Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things

by Charles Panati

  The Baths of Caracalla, for example, offered Roman citizens a wide range of health and beauty options. In one immense complex there were body oiling and scraping salons; hot, warm, and cold tub baths; sweating rooms; hair shampooing, scenting, and curling areas; manicure shops; and a gymnasium. A selection of cosmetics and perfumes could also be purchased. After being exercised, washed, and groomed, a Roman patron could read in the adjoining library or stop into a lecture hall for a discussion of philosophy or art. A gallery displayed works of Greek and Roman art, and in another room, still part of the complex, slaves served platters of food and poured wine.

  If this sounds like the arrangement in such a celebrity spa as the Golden Door, it was; only the Roman club was considerably larger and catered to a great many more members—often twenty-five hundred at one time. And that was just the men’s spa. Similar though smaller facilities were often available to women.

  Roman spa. Men and women used separate facilities but later mixed bathing became the fashion.

  Though at first men and women bathed separately, mixed bathing later became the fashion. It lasted well into the early Christian era, until the Catholic Church began to dictate state policy. (From written accounts, mixed bathing did not result in the widespread promiscuity that occurred a thousand years later when public baths reemerged in Europe. During this early Renaissance period the Italian word bagnio meant both “bath” and “brothel.”)

  By A.D. 500, Roman bathing spa luxury had ended.

  From the decline of the Roman Empire—when invading barbarians destroyed most of the tiled baths and terra-cotta aqueducts—until the later Middle Ages, the bath, and cleanliness in general, was little known or appreciated. The orthodox Christian view in those times maintained that all aspects of the flesh should be mortified as much as possible, and whole-body bathing, which completely exposed the flesh, was regarded as entertaining temptation and thus sinful. That view prevailed throughout most of Europe. A person bathed when he or she was baptized by immersion, and infrequently thereafter. The rich splashed themselves with perfume; the poor stunk.

  With the demise of bathing, public and private, went the niceties of indoor bathroom technology in general. The outhouse, outdoor latrines and trenches, and chamber pots reemerged at all levels of society. Christian prudery, compounded by medical superstition concerning the health evils of bathing, all but put an end to sanitation. For hundreds of years, disease was commonplace; epidemics decimated villages and towns.

  In Europe, the effects of the 1500s Reformation further exacerbated the disregard for hygiene. Protestants and Catholics, vying to outdo each other in shunning temptations of the flesh, exposed little skin to soap and water throughout a lifetime. Bathroom plumbing, which had been sophisticated two thousand years earlier, was negligible to nonexistent—even in grand European palaces. And publicly performed bodily functions, engaged in whenever and wherever one had the urge, became so commonplace that in 1589 the British royal court was driven to post a public warning in the palace:

  Let no one, whoever, he may be, before, at, or after meals, early or late, foul the staircases, corridors, or closets with urine or other filth.

  In light of this warning, Erasmus’s 1530 advice— “It is impolite to greet someone who is urinating or defecating” —takes on its full significance.

  A hundred years later, etiquette books were still giving the same advice for the same public problem. The Gallant Ethic, in which it is shown how a young man should commend himself to polite society, written around 1700, suggests: “If you pass a person who is relieving himself you should act as if you had not seen him.” A French journal of the day provides a glimpse of the extent of the public sanitation problem. “Paris is dreadful. The streets smell so bad that you cannot go out…. The multitude of people in the street produces a stench so detestable that it cannot be endured.”

  The sanitation problem was compounded by the chamber pot. With no plumbing in the average home, wastes from the pots were often tossed into the street. Numerous cartoons of the period illustrate the dangers of walking under second-story windows late at night, the preferred time to stealthily empty the pots. This danger, as well as continually fouled gutters, is supposed to have instituted the custom of a gentleman’s escorting a lady on the inside of a walkway, removed from the filth.

  Legally, the contents of chamber pots were supposed to be collected early in the morning by “night-soil men.” They transported the refuse in carts to large public cesspools. But not every family could afford to pay, or wait, for the service.

