Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (40 page)

Not only did nylon toothbrushes improve dental hygiene; they also went a long way to spare hogs around the world pain. In 1937, for example, the year before nylon bristles were introduced, the United States alone imported a whopping 1.5 million pounds of hog bristles for toothbrushes.

The next technological advance came in 1961, when the Squibb Company introduced the first
electric toothbrush
, under the name Broxodent. It had an up-and-down brush action and was endorsed by the American Dental Association.

A year later, General Electric designed a cordless electric toothbrush, battery operated and rechargeable. GE scientists tested the brushes on scores of dogs and assured stockholders that “dogs actually liked to have their teeth brushed,” concluding, drolly, that no other dogs in history so aptly fitted the adage “clean as a hound’s tooth.”

Today people around the world favor the simple, hand-operated nylon-bristle toothbrush. However, as inexpensive and easily replaceable as the brushes are, the American Dental Association claims that four out of five Americans hang on to their brushes to the point where the bent bristles are unfit for cleaning teeth and are likely to cut gums.

Toothpaste: 2000
B.C
., Egypt

The first toothpaste mentioned in recorded history was devised by Egyptian physicians about four thousand years ago. Highly abrasive and puckeringly pungent, it was made from powdered pumice stone and strong wine vinegar and brushed on with a chew stick. By modern standards, it was considerably more palatable than early Roman toothpaste, made from human urine—which in liquid form served also as a mouthwash. First-century Roman physicians maintained that brushing with urine whitened teeth and fixed them more firmly in the sockets.

Upper-class Roman women paid dearly for Portuguese urine, the most highly prized, since it was alleged to be the strongest on the Continent. Dental historians believe that may have been true, but only because the liquid came by land all the way from Portugal. Urine, as an active component in toothpastes and mouthwashes, continued to be used into the eighteenth century. What early dentists were unwittingly making use of was urine’s cleansing ammonia molecules, which would later be used in modern dental pastes.

With the fall of the Roman Empire, dental skills and hygiene rapidly deteriorated in Europe. For five hundred years, families palliated their own dental aches and pains with homemade poultices and makeshift extractions.

The writings of the Persian physician Rhazes in the tenth century mark a reawakening of dental hygiene, as well as a breakthrough. Rhazes was the
first doctor to recommend
filling cavities
. He used a glue-like paste made of alum (containing ammonium and iron) and mastic, a yellowish resin from a small Mediterranean evergreen tree in the cashew family. At the time, mastic was a main ingredient in varnishes and adhesives.

Dental surgery and hygiene. Human urine urns a popular Roman toothpaste to whiten teeth and prevent cavities. In the tenth century cavities were drilled and filled
.

Sophisticated as Rhazes’ filling material was, drilling out a cavity to accept a filling required a high degree of dexterity in the dentist and superhuman fortitude in the patient. The major drawback of those early drills was the excruciatingly slow rotation of the bit. The dentist, holding the metal spike between his thumb and index finger, manually worked it back and forth, all the while forcefully bearing downward.

Not until the eighteenth century was there a mechanical drill, about the size of a hand-held clock and with a clock’s inner rotary mechanism. And not until George Washington’s personal dentist, John Greenwood, adapted his mother’s spinning wheel to rotate a bit was there an even moderately rapid, foot-pedaled dental drill. Unfortunately, the intense heat generated by its quick rotation was itself a drawback; although this was compensated for by a shorter period of discomfort. (Whereas Greenwood’s drill rotated about five hundred times a minute, modern water-cooled models spin in excess of a half-million turns a minute.)

Whitening Teeth
. In Europe, attitudes about dental hygiene began changing in the fourteenth century.

In 1308, barber-surgeons, the main extractors of teeth, banded into guilds. Apart from extraction, the chief dental operation of the barber-surgeon
was whitening teeth. Brilliantly white teeth were prized, and a barber-surgeon would first file a patient’s teeth with a coarse metal instrument, then dab them with aquafortis, a solution of highly corrosive nitric acid. This produced white teeth for a while, but it also thoroughly destroyed the enamel, causing massive dental decay in mid-life. Still, in the pursuit of vanity, acid cleaning of teeth continued in Europe into the eighteenth century.

The rough-and-ready surgery performed by barber-surgeons gave rise to the once-common sight of the red-and-white-striped barber’s pole. It came about in this way. The teeth-extracting surgeons also cut hair, trimmed beards, and practiced the alleged panacea of bloodletting. During a bloodletting, it was customary for the patient to squeeze a pole tightly in one hand, so that the veins would swell and the blood gush freely. The pole was painted red to minimize bloodstains, and when not in use, it hung outside the shop as advertisement, wrapped round with the white gauze used to bandage bloodlet arms. The red-and-white pole eventually was adopted as the official trademark of barber-surgeon guilds. The gilt knob later added to the top of the pole represented the brass basin that served the profession’s dual aspects of letting blood and whipping up shaving lather. When surgeons and barbers split, the barbers got the pole.

The price paid for artificially whitened teeth was cavities, adding to normal dental decay, one of humankind’s oldest miseries. Terrified of tooth extraction, people often suffered intense and chronic pain—and many of these people were history’s major policymakers. It is surprising that history books omit the fact that, for instance, Louis XIV and Elizabeth I (to mention only two policy-shaping figures) often had to render major decisions while in intense dental agony. Louis, in 1685, signed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (which had granted religious freedom), causing thousands to emigrate, while he was in the throes of a month-long tooth infection. It had developed into a raw, unhealing opening between the roof of his mouth and his sinuses.

