you do this a long time ago?”
But then I remember that Jane Goodall never asked such questions of the chimpanzees.
She simply lived among them with respect and celebrated those things which would make their natural lives better. So, too, do I celebrate the Cornucopia and the Nautilus and the ways in which they will better men’s restrooms and the lives of the men who use them.