  By the 1600s, plumbing technology had reappeared in parts of Europe—but not in the bathroom. The initial construction of the seventeenth-century palace at Versailles—which shortly after its completion would house the French royal family, one thousand noblemen, and four thousand attendants—included no plumbing for toilets or bathrooms, although the system of cascading and gushing outdoor water fountains was grand.

  The dawning of the industrial revolution in Britain in the 1700s did nothing to help home or public sanitation. The rapid urbanization and industrialization caused stifling overcrowding and unparalleled squalor. Once-picturesque villages became disease-plagued slums.

  It was only after a debilitating outbreak of cholera decimated London in the 1830s that authorities began campaigning for sanitation facilities at home, in the workplace, and along public streets and in parks. For the remainder of the century, British engineers led the Western world in constructing public and private plumbing firsts. The bathroom, as we take it for granted today, had started to emerge, with its central feature, the modern flush toilet.

  Medieval woodcut depicting the danger from a chamber pot being illegally emptied.

  Modern Flush Toilet: 1775, England

  That essential convenience of modern living the flush toilet was enjoyed by Minoan royalty four thousand years ago and by few others for the next thirty-five centuries. One version was installed for Queen Elizabeth in 1596, devised by a courtier from Bath who was the queen’s godson, Sir John Harrington. He used the device, which he called “a privy in perfection,” to regain the queen’s favor, for she had banished him from court for circulating racy Italian fiction.

  Harrington’s design was quite sophisticated in many respects. It included a high water tower on top of the main housing, a hand-operated tap that permitted water to flow into a tank, and a valve that released sewage into a nearby cesspool.

  Chamber pots with toilet stands flanking an eighteenth-century flush toilet mechanism.

  Unwisely for Harrington, he wrote a book about the queen’s toilet, titled The Metamorphosis of Ajax—Ajax being a pun on the word “jake,” then slang for chamber pot. The book’s earthy humor incensed Elizabeth, who again banished her godson, and his flush toilet became the butt of jokes and fell into disuse.

  The next flush device of distinction appeared in 1775, patented by a British mathematician and watchmaker, Alexander Cumming. It differed from Harrington’s design in one significant aspect, which, though small in itself, was revolutionary. Harrington’s toilet (and others that had been devised) connected directly to a cesspool, separated from the pool’s decomposing contents by only a loose trapdoor; the connecting pipe contained no odor-blocking water. Elizabeth herself had criticized the design and complained bitterly that the constant cesspool fumes discouraged her from using her godson’s invention.

  In Cumming’s improved design, the soil pipe immediately beneath the bowl curved backward so as, Cumming’s patent application read, “to constantly retain a quantity of water to cut off all communication of smell from below.” He labeled the feature a “stink trap,” and it became an integral part of all future toilet designs.

  The modern flush toilet had been invented. But more than a hundred years would pass before it would replace the chamber pot and the outhouse, to become a standard feature in British and American bathrooms.

  Toilet Paper: 1857, United States

  The first commercially
packaged toilet paper, or bathroom tissue, in America was introduced by businessman Joseph Gayetty in 1857. But the product, available in packages of individual sheets, sold poorly and soon virtually disappeared from grocery store shelves. At the time, the majority of Americans could not comprehend wasting money on perfectly clean paper when their bathrooms and outhouses were amply stocked with last year’s department store catalogues, yesterday’s newspapers, and sundry fliers, pamphlets and advertisements, which also provided reading material.

  In England, an attempt to market toilet paper was made in 1879 by British manufacturer Walter Alcock. Whereas Gayetty produced individual flat sheets of paper, Alcock conceived the idea of a roll of “tear sheets,” introducing the first perforated toilet roll. Invention was one thing, but marketing an unmentionable product in the Victorian age was another. Alcock spent nearly a decade struggling to get his product mass-produced, advertised, and accepted by a public at a pinnacle of prudery.

  Across the Atlantic, in upstate New York, two enterprising bearded brothers were also attempting to interest the public in their line of paper products, which included rolled bathroom tissue. They would succeed in the field where Alcock and Gayetty failed.

