Just in case you are not happy to live in the twentieth century and take for granted the simple amenities we enjoy in everyday life. General grooming items, for example, like soap, toothpaste and toilet tissue paper. How would you manage without them? Did you ever wonder, for instance, who invented toilet paper and what was used before its invention? We can go back in history to the ancient Greeks, for instance, whose idea of using stones or pieces of clay was a bit rougher than the Romans, who used sponges on the ends of sticks that were kept in jugs filled with salty water. Mid Easterners commonly used the left hand, which is supposedly still considered unclean in the Arabian region. 

But who first thought about using paper for personal hygiene? If we could travel back in time to 1391, we would encounter a Chinese emperor who demanded the first paper sheets sliced to be placed in his outhouse. The first “official” toilet paper was introduced in China measuring a whopping 2 ft X 3 ft each. 

In early American years, one common alternative happened to be ... corncobs. If you lived in early rural America, you would find a corncob hanging from a string in the outhouse for purposes of personal hygiene. The string, as it turns out, was to permit the cob to be reused. While in coastal regions, the cob might be replaced by a mussel shell, the preferred method became plant leaves and magazines. In fact, Sears received significant complaints when they switched to color coated shiny paper. 

As history would have it, an important move towards the production and distribution of modern toilet tissue paper came from a teacher in Philadelphia in 1907. Concerned about a mild cold epidemic in her classroom, she blamed it on the fact that all students used the same cloth towel. She proceeded to cut up paper into squares to be used by her class as individual towels, a revolutionary idea.