BY MARCIA SCHNEDLER
The average American visits the toilet 2, 500 times a year. With a U. S. population of 300 million, that adds up to 750 billion trips annually.
There’s no question that an individual’s bathroom moments are personal, which they should be.
But plenty of things that happen in there can be reported tastefully. Here are snippets presented by a bathroom equipment company, a toilet paper manufacturer that surveyed American mothers, and other sources: The most common bathroom mishap is falling into the toilet when the seat is left up, said the mothers. One-quarter of moms admit to resorting to toilet paper to dry off a wet child clambering from the tub when there’s no towel at hand. According to the mom poll, bathrooms serve as a haven where they read, talk on the phone, meditate, watch TV, drink coffee or snack and occasionally balance the checkbook and write letters. A child is changed an average of 10, 000 times before he learns to use the toilet by himself. For quick hang-ups: Some 7 million cell phones a year are dropped into toilets. Half of toilet users have witnessed at least one attempt to flush goldfish, false teeth, socks, underwear, bras, shirts, shoes, mice, hamsters, toy cars, action figures, Barbie dolls, toothbrushes or entire rolls of toilet paper. Music to the ears: Most toilets flush in E-flat. House guests often have no sense of bathroom etiquette. Hosts’ complaints in top-to-bottom order: They don’t flush the toilet, leave the bathroom dirty, snoop in the medicine cabinet, take too long, and use the hosts ’ personal bath products. Too much liquidity: If you leave water running while brushing your teeth, you use five extra gallons. If while shaving, 15 to 20 gallons. The average man spends about 140 days of his life shaving.
HISTORIC RECORD The first mention of toilet paper was in A. D. 589 by Chinese scholar-official Yan Zhitui: “Paper on which there are quotations or commentaries from Five Classics or the names of sages, I dare not use for toilet purposes.” For 1393, records show 720, 000 sheets of toilet paper, 2 by 3 feet each, were produced for general use at the imperial court in Beijing. In 1857, the first packaged bathroom tissue appeared in the United States, named “The Therapeutic Paper.” It contained aloe; 500 sheets cost 50 cents. Scott Paper Co. first manufactured tissue on a roll in 1890. Ads claimed that more than 65 percent of middle-age men and women suffered from some sort of rectal disease, largely caused by inferior toilet paper. What did people use before TP ? Hay balls, grass, straw, scrapers (Middle Ages ); discarded sheep’s wool (Vikings ); frayed end of an old anchor cable (sailing crews from Spain and Portugal ); pages from a book (British lords ); old lace, linen, hemp (French royalty ); snow, tundra moss (early Eskimos ); sponge soaked in salt water (Roman hoi polloi ) or wool and rosewater (Roman upper crust ); and Sears Roebuck catalog pages, newspaper, leaves, corn cobs, mussel shells, leaves, sand (early United States ). John Harington invented the flushing toilet in 1596, long before Thomas Crapper marketed an updated version in the late 1800 s. Harington may be the source of the nickname “john” for a toilet.
Other polite euphemisms: house of honor (ancient Israelites ), house of the morning (ancient Egyptians ), garderobe (“ cloakroom” ), privy, necessarium, necessary house, the jakes, loo, w. c. (water closet ), room 100, lavatory, closet of ease. The word toilet evolved from the French toilette, meaning the act of washing, dressing and preparing oneself. Benjamin Franklin brought the first bathtub to the United States from France in 1790. In 1800, Buckingham Palace had no bathroom. It’s said that the Pentagon uses some 666 rolls of toilet paper daily. This goes unconfirmed, but we do know the building houses 23, 000 employees, has 284 restrooms, and that Americans average seven sheets per visit. Go figure.
- Re: Some necessary facts about the necessary room in history (zt)posted on 09/16/2007
再读了一遍,觉得这句最有现实意义,早上起来都可以免放CD了。
Music to the ears: Most toilets flush in E-flat. - posted on 09/17/2007
这个好玩儿,再ZT些来:
Timeline of toilet paper——
589 AD: the first mentioning of toilet paper in China.
851 AD: the first foreign source (Arab-Muslim) to confirm the use of toilet paper in China.
"They (the Chinese) are not careful about cleanliness, and they do not wash themselves with water when they have done their necessities; but they only wipe themselves with paper."
c. 1300 AD: first records of the massive amounts of toilet paper manufactured in China.
1391: 720 sheets of toilet paper produced in China for the Hongwu Emperor's court, while 15,000 special sheets were produced solely for the royal family. Sheets were approximately 60cm × 90cm.
1596: invention of the flushing toilet.
1700s: newspaper is a popular choice of toilet paper, since it is widely available.
