Colgate toothpaste advertisement. 1929 /Alamy
When discussing toothbrushes, the term ‘oral history’ has quite the literal meaning, extending back thousands of years. To maintain even a basic level of oral hygiene, humanity has used various tools over time, including twigs, bones, and feathers, with more esthetically inclined individuals using porcupine quills. For instance, the ancient Egyptians used a mixture of eggshells, ashes, and myrrh for dental care. They applied this mixture using their fingers—a practice that many of us may have resorted to when unexpectedly waking up in an unfamiliar place. This finger method has a long history.
Surprisingly, our toothbrushes are not as modern as we might think. Even in the science fiction works of Isaac Asimov, such as Robots and Empire, there are scenes depicting teeth cleaning with fingers.
Both Romans and Greeks had their own oral hygiene practices, which included using toothpicks. In India, people used twigs from the neem tree, also known as Indian lilac. In the Islamic world, there was a practice called miswak, which involved chewing on a stick made from the Salvadora persica tree. When chewed, it transformed into a brush-like tool. This practice even gained religious significance starting from the seventh century.
The toothbrush as we know it today originated in China. According to some sources, this innovation occurred in 1498. However, Japanese Zen master Dogen reported seeing Chinese monks as early as 1223 who were cleaning their teeth using horsehair bristles attached to handles made of cattle bone. The classical Chinese toothbrush from the fifteenth century was crafted from bamboo and featured bristles made from Siberian wild boars. Interestingly, just two decades ago, the BBC was still disseminating information that around half a billion Chinese people had never cleaned their teeth.
In the seventeenth century, the toothbrush inevitably made its way from China to Europe and, just as inevitably, underwent changes as Europeans replaced pig bristles with horsehair. It was during this period, in the seventeenth century, that the English language saw the emergence of the word 'toothbrush'. The word is first recorded in the works of the seventeenth-century English antiquarian and historian Anthony Wood (you can read about him in Ian Pears' novel An Instance of the Fingerpost).
Mass production, however, began thanks to another Englishman named William Addis. While imprisoned for incitement to riot in 1770, he concluded that it was not fitting for a gentleman to clean his teeth with soot and salt. Using a piece of bone left over from his meal and some bristles he had at hand, he crafted a suitable hygiene tool. Upon his release, he established production by 1780 and became wealthy. For affordable toothbrushes, he used the same boar bristles, while the more expensive ones were made with badger hair. The family business thrived until 1996 (incidentally, the global toothbrush market was valued at around $600 million back then).
As is often the case in history, an Englishman invented it but an American popularized it. The first patent for a toothbrush was granted on 7 November 1857 to H.N. Wadsworth (although mass production only started in the United States in 1885). Surprisingly, in the homeland of the Hollywood smile, regular tooth cleaning only became mainstream during World War II, when returning soldiers introduced this integral part of military discipline into civilian life.
In 1938, nylon, manufactured by the DuPont de Nemours company, replaced animal hair, which, among other disadvantages, served as a carrier of bacteria. DuPont de Nemours is an interesting company in every sense. Originally involved in gunpowder production, it continued its business in the chemical and nuclear weapons industry. It is one of the leading contributors to environmental pollution, and its lobbyist was Joe Biden, the current President of the United States. The first nylon toothbrush proudly bore the name 'Doctor West's Miracle Toothbrush'.
A full-fledged electric toothbrush, known as the Broxodent, was invented in Switzerland in 1954 (although initial experiments in this field date back to the 1930s). Originally designed for patients with limited mobility, it didn't appear on the American market until 1960.
Japanese woman brushing her teeth. 1900/photo by Buyenlarge/Getty Images
The image of a toothbrush in poetry and much more
In a 1962 interview, the tragic poet Sylvia Plath asserted that poetry had a place for everything except perhaps toothbrushes. Nevertheless, toothbrushes did find their way into the broader Anglo-Saxon poetic tradition—at the very least, they appeared in T.S. Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' (1911):
‘The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.’
In this context, the toothbrush becomes a rather poetic symbol of the mundane, a part of the eternal ritual of 'preparing to live'.
Interestingly, the idiosyncrasy of toothbrushes in twentieth-century poetic contexts resurfaced at least once more—in a humorous documentary sketch by Sergei Dovlatov, describing a brief encounter between Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Anna Akhmatova: ‘Yevtushenko was wearing a fashionable sweater and a foreign jacket. A pen gleamed in his breast pocket. Akhmatova asked, “Where's your toothbrush?”’ Plath tragically ended her life in 1963, and Akhmatova passed away in 1966. Since then, the object of our interest has hardly appeared in the global poetic context.
However, in the North American novella of the previous century The Catcher in the Rye (1951), there is a scene where Holden Caulfield attacks a more successful romantic rival while he's brushing his teeth: ‘All of a sudden I let him have it, right smack in the toothbrush, so it would split his goddam throat open. Only, I didn't connect.’
It's no coincidence that the toothbrush figures in this scene of adolescent sexual rivalry. Its further erotic connotations are clear: a woman (or, less frequently, a man) leaves a toothbrush at their partner's place, creating a special sense of legal intimacy and marking territory (there's a scene in the TV series Sex and the City involving different attachments for an electric toothbrush). Jean Baudrillard, in his classic work The System of Objects (1968), probably referred to this as 'libidinous instrumentality'. In short, whether libidinous or not, the toothbrush has definitely become a symbol of various gender intrusions into domestic spaces.
Brush monument in front of the villa built by Mies van der Rohe in Krefeld/Alamy
In terms of art, the toothbrush has indeed been less fortunate than, for example, a can of tomato soup or a Zippo lighter. It hasn't entered the pantheon of pop culture, and in this regard, Plath was right (despite the fact that between 1963 and 1998, approximately 3,000 patents were recorded for various modifications of this hygiene device). Although in the German town of Krefeld, a 2-meter monument to the toothbrush was erected in 1983, designed by Robert Jennings, it can't be considered a place of pilgrimage by any means. Among more recent design discoveries, we should mention Philippe Starck and his elegant toothbrush from 1989, shaped like a violet flame. Lastly, the modern Japanese artist and sculptor Takahiro Iwasaki constructs rather charming architectural art objects from toothbrushes (by the way, in 1981, the famous Japanese pop group Yellow Magic Orchestra even featured a toothbrush on one of their album covers). Iwasaki’s Out Of Disorder series is likely intended to remind us of the original naivety with which early humans used feathers, sticks, and porcupine quills as tooth-cleaning tools.
Installation by Takahiro Iwasaki/Artsy