thunderbox

A chamber pot enclosed in a box; a portable commode.

True, our cash would run out, but Charleton wouldn't let us starve. He'd put us into shorts, and we should wash the dishes and clean the thunder-boxes and take out guests for walks.

Then, after another pause, he said: "Well, if you must know, it's my Thunder-box." […] He opened it, showing a mechanism of heavy cast-iron brass and patterned earthenware of solid Edwardian workmanship. On the inside of the lid was a plaque bearing the embossed title Connolly's Chemical Closet.

Any lavatory or toilet, especially a rudimentary outdoor latrine or toilet, or an outhouse.

Meantime the ICE [Institute of Consumer Ergonomics] experts are poring over their photographs, and making measurements, which, presumably, will go into a computer, and out will come the specification for the perfect thunderbox.

In the old days, when there was a corrugated iron thunderbox, the Holts' guests were told to approach it with caution: where other thunderboxes had redback spiders, the local ones tended to have taipans.

A box of metal balls which is shaken to create a thunder sound effect.

[T]wo articles, both indispensibly necessary to a theatre, are not blundered, viz. a property room, and thunder box!—no they are omitted altogether!!

[H]e [the English actor West Digges] said, "Take the child to the slips;" and I was led through the carpenter's gallery, the cloudings and thunder boxes, and placed in a good seat, where I saw the play with great delight.

A blunderbuss; also, a cannon.

In the year 1346, at the battle of Crecy, the engliſh uſed a ſort of cannons, which were then called thunder-boxes.

[…] I saw Arnoldi at Dettelbach, standing unhurt amongst the lances and swords, which flashed and glittered around him like lightning; the thunder-boxes peppering away all the while as if it snowed lead; and when the pastime (for it was nothing else to him) was over, there he stood leaning on his halbert, coolly shaking out the bullets, which rattled like peas from his breeches and doublet.