1710s: the bidet invented.
1792: the Old Farmer's Almanac begins publication; there are several publications by the same name, as well as the Farmer's Almanac, which began publication in 1960. Pages from these publications were often ripped out and used as toilet paper, and later editions have holes punched in them so they could be hung from a hook in outhouses.
1857: Joseph Gayetty sells first factory-made toilet paper (Gayetty's Medicated Paper) in the USA. These were loose, flat, sheets of paper, pre-moistened and medicated with aloe; each sheet has Gayetty's name printed on it. It sold at five hundred sheets for fifty cents and was known as Gayetty's Medicated Paper—"a perfectly pure article for the toilet and for the prevention of piles." An advertisement for Gayetty's Medicated Paper can be found here.
1877: The Albany Perforated Wrapping Paper Company of Albany, New York sells Perforated toilet paper ("The Standard"). It is sold "by all the leading druggists" and is not medicated. It is marketed as being free of "all deleterious substances" which includes printed materials and chemicals "incident to the ordinary process of manufacture (which is) a cause of hemorrhoids." In addition, medicated toilet paper which is "heavily charged with ointment" was offered for "sufferers of hemorrhoids."
1879: Scott Paper Company sells the first toilet paper on a roll, although initially they do not print their company name on the packaging. Toilet paper was sold under the name of various industrial customers, including the Waldorf Hotel, which led to the popular Waldorf brand of toilet paper.
late 19th century: rolls of perforated toilet paper available for the first time, replaces razor or knife on dispensers.
1900: plumbing improvements of the Victorian era have led to wide use of flushing toilet and (in Europe) the bidet.
1935: Northern Tissue advertises its toilet paper as "splinter-free".
1942: first two-ply toilet paper from St. Andrew's Paper Mill in England; toilet paper becomes softer and more pliable. For most of the rest of the twentieth century, both "hard" and "soft" paper was common. Hard was cheaper, and was shiny on one side. Sometimes it had messages like "GOVERNMENT PROPERTY", "IZAL MEDICATED" or "NOW WASH YOUR HANDS PLEASE" written on each sheet near the perforation. Eventually soft paper won out as the price differential between the two papers vanished. Hard paper is seldom seen these days in UK, but is still available.
1943[这条太逗了]: novelty toilet paper printed with images of Adolf Hitler. (Note: The use of toilet paper of any type in wartime Britain was officially discouraged due to paper shortages. The widespread use of newspaper for this purpose was revived and one government propaganda newsreel suggested that anyone finding Nazi propaganda leaflets dropped from planes should use them for this purpose.)
1964: Procter and Gamble introduces a fictitious Mr. Whipple, a grocer who begins admonishing customers, “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin!” [3]
1973 December 19: comedian Johnny Carson causes a three week toilet paper shortage in the USA after a joke scares consumers into stockpiling supplies.
1980: the paperless toilet invented in Japan (combination toilet, bidet and drying element, see Japanese toilet)
1990s: papers containing ingredients like aloe begin to be heavily marketed in the USA.
2000s: toilet paper is commonly available in hundreds of different designs, colors, and prints.
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咱中国人一向以古代发明为自豪,怎么不见宣传中国人首先发明了toilet paper呢?这个我看可以放到奥运开幕式上:) - Re: Some necessary facts about the necessary room in history (zt)posted on 09/17/2007
Bidet——
- posted on 09/17/2007
浮生 wrote::)
这个好玩儿,再ZT些来:
Timeline of toilet paper——
589 AD: the first mentioning of toilet paper in China.
浮生同学,旷课也太久了吧? 几次都准备点名了,呵呵,只要你没转学就好,期末还是评你当三好学生。
我也在想,公元589年,刚好是隋文帝开创科举制度的前后年份,看来科学技术的进步就是令人振奋,源源不断的纸张供应连秀才们练书法都用不完了,于是引发了书房背后茅房里的壮举(是否有人再去考考古,看看同时期大熊猫的数量是不是急速增长了;))。
- Re: Some necessary facts about the necessary room in history (zt)posted on 09/17/2007
Small correction:
Music to the rears.
WOA wrote:
再读了一遍,觉得这句最有现实意义,早上起来都可以免放CD了。
Music to the ears: Most toilets flush in E-flat. - Re: Some necessary facts about the necessary room in history (zt)posted on 09/17/2007
touche wrote:
Small correction:
Music to the rears.
WOA wrote:
再读了一遍,觉得这句最有现实意义,早上起来都可以免放CD了。
Music to the ears: Most toilets flush in E-flat.
Nah...for men it's only 50% true.
touche 是女ID吗?:)))
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