You wake up and stumble to the bathroom to
take care of your morning business. You’re still half asleep when you finish
and grope around for the toilet paper - only to have your hand close on an empty roll! You’re wide awake now as a moment of panic
ensues. Even as your brain scrambles for a solution
to your immediate predicament, a part of you is wondering - what on earth did people do
before toilet paper? Toilet paper is currently a billion-dollar
industry in the United States alone. The average American uses fifty-seven squares
of toilet paper per day, which adds up to a staggering fifty pounds of toilet paper
per year! But toilet paper as we know it has only been
around for about a hundred-and-fifty years. So, what did people do before toilet paper? In his book Poop Culture, Dave Praeger, who
runs the popular website PoopReport.com, says: “The experience of needing to poop, of pooping
and of having pooped is universal.” Using the bathroom is truly a universal human
experience, but our particular bathroom habits have certainly changed throughout history,
and even vary widely across the world today! For most of human history, when it came to
toilet paper people used whatever was handy - leaves, sticks, rocks and yes, even hands! Prehistoric tribal people didn’t even have
designated bathroom areas, although they would generally do their business away from their
sleeping and eating areas. Some cultures even considered bathroom time
to be a communal activity, and it was common to socialize and chat with your friends while
you did your business. Imagine you’re a prehistoric Native American
tribesperson, waking up in your longhouse surrounded by your family. You climb out of your bed of furs on your
sleeping platform and make your way past the other longhouses and through the village. You head to a particular area of the nearby
field where you settle into a comfortable squat and proceed to do your thing. When you’re done, you look around you for
something to use to clean up. After considering some twigs, a few leaves
and some small stones, you finally settle on a handful of dried grass to get the job
done, before you head off to face the rest of your day. If you were a member of a different prehistoric
tribe living in a more tropical climate, your morning routine would look remarkably similar
to your North American counterpart. You wake up and find a suitable place to pop
a squat, and then you use whatever is available to clean up. Your particular choice of clean-up materials
might be a bit different though, reflecting your tropical environment. Instead of dried grass and stones you might
consider using native leaves, coconut shards or even seashells to get the job done. If you woke up among the ancient peoples of
the Middle East and Indian subcontinent, you’d find that they had a totally different tactic
for dealing with a lack of toilet paper - they skipped it all together! Waking up in your tent, you feel the call
of nature. You walk down to the river near your encampment,
position yourself over the edge, and do your thing. When you’re done, you use water from the
river and your left hand to clean yourself up - your right hand is your eating hand,
so it’s important not to get them mixed up! Finally, you’d gather your water for the
day - from the same river that you just did your business in - and carry on with your
day. If you lived in a city in China around the
first century A.D., you might almost feel right at home! After waking up you stumble over the matong,
or “horse bucket”, which was a large wooden bucket filled with water. You squat over the bucket and take care of
business, and when you’re ready to clean up, you find a sight for sore eyes - toilet
paper! The Chinese not only invented paper, period,
but they were the first to use paper as bathroom material. The practice was common there for centuries,
but it wouldn’t make its way to the rest of the world for another sixteen-hundred years. In the first centuries A.D., the Chinese empire
was manufacturing almost a million sheets of ancient toilet paper per year. These two-foot by three-foot sheets were made
from a bamboo pulp, and toilet paper for wealthy and important families would often be perfumed. The Emperor Hungwu’s family alone would
use fifteen-thousand of the two-foot by three-foot paper sheets per year. The rural Chinese farmers of the day may not
have had access to the luxury of toilet paper, but they had their own method of dealing with
toilet waste. As a rural Chinese farmer, you wake up, head
outside and make your way over to the pigpen. You settle into a squat over a hole dug in
the earth nearby. After you’ve relieved yourself, your … waste…
travels down a tunnel and into the nearby pigsty for the pigs to eat. This practice was so common that the Chinese
character for “pig” can be found in the Chinese word for “toilet”. If instead you found yourself waking up during
the Nara period in ancient Japan, you’d be facing an entirely different set of toilet
practices. As a government official living in Heijokyu
Palace, the political centre of Japan during the Nara period, you wake up and make your
way to the latrine for your morning ritual. Once done, you would use a flat stick called
a chügi that looks a bit like a popsicle stick to scrape your… area… from left
to right. If that seems weird, just imagine waking up
in ancient Greece. After waking up in your home in the city,
you make your way down the street to the public latrine. You take a seat at one of the many holes in
the stone bench and make small talk with your neighbours while you do your business. But, instead of using a smooth wooden stick
to clean up, you use broken shards of pottery to scrape yourself clean. Since you’re still holding a grudge against
one of your neighbours, you take a moment to inscribe his name on the shards first. The ancient Romans had a gentler method for
dealing with toilet hygiene, although their bathroom practices still left a lot to be
desired. In the morning you make your way down the
street to the public latrine to relieve yourself. After doing your business - and catching up
on local gossip, of course - you use a sea sponge tied to string to clean yourself up. You’re careful to give the sponge a courtesy