  Edward and Clarence Scott were born three years apart in rural Saratoga County, New York. In 1879, the year Alcock had perfected his perforated roll in England, the Scotts were living in Philadelphia, beginning a business of paper products, which, because they were generally indispensable, disposable, and unreusable, promised to make a fortune. And the one item that seemed indisputably to embody all three attributes best was toilet paper.

  The Scotts’ timing was better than Joseph Gayetty’s.

  In the 1880s, many home owners, hotels, and restaurants were installing full-service indoor plumbing for sinks, showers, and toilets. Major cities were laying down public sewer systems. In Boston, the Tremont House had earlier boasted of being the first hotel to offer guests convenient indoor flush toilets and baths: “8 privies and 8 bathing rooms” (though all of them were in the basement). Philadelphia had the distinction of being the city with the most fully plumbed bathrooms and bathtubs (1,530 tubs in 1836), which drew water from the Schuykill Water Works. In lower Manhattan, tenements were shooting up, in which several families shared plumbed bathroom facilities. And manufacturers and stores were highlighting the latest in European toilet seats, the oval “Picture Frame,” as well as the newest toilet bowl, the one-piece ceramic “Pedestal Vase,” which took the gold medal in bathroom design when it was unveiled at the 1884 British Health Exhibition. The bathroom was changing. The climate was set for toilet paper.

  Unlike Gayetty’s bathroom tissue, available only in large five-hundred-sheet packages, the Scotts’ product came in small rolls. It sold in plain brown wrappers and fit convenietly into the American bathroom, which at the time was truly, as euphemistically called, “the smallest room in the house.”

  From unlabeled brown wrappers, the product evolved to the prestigiously named Waldorf Tissue, then simply to ScotTissue, each roll bearing the slogan “soft as old linen.”

  Like British bathroom tissue advertising, the Scotts’ early ad campaigns were low-keyed, in deference to the public’s sensibilities concerning the product. Waldorf Tissue seemed fittingly appropriate to rest beside a Pedestal Vase overhung by an oval Picture Frame. But following World War I, the company attempted to corner the American bathroom tissue market with more aggressive advertising, which sought to create snob appeal by impugning competitors’ brands. Typical was an advertisement that read: “They have a pretty house, Mother, but their bathroom paper hurts.” The market, however, was large enough to support numerous competitors, for as the brothers had realized, toilet paper truly was indispensable, disposable, and unreusable.

  Paper Towels. It was a factory production error in 1907 that resulted in America’s first commercially packaged, tear-off paper towels.

  By that year, the Scott brothers’ paper company was a business success. Their high-quality soft bathroom tissue arrived from a large paper mill in so-called parent rolls, which were then cut down to convenient bathroom-size packages. One order from the mill proved to be defective. The parent roll was excessively heavy and wrinkled. Unfit for bathroom tissues, the product was scheduled to be returned when a member of the Scott family suggested perforating the thick paper into small towel-size sheets. The product, he suggested, could be advertised as disposable “paper towels.”

  America’s first commercially packaged paper towel was named Sani-Towel in 1907, and it sold primarily to hotels, restaurants, and railroad stations for use in public washrooms. There was a simple, economic resistance to paper towels on the part of home owners: Why pay for a towel that was used once and discarded, when a cloth towel could be washed and reused indefinitely? But as the price of paper towels gradually decreased, home owners found them more readily disposable, and in 1931 the brand Sani-Towel was renamed ScotTowels; a roll of two hundred sheets sold for a quarter. Whereas toilet tissue became a necessity of the bathroom, paper towels would become a great convenience in almost every room in the house.

  Kleenex Tissues: 1924, United States

  Today we use the tissue as a disposable handkerchief, but that was not its original purpose as conceived by its manufacturer following World War I.

  In 1914, cotton was in short supply. A new, remarkably absorbent substitute was developed for use as a surgical bandage on the battlefield and in wartime hospitals and first-aid stations. An even more highly absorbent form of the material found use as an air filter in GIs’ gas masks. The cotton-like wadding, produced by Kimberly-Clark and called Cellucotton, was manufactured in such immense quantities that following the war, huge surpluses crowded warehouses.

