Rating Every Way People Wiped Before Toilet Paper

How did people wipe before toilet paper? Today we're rating every method in history, with a wipe score out of ten. You travel to five stops, from ancient Athens to a farm in the 1800s, and at every stop you need the toilet. Along the way: the world's first toilet paper, a famous Roman sponge that might not be what you've heard, and a company too embarrassed to put its own name on its product. The history of toilet paper and what people used before it: the ancient Greek "three stones" saying, pessoi and ostraka, Roman public latrines and the tersorium (the sponge on a stick, or xylospongium), Seneca, the latrines at Ephesus, hygiene sticks from a Silk Road relay station (Xuanquanzhi), Yan Zhitui and paper in early China, the imperial court's paper in 1393, moss in Viking York and at Whithorn, Rabelais' Gargantua, Lord Chesterfield and Cloacina, outhouses, corn cobs, newspapers and the mail-order catalog, the Farmers' Almanac, Joseph Gayetty's medicated paper (1857), Seth Wheeler's perforated roll, the Scott brothers, and Northern Tissue. ⏱ CHAPTERS 0:00 How did people wipe before toilet paper? 1:01 What did the ancient Greeks wipe with? 2:14 Did Romans really wipe with a sponge on a stick? 3:29 Did ancient China have toilet paper? 4:46 What did medieval people use instead of toilet paper? 6:02 Did people really wipe with corn cobs? 6:59 Who invented modern toilet paper? 8:16 What was the best way to wipe before toilet paper? 📚 RESEARCH & SOURCES Everything in this video is based on the research below. History is messy: where historians disagree, we say so. ▸ Pessoi, "three stones are enough to wipe", the cup and the ostraka idea (Charlier et al., BMJ 2012) — Scientific American https://www.scientificamerican.com/ar... · JSTOR Daily https://daily.jstor.org/this-is-how-t... ▸ Seneca, Letter 70.20 — The Latin Library https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/sen/s... · Wikisource (Gummere) https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_... ▸ The tersorium, Ephesus, and water instead of paper today — National Geographic https://www.nationalgeographic.com/hi... ▸ The xylospongium debate (Wiplinger, 2012) — Wikipedia, "Xylospongium" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylospo... ▸ Hygiene sticks and Silk Road parasites — University of Cambridge https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/a... ▸ Yan Zhitui, the traveller of 851 and the court's paper in 1393 (Tsien, Science and Civilisation in China) — Wikipedia, "Toilet paper" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_... ▸ Moss and cloth in Viking York — Tes https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/... ▸ Moss at Whithorn — Future Museum https://www.futuremuseum.co.uk/collec... ▸ Gargantua, Book 1, Chapter 13 — Rabelais, Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1200 ▸ Lord Chesterfield's letter of 15 December 1747 — Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/... · Cloacina — JSTOR Daily https://daily.jstor.org/venus-of-the-... ▸ Corn cobs, newspapers and catalogs — Farmers' Almanac https://www.farmersalmanac.com/before... · ABC News https://abcnews.com/Entertainment/Wol... ▸ The pigs and the cobs — Albuquerque Museum, Casa San Ysidro docent notes ▸ The hole in the corner (1919) — Farmers' Almanac https://www.farmersalmanac.com/?p=25058 ▸ Gayetty (1857) and Wheeler's patents (1871, 1883) — Hagley Museum & Library https://www.hagley.org/node/479 · Mental Floss https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/2... ▸ Scott Paper and its 2,000 brand names — Encyclopedia.com https://encyclopedia.com/books/politi... ▸ Northern Tissue's 1930s ads — The Saturday Evening Post https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2... ✏️ Every frame of this video is drawn and animated by hand-written code. No stock footage. (•‿•) /| |\ ← you, in every century ^^ ^^ #history #toiletpaper #animation