rinse for the next person before placing it in a bucket of vinegar or salt water to be
disinfected...or that was the idea anyways… Things only got marginally better later in
history. In England during Shakespearean times, most
homes had their own bathroom facilities, so business was at least indoors, if not private
or much more hygenic. When you wake up in your London home, you
lay in bed for a minute trying to decide whether to get up and head to the latrine, which is
a large room that contains a bench with a hole in it placed over a bucket. You also store all of your clothing in the
latrine so that the strong smell of urine can ward off disease. You decide you’re too lazy to get out of
bed just yet, so do your business in the chamber pot you keep under your bed and fall back
asleep. You don’t even hear your servant come in
to empty the chamber pot - but you definitely hear the shouts from the unsuspecting pedestrians
who happened to be walking by when she dumped the contents out of the second story window! If you were lucky enough to be a noble person
living in a medieval castle around this time, you would use the most advanced toilet technology
of the day. The latrines in the higher floors where the
king and other nobles lived were large rooms with stone benches with holes in them, but
the rooms were built out over the edge of the castle’s walls, so that the waste would
fall down the side of the castle and you wouldn’t have to worry about removing it yourself. Needless to say, castle life didn’t smell
very pleasant! If you were one of the pioneer farmers who
settled America, morning would mean a trip to the outhouse, a small wooden shed behind
your farmhouse containing a bench over a hole dug in the ground. After enjoying some peace and quiet in the
outhouse and taking care of your business, you use a corn cob to clean things up. Yepp, that’s right, corn cob. Corn was a mainstay crop for early American
farmers, and they would save the husks and cobs for bathroom time. Once the kernels were removed, the bare cob
was the perfect shape and texture to provide a thorough cleaning. In fact, corn cobs were so popular that many
farmers preferred to use corn cobs even once modern toilet paper was readily available. Speaking of modern toilet paper, you can thank
Sears for the toilet paper you know and love today. You wake up on your farm in the late nineteenth
century and make your way to the outhouse for your morning routine, the same way your
family has been doing for nearly a century. But, instead of corn husks, you use the Sears
catalog to clean up. The Sears catalog was a mail-order catalogue
that was delivered for free to every American home. The Sears people knew what was going on with
their catalogues - it even came with a hole punched through it so you could conveniently
hang it in your outhouse! Is this the beginning of bathroom reading? By 1857, your trip to the outhouse might have
evolved beyond old catalogues. You wake up in a stately home in a major city. You still need to go outside to the outhouse,
but your morning routine now includes the latest toilet product - “medicated paper”,
as it was called, is a hemp-based paper product infused with aloe. These sheets resemble tissues more than today’s
toilet paper, but they are a big step up from corn cobs and catalogues! It’s not until 1890 that you’d finally
find some toilet paper that resembles what you’re used to today. The Scott brothers were the first to put toilet
paper on a roll, but they were too embarrassed to put their name on the product - or even
admit that they had created it! - until many years later. The general public was extremely embarrassed
by bodily functions, and it was considered taboo to talk about them. Buying toilet paper from the drug store was
an embarrassing errand, and druggists would be careful to wrap the package in paper so
that no one would know what you were buying. Toilet paper companies poured millions into
marketing campaigns designed to change the public perception of bodily functions and,
by extension, toilet paper. The advent of indoor toilets also helped push
toilet paper into the mainstream - and led to the modern trend of soft toilet paper. You wake up in a new housing development in
the early nineteen hundreds. You are one of the first of your friends to
have a new indoor flush toilet - no more morning trips outside! You also have the softest, gentlest toilet
paper so far in history. This isn’t about your comfort, though - it’s
about making sure all this paper will dissolve in the new sewer systems! Toilet paper may be ubiquitous now, but in
any parts of the world, water is actually still the most common way to clean yourself
after doing your business. This trend may even become more popular around
the world as the cost of producing toilet paper continues to rise, and people reevaluate
their use of resources like trees and water. Bidets are already the norm in places like
Japan, India and the Middle East. In some countries, the hand-and-water method
is even still popular. This may seem strange to those of us who are
used to flush toilets and toilet paper, but studies show that these water-based practices
might actually be more hygienic. Back in the comfort and luxury of your modern-day
bathroom, you thankfully find an extra roll of toilet paper under the sink, clean yourself
up and get on with your day. But in the back of your mind, you’re still
thinking about what they did before toilet paper - and thanking your lucky stars that
you live in 2020! So, what do you think about what people did
before toilet paper? What about some of the other methods used
around the world? What would you do if you couldn’t use toilet
paper again? Be sure and let us know your thoughts on life
before toilet paper in the comments! If this video got you curious about how people
lived in the past, you’ll want to check out this video, called What A Day In The Life
of A Neanderthal Was Like. It will make a lack of toilet paper seem like
a walk in the park! Or perhaps you’d prefer this other video
instead- either way, we guarantee our content’s not a total flush, so click now!
