People often ask me how I came up with the idea for Urinal Fly decals. I didn’t! As it turns out, the idea was hatched not in this century, not in the last century, but two centuries before.

The following is taken from an article, Works That Work, No.1, Winter 2013, written by Blake Evans-Pritchard.

As early as 1976 Joel Kreiss, an inventor from New Jersey, registered a US patent for a bull’s-eye target to improve aim, noting that ‘parents, janitors, and others responsible for this cleanliness have often despaired [sic] the human male sloppiness of failing to direct urine into the proper receptacles’.

Even further back, in 1954, inventor Rolph Henoch registered a patent for a complex device suspended over the toilet, which served as a target for young boys who were being trained ‘in the practice of not wetting the floor around the toilet bowl’.

However, the most intriguing use of a urinal target is by the Victorians, dating back at least as far as the 1880s. Simon Kirby, owner and manager of Thomas Crapper, which manufactures period sanitary ware, is something of an expert on the use of toilets through the ages. Two old Victorian urinals stand outside his office door in Stratford-on-Avon, both embossed with a small bee.

A Victorian urinal target dating back at least as far as the 1880s features a bee. The Latin for bee is apis, a vulgar joke understandable to Victorian gentlemen, but almost certainly lost on 21st-century men. (Photo courtesy of Thomas Crapper & Co.)

‘The bee was put on as an unusually vulgar Victorian joke,’ he says. ‘The Latin for bee is apis. Victorian gentlemen would have been schooled in Latin and would have got this joke, which would be lost on us now. It’s quite rare for any humour to be applied to sanitary manufacturing, so I rather like this.’

Kieboom says that he was not previously aware of any of these ideas before putting forward the idea of the fly to Schiphol’s management. And nearly a quarter of a century after the first one being suggested, the idea still has the capacity to capture the popular imagination.

‘I worked for 31 years at Schiphol Airport,’ says Kieboom, ‘first in the operations department, then in charge of major projects like the Terminal Three building, a brand-new railway station incorporated within the terminal buildings, renovating Terminals One and Two and developing four new piers, being chairman of Schiphol’s fine arts committee. I did a lot for the JFK Terminal 4 project [in New York] and also a lot of other foreign projects. And how will I be mainly remembered on the Internet? By the fly in the urinals!’

Kieboom is intrigued by the hype that the story has generated. He says that the version that still makes him smile is the one reported in Iceland. Rather than flies, the targets in the urinals were pictures of Icelandic bankers. This was around 2008, shortly after the country’s three main commercial banks had collapsed.

Just about anything can be put at the bottom of the urinal to serve as a target, but psychologically it is much more effective to put something there that men want to pee on.