A chamber pot is the proverbial pot to piss in. Way back in the old days, before we had toilets that automatically dispensed disposable covers and flushed by themselves, people had to use less dignified means to do their business. In rural areas, it wasn't as big of a problem, of course — there's always places to go. But in urban centers, people went in chamber pots, which were, well, pots. They were generally emptied into the public sanitary sewers of the day — that is, the street.
A brief history of waste
The cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in ancient India are the oldest known examples of public sewer systems, dating to around 2600 BCE. At the time, the concern was simply conducting sewage away from cities; toilets were built into houses on the street side, and water was poured down to clear them, making them the earliest version of the flush toilet. Toilets even existed on the second…