The extraordinary biography of Thomas Crapper, the man who revolutionised the nation's water closet and was plumber By Appointment to Edward VII. Thomas Crapper was born of a humble family in the Yorkshire town of Thorne in 1837. At the age of eleven he walked from Thorne to London in search of work, where he began as a plumber. He went onto be a sanitary engineer and his fame was secured by the invention of Crapper's Valveless Water Waste Preventer in 1872, became the father of the modern cistern system. This highly entertaining, informative and illustrated biography of one of the great unsung engineers of the Victorian era was published in 1969 and has been in print ever since, selling over 200,000 copies. It has been rightly called 'the little classic of the smallest room.' and establishes Crapper as one of the figures of the industrial age.