Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (39 page)

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.

Toothbrushes made of other animal hair, such as badger, experienced brief vogues. But many people preferred to pick their teeth clean after a meal with a stiff quill (as the Romans had done), or to use specially manufactured brass or silver toothpicks.

In many cases, metal toothpicks were less of a health hazard than hard natural-hair toothbrushes. For once the nineteenth-century French bacteriologist Louis Pasteur posited his theory of germs, the dental profession realized that all animal-hair toothbrushes (which retain moisture) eventually accumulate microscopic bacterial and fungal growth, and that the sharp ends of the bristles piercing a gum could be the source of numerous mouth infections. Sterilizing animal-hair brushes in boiling water could permanently leave them overly soft or destroy them entirely. And good animal-hair toothbrushes were too expensive to be frequently replaced. The solution to the problem did not arrive until the third decade of this century.

Nylon-Bristle Toothbrush: 1938, United States

The discovery of nylon in the 1930s by Du Pont chemists set in motion a revolution in the toothbrush industry. Nylon was tough, stiff, resilient, and resistant to deformation, and it was also impervious to moisture, so it dried thoroughly, discouraging bacterial growth.

The first nylon-bristle brush was marketed in the United States in 1938, under the name Dr. West’s Miracle Tuft Toothbrush. Du Pont called the artificial fibers Exton Bristles, and through a widespread advertising campaign the company informed the American public that “The material used in manufacturing Exton is called nylon, a word so recently coined that you will not find it in any dictionary.” And the company played up nylon’s many advantages over hog hair, stressing, too, that while hog-hair bristles often pulled free of the brush, to lodge annoyingly between teeth, nylon bristles were more securely fastened to the brush head.

However, those first nylon bristles were so extraordinarily stiff that they were hard on gums. In fact, gum tissue tore so readily that dentists at first resisted recommending nylon brushes. By the early 1950s, Du Pont had perfected a “soft” nylon, which they introduced to the public in the form
of the Park Avenue Toothbrush. A person could pay ten cents for a hard-bristle brush, forty-nine cents for the fancier, softer Park Avenue model.