The history of toilet paper goes back thousands of years. It involved, pardon our french, many sh#$$y options. Like the famous “march of progress” chart that shows man evolving from ape to Homo sapien, the history of backside sanitation starts with smooth stones, sponges on sticks, and even ceramic before thankfully advancing to wildly varying forms of paper.
We can safely assume this one came with splinters.
Frankly, any form of papyrus beats some of the earliest options. However, the 1930s major innovation of “splinter-free” toilet paper inspires little confidence in its predecessors. Here’s the fascinating and slightly disturbing history of toilet paper.
Starts With A Bang
As Erica Rowan, an environmental archaeologist and a lecturer in classical archaeology at the University of London, safely declared, “The most famous example of ancient ‘toilet paper’ comes from the Roman world [during the first century A.D.] and Seneca's story about the gladiator who killed himself by going into a toilet and shoving the communal sponge on a stick down his throat.”
An early form of "toilet paper." toiletseeker
That’s either a translation error or the single worst form of suicide ever conceived. We should clarify that “communal sponge” was whatever classified as the Roman era version of a sponge, strapped to a stick which then everyone used to cleanse themselves post defecation. Yea, living in the Game Of Thrones days sounds great.
Some farmers constructed their outhouses attached to their pigpens. wikipediacommons
A Step In The Right Direction
As time went on, other cultures utilized seashells and animal furs. While PETA would be furious, even they have to admit animal fur sounds downright heavenly compared to a communal butt sponge. Still, evidence that Greco-Romans went with pessoi, which amounts to a rough-looking stone, makes one sit up straight.
At least a handful of citizens in the fateful city of Pompeii appeared to have used cloth! According to Rowan, “Cloth was made by hand in antiquity so using a cloth to wipe your bum would have been quite a decadent activity. It's the equivalent to using the softest and most expensive three-ply today.”
China Ahead Of The Curve
While historians have found indications that the Chinese also used “hygiene sticks” made of bamboo, documentation suggests that they became the first to use “toilet paper.” Scholar Yen Chih-Thui wrote in 589 A.D, “Paper on which there are quotations or commentaries from the Five Classics or the names of sages, I dare not use for toilet purposes.”
Incredibly by the 14th century, China mass-produced toilet paper at the rate of 10 million packages of 1,000 to 10,000 sheets annually. The Hongwu Emperor’s imperial family even enjoyed perfumed sheets!
Public toilet from the 1800’s. truewestmagazine
The West Lags Behind
Rather sadly, the Westerners did not figure out the whole butt paper thing until 1857, roughly 400 hundred years later! That year Joseph Gayetty of New York came up with the “cute” idea for a "Medicated Paper, for the Water-Closet.” Prior to that Americans were forced to “cleverly” improvise. And by clever we mean disgusting.
It got so bad for Americans that the Farmer’s Almanac began providing a hole in their 1919 publication so people could more easily nail it to their outhouse wall. Understand that reading it became its secondary function…
Barry Kudrowitz, associate professor and director of product design at the University of Minnesota who’s something of a toilet paper historian reported, “The ‘legend’ goes that people were primarily using the Sears catalog in outhouses, but when the catalog began to be printed in glossy paper, people needed to find a replacement.”
Newspaper or toilet paper? Back then no such a distinction existed.
Blissfully Splinter Free
It took many decades for Americans to finally graduate from almanac pages to what you can only imagine was splinter-filled toilet paper. And many more years before they finally received the “splinter-free” version that still undoubtedly fell well short of what we use today. So if anyone you know goes on a George Costanza-esque rant about the lack of development in toilet paper, remind them that they could be sharing a stick with a sponge.