Elizabeth, on the other hand, suffered chronically from deep, massive cavities but feared the misery of extraction. In December 1578, an unrelenting tooth pain kept her awake night and day for two weeks, necessitating drugs that were themselves heavily disorienting. She finally consented to extraction after the bishop of London volunteered to have one of his own good teeth pulled in her presence so she might witness that the pain was not unendurable. Throughout the weeks of misery, she had continued to oversee legislation that affected the lives of millions of subjects.

In more recent times, George Washington suffered throughout his adult life from decayed teeth, gum inflammation, and the inadequacies of eighteenth-century dental treatment. From the age of twenty-two, he lost his teeth one by one, and he acquired a succession of dentures that nearly destroyed his gums. From a wealth of documentation, it is clear that America’s first President endured almost continual pain and found chewing nearly
impossible later in life, and that the likely cause of his eventual deafness was the unnatural posture he forced on his lower jaw in an attempt to give his face a natural appearance. A volume of speculative history could be written on the effects of severe and protracted dental pain on policy-making.

Fluoride Toothpaste
. It would be hard to imagine that the toothpaste sitting on a modern-day bathroom sink does not contain some fluoride compound, most likely sodium monofluorophosphate. But the use of fluorides to reduce cavities is not a twentieth-century phenomenon, though fluoride toothpastes are.

In 1802, in several regions surrounding Naples, Italian dentists observed yellowish-brown spots on their patients’ teeth. The spots turned out to have resulted from an interaction between natural variations in human tooth enamel and a high level of fluorides occurring in local soil and water. What no Neapolitan dentist could ignore was the fact that the spotted teeth, however unsightly, were cavity-free. By the 1840s, in both Italy and France, dentists were suggesting that people from an early age suck regularly on lozenges made with fluoride and sweetened with honey.

The first scientific trials with fluoridated drinking water took place in America in 1915. The results were so encouraging that in time fluorides found their way into water, mouthwashes, and toothpastes, substantially reducing the incidence of cavities.

Dentures: 800
B.C
., Etruria

The Etruscans, who inhabited Italy in the area that is modern Tuscany, are regarded as the best dentists of the ancient world. They extracted decayed teeth, replacing them with full or partial dentures, in which individual teeth were realistically carved from ivory or bone and bridgework was crafted in gold. Upon a person’s death, good, intact teeth were surgically removed to be incorporated into even more authentic-looking dentures for the upper classes. Dental historians claim that the Etruscans’ skill in designing dentures and fashioning false teeth (which was passed on only in part to the Romans) was not matched until the nineteenth century.

By comparison, medieval and early Renaissance dentists could be primitive in their practices and beliefs. They taught that cavities were caused by “tooth worms” boring outward (a theory depicted in numerous extant illustrations), and though they extracted rotted teeth, they often made little effort to replace them, leaving patients with gaping holes for a lifetime. The rich purchased good, sturdy teeth from the mouths of the poor. Pulled for a negotiated fee, the teeth were set in “gums” of ivory.

Keeping uppers in place required ingenuity in the dentist and continual vigilance and great vanity in the patient. Fashionable women in the 1500s had their gums pierced with hooks to secure denture wires. In the next century, it was possible to keep uppers in place through the use of springs,
so sturdy that constant pressure was needed to keep the mouth shut. A momentary lapse in concentration and the jaws suddenly flew apart.

Denture appearance began to improve around the time of the French Revolution.

Parisian dentists made the first durable, realistic-looking porcelain teeth, baked in one piece. The fashion was adopted in America by Dr. Claudius Ash. Ash deplored the practice of collecting teeth from the battlefield. Horror stories abounded of the unscrupulous operations of “teeth robbers,” who pillaged their bounty from wounded soldiers not yet dead. Thousands of Europeans sported “Waterloo” dentures, and as late as the 1860s, thousands of Americans wore “Civil War” plates, while barrels of additional young American soldiers’ teeth were shipped to Europe. Porcelain teeth eventually put an end to that practice.

As porcelain greatly improved the appearance of false teeth, vulcanized rubber, perfected in the late 1800s, paved the way for the first comfortable-to-wear, easy-to-fashion base to hold teeth. Concurrent with these two nineteenth-century innovations was the introduction of the anaesthetic nitrous oxide, or “laughing gas,” ushering in the era of painless dentistry. For the first time in human history, decayed, aching teeth could be extracted painlessly and replaced with comfortable, durable, and attractive dentures. By the 1880s, demand for false teeth was enormous. Only in the next century would the miracle of plastics improve their appearance.

Razor: 20,000 Years Ago, Asia and Africa

Although we think of early man as a bearded creature, archaeologists have evidence that men shaved their faces as far back as twenty thousand years ago. Cave drawings clearly depict bearded and beardless men, and gravesites have yielded sharpened flints and shells that were the first razors. And as soon as man mastered working with iron and bronze, razors were hammered from these metals.

Throughout recorded history, a man’s hirsute facial growth and how he has dealt with it was an important factor in the lives of king and peasant, soldier and tradesman. Among ancient Egyptians, a clean-shaven face was a symbol of status, and members of royalty took their collections of bronze razors with them to the grave. The Greeks shaved daily, and though Romans thought the practice sissified, they used razors on the battlefield, for in hand-to-hand combat a full beard was a detriