page_title: Portable toilet
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Portable toilet / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Royal Air Force Bomber Command, 1939-1941. A crew member on board a Vickers Wellington of No. 75 (New Zealand) Squadron RAF places night flares in position in the cramped rear fuselage. Note the Elsan chemical lavatory to the right.
context_page_description: A portable or mobile toilet is any type of toilet that can be moved around, some by one person, some by mechanical equipment. Most types do not require any pre-existing services, such as sewerage disposal, but are completely self-contained.
  They can be used in a variety of situations, for example in urban slums of developing countries, at festivals, for camping, or on boats. One well-known type of portable toilet is a chemical toilet but other types also exist, such as urine-diversion dehydration toilets, composting toilets, container-based toilets, bucket toilets, freezing toilets and incineration toilets.
  A portable toilet is not connected to a hole in the ground, nor to a septic tank, nor is it plumbed into a municipal system leading to a sewage treatment plant; it can, by definition, be picked up and moved. Some portable toilets can be carried by one person, as in the main image, whereas others need heavy lifting equipment such as a truck and crane.
context_section_description: The close stool, built as an article of furniture, is one of the earliest forms of portable toilet. They can still be seen in historic house museums such as Sir George-Étienne Cartier National Historic Site in Old Montreal, Canada. The velvet upholstered close stool used by William III is on display at Hampton Court Palace; see Groom of the Stool.
  Early versions of the "Elsan chemical closet" ("closet" meaning a small room, see water closet, WC, and earth closet) were sold at Army & Navy Stores. Their use in World War II bomber aircraft is described at some length by the Bomber Command Museum of Canada; in brief, they were not popular with either the flying crew or the ground crew.
  African-Americans living under Jim Crow laws (i.e. before the Civil Rights Act of 1964) faced dangerous challenges. Public toilets were segregated by race, and many restaurants and gas stations refused to serve black people, so some travellers carried a portable toilet in the trunk of their car.
caption: A portable toilet in Royal Airforce WWII plane
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