""It's pretty much impossible to do a serious history of the toilet," says Ian Kerr-Wilson, curator of a museum exhibit that notes the use of corncobs as toilet paper and pocket urinals that look like silver hip flasks. Kerr-Wilson jokes his way past the bowls, plungers and tissue rolls on the ground floor of the Hamilton Museum of Steam and Technology. He's ready for bathroom humour at today's opening of Sitting Pretty: A History of the Toilet.

"But toilet history, Kerr-Wilson says, is also the study of an "invisible technology" we are trying to tame. It's a tale of the knitted silencers we slipped over chamber pot lids to hush the noises of a midnight pee."