Adventures in Toothbrushing

I was brushing my teeth the other night, and the multitude of little squeaks going off in my mouth from all the tiny rubber wiggly spikes on the perimeter of my toothbrush's bristles got me thinking about all the crazy swoopy hyper-ergonomic toothbrushes we have these days. The toothbrush of my childhood bears little resemblance to these sleek anti-plaque frigates. The old brush was a simple thing; an unadorned hard plastic bar - translucent like a Jolly Rancher, and some nylon bristles - gray if it's new and soft and white once worn. Now there's all manner of leverage improving angles, embedded rubber sticky gripping points, multi-faceted arrays of bristles for reaching in, around, and under all the places plaque likes to perch. Frequently these days my toothbrushes have those supple little squeaky gum massagers.

It got me wondering about the toothbrush, and where it was invented in it's current manifestation, and all of that. I knew some people had used fuzzy wood, and bark or something, but I realized I had no idea what people did before there were toothbrushes. Statues have teeth right? Some of them? Old paintings? I mean they had to do something right? I couldn't really picture an old 18th century noble sucking on a frazzled bark chunk like some kind of savage.

So - time for some research.

I did what anyone would do. I powered up my internet, and navigated to google.com. I typed in "toothbrush", clicked Image search, set a filter to line drawings, and searched until I found a penis.

First row, four in. Turns out, a search for almost anything in line drawings will eventually return a penis one way or another.

In this case, some happy looking little paunchy dude has got the waistband of his sweatpants held out in front of him, and is rubbing the the bristles of his(?) toothbrush against the skin of his uncut man-meat. He's demonstrably happy about this, and in fact goes on in latter pages to rub one off with off with a cringe-inducing array of household objects. The site is called I Love My Toothbrush, and it's all about Homemade Sex Toys. I never really thought about it, but I can easily imagine such a topic having quite the avid DIY online community. I'll bet it's also a decent sized category of reasons while people were admitted to hospitals for injuries involving orifices and doctors that have to take 15 because they just can't stop laughing.

This is just one of those Laws of the Internet, i guess. Penis pictures are to be found everywhere*. I'd like to blame Superbad, but I can't.

Further research revealed some interesting things. Apparently Europeans used to clean their teeth by wiping them with a rag that was dipped in salt and or sulfur oil. Now, I don't know what kind of sulfur their talking about, but all the forms of sulfur I'm familiar with smell like utter shit. I guess the theory there is that everyone smells fucking atrocious in the first place, because it's Europe, 1780 and no one will take any freaking baths, so what does matter if your mouth smells like death? Later, your teeth will rot off and smell worse, so really what's the point of it all anyway.

So, some clever soul (one William Addis of Clerkenwall, England) clued in that this wasn't working and, armed with an idea, grabbed the first two things he found in his basement: A sharp knife, and the severed hindquarters of a cow.

In short order he had whittled the cow's thighbone into a suitable stick shaped handle, and set about mounting clusters of cow-tail hair bristles into one end the head. After that, he presumably proudly presented his breakthrough to his wife who responded to his suggestion that she stick the accursed thing in her mouth by beating him out of the kitchen with a rolling pin so she could have her baby in peace.

That was, however, the first real ancestor of our modern dental savior. People went on making them out of bone all the way up to World War 1, when apparently all the bone was co-opted for to make soup for the soldiers. Mmmmm. Celluloid soon took the place of the thighbone.

The bristle of choice all this time was Boar's hair. A sub-optimal solution due to it's tendency to hold moisture and host bacteria, and due to it being nasty, chunky brown hair from the back of a giant wild pig-beast.

In the 1920s, DuPont cast its nylon magic towards the toothbrush. Nylon bristles were cheap to produce, easy to shape, and nice and white and clean. The modern toothbrush was born.
Regular usage of such a device was still not all that common it seems, until returning soldiers from WWII came parading home with their pearly white victory smiles - polished by long months of militarily enforced tooth-brushing regimen. Since then, the habit has taken hold quite firmly.

My girlfriend suggested that perhaps this was responsible for the baby boom. A young soldier fresh from the war merely had to stroll down main street, letting his gleaming chompers dazzle in the sun, and all the eligible young ladies who would come running towards him, uterus-first. Hence, she would claim, the advent of regular dental hygiene is directly responsible for our current entitlement program financial fiasco. I pointed out that this was idiotic conjecture, and proof that thinking is best left for the men-folk.


Also, here is a little cautionary tale about making the most of a bottle of toothpaste. You know how it gets reaaaaaly hard to get the last bit out of the bottle? Well give up - this isn't the Great Depression. Just crack open another tube, you peasant.




*Genitals in general actually. The next line of search results shows a woman vigorously scrubbing her toothbrush against her vajayjay like it was the cure for AIDS.

- CC