  The company sought a peacetime use for the product it had spent years perfecting. One later application for Cellucotton would be in a new feminine napkin, Kotex, but its first postwar spin-off was as a glamour product: a cold-cream tissue, used by Hollywood and Broadway stars to remove makeup.

  Named Kleenex Kerchiefs, the “Sanitary Cold Cream Remover” was heavily promoted as a disposable substitute for cloth facial towels, and a package of one hundred sold for sixty-five cents. Magazine advertisements featured such celebrities as Helen Hayes, Gertrude Lawrence, and Ronald Colman. And American women were told that Kleenex Kerchiefs were the “scientific way,” as well as the glamorous way, to remove rouge, foundation, powder, and lipstick.

  The star-studded campaign worked perfectly. For five years, Kleenex sales increased steadily. But an unexpected phenomenon occurred. Consumer mail poured into the company’s headquarters, praising the product as a disposable handkerchief. Men questioned why it was not promoted that way, and wives complained that husbands were blowing their noses in their cold-cream Kerchiefs.

  Consumer mail increased late in 1921. That year, a Chicago inventor, Andrew Olsen, had devised a revolutionary new pop-up tissue box, which Kimberly-Clark had put into production, in which two separate layers of tissue paper were interfolded. Named Serv-a-Tissue, the product won even more nose-blowing converts for its quick, easy accessibility, a genuine plus for capturing a sudden, unexpected sneeze.

  Kimberly-Clark’s management, confused and divided, decided in 1930 to test-market the twofold purpose of the tissue. A group of consumers in Peoria, Illinois, was enticed to redeem one of two coupons, with alternative headlines: “We pay [a free box of tissues] to prove there is no way like Kleenex to remove cold cream,” or: “We pay to prove Kleenex is wonderful for handkerchiefs.” The coupons were good for redemption at local drug and department stores. When the votes were tallied, the numbers were decisive: sixty-one percent of the coupon-redeemers had responded to the handkerchief ad.

  The company began to promote tissues as disposable handkerchiefs. The campaign worked so well that management conceived more than a dozen additional household uses for Kleenex, such as dusting and polishing furniture, wiping food residue from the inside of pots and pans, draining grease
from French-fried potatoes, and cleaning car windshields. In fact, a 1936 insert in a Kleenex tissue package listed forty-eight handy uses for their product. People, though, still wanted them mainly for blowing their noses.

  Siberian hogs provided bristles for toothbrushes until the introduction of nylon in 1938.

  Toothbrush: 3000 B.C., Egypt

  The first toothbrush used by ancients was the “chew stick,” a pencil-size twig with one end frayed to a soft, fibrous condition. Chew sticks were initially rubbed against the teeth with no additional abrasive such as toothpaste, and they have been found in Egyptian tombs dating to 3000 B.C.

  Chew sticks are still used in some parts of the world. Many African tribes fray twigs only from a certain tree, the Salvadore persica, or “toothbrush tree.” And the American Dental Association discovered that frayed sticks often serve as toothbrushes for people living in remote areas of the United States; in the South, they’re known as “twig brushes.” They can be every bit as effective as a modern nylon-bristled toothbrush. Dentists reported on one elderly man living near Shreveport, Louisiana, who had used frayed white elm sticks all his life and had plaque-free teeth and healthy gums.

  The first bristle toothbrush, similar to today’s, originated in China about 1498. The bristles, hand plucked from the backs of the necks of hogs living in the colder climates of Siberia and China (frigid weather causes hogs to grow firmer bristles), were fastened into handles of bamboo or bone. Traders to the Orient introduced the Chinese toothbrush to Europeans, who found hog bristles too irritatingly firm.

  At the time, those Europeans who brushed their teeth (and the practice was not at all commonplace) preferred softer horsehair toothbrushes. The father of modern dentistry, Dr. Pierre Fauchard, gives the first detailed account of the toothbrush in Europe. In his 1723 dental textbook, La chirurgien Dentiste, he is critical of the ineffectiveness of horsehair brushes (they were too soft), and more critical of the large portion of the population who never, or only infrequently, practiced any kind of dental hygiene. Fauchard recommends daily vigorous rubbing of the teeth and gums with a small piece of natural sponge.