the history of toilet paper

 

The link below contains a picture that was taken almost exactly three years ago, during the early stages of the pandemic. No matter which store you went to, toilet paper, and other paper products, was very scarce.

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2020/03/no-shit-sherlock.html

Because people were afraid of running out of some of the basics, hoarding became more common, and there were stories of people getting into fights in grocery store aisles over toilet paper.

At the same time, oil prices plunged due to the fact that people were driving less, largely due to the fact that it was no longer safe to go into the office to work. For a brief period of time, there was an oversupply of oil, which pushed the price of a barrel of oil into negative values. It’s not a stretch to say that a roll of toilet paper was worth more than a barrel of oil.

An article in today’s Washington Post discussed an alternative to toilet paper, and it’s been around a long time.

It’s called a bidet.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/04/04/bidets-benefits-history-environmental-impact/

Although the bidet is thought to have been invented in France in the 1600s, Japan has embraced the device like few other nations, with an estimated 79 percent of households owning at least one.

In the United States, the bidet has barely cracked the mainstream. Our historical prejudice against the apparatus dates back to World War II, when many service members’ first encounters with it were in a French brothel. That created an association with sex work.

 The rest of the world, meanwhile, has embraced the concept, with the bidet evolving into myriad forms. 

 Today, no one buys more TP than Americans. The typical person in the United States uses about 24 rolls of toilet paper per year. That’s roughly three times more than Europeans — and among the highest per capita consumption of any country. Were the country to switch to bidets, millions of trees would likely remain standing every year.

Toilet paper is older than you might think.

During the early 14th century, it was recorded that in what is now Zhejiang alone, ten million packages of 1,000 to 10,000 sheets of toilet paper were manufactured annually. During the Ming dynasty (1368–1644 AD), it was recorded in 1393 that an annual supply of 720,000 sheets of toilet paper (approximately 2 by 3 ft (60 by 90 cm)) were produced for the general use of the imperial court at the capital of Nanjing. From the records of the Imperial Bureau of Supplies of that same year, it was also recorded that for the Hongwu Emperor's imperial family alone, there were 15,000 sheets of special soft-fabric toilet paper made, and each sheet of toilet paper was perfumed.

Joseph Gayetty  is widely credited with being the inventor of modern commercially available toilet paper in the United States. Gayetty's paper, first introduced in 1857, was available as late as the 1920s. Gayetty's Medicated Paper was sold in packages of flat sheets, watermarked with the inventor's name. Original advertisements for the product used the tagline "The greatest necessity of the age! Gayetty's medicated paper for the water-closet."

Seth Wheeler of Albany, New York, obtained the earliest United States patents for toilet paper and dispensers, the types of which eventually were in common use in that country, in 1883. Toilet paper dispensed from rolls was popularized when the Scott Paper Company began marketing it in 1890.

 

The manufacturing of this product had a long period of refinement, considering that as late as the 1930s, a selling point of the Northern Tissue company was that their toilet paper was "splinter free". The widespread adoption of the flush toilet increased the use of toilet paper, as heavier paper was more prone to clogging the trap that prevents sewer gases from escaping through the toilet.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper

 Northern Tissue, in 1935, began to advertise toilet paper that was “splinter free”. Prior to 1935, it was common to have splinters due to the production techniques used to produce the product.

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/11/05/splinter-free-toilet-paper-didnt-exist-until-the-1930s/?chrome=1&A1c=1

There’s evidence that humans have been baking bread in some form for about 30,000 years, but sliced bread has only been around since the early 20th century. The first automatically sliced commercial loaves were produced on July 6, 1928, in Chillicothe, Missouri, using the machine invented by Otto Rohwedder, an Iowa-born, Missouri-based jeweler. 

As a result, it is literally true that “splinter free” toilet paper was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

My father was born in 1909, and mom was born in 1913, long before “splinter free” toilet paper was available to the public. Since they both lived on farms, they used a product that was readily available and free.

Corn cobs.

 

Our son installed a bidet in our house during the brief period of time when he and his family lived with us between the lease on their rental house, and their better-quality apartment unit. I’ve used it a few times, but I’m not a regular user.

Bidets can be fairly inexpensive, but if you want to splurge, there’s always the Neorest NX2 toilet, which costs $21, 181. Designed by the Japanese company Toto, it features a remote control, heated seat, deodorizer, night light, and, as DJ Khaled says enthusiastically, “water that splashes up” after you’re done.    

Water, not paper, has long been the world’s gold standard for cleaning up behinds. The Quran details prescriptions for cleaning with water in the bathroom. More recently, a 1975 hygiene bill in Italy made it illegal not to have at least one bidet in every public lodging, reports The Guardian.

Since moving to Tucson, the only bidet that I have seen in a public building was in a high school on the east side of town.

 I doubt that bidets will ever become common in this country, but if we ever are faced with a shortage of toilet paper again, at least we’ll have a viable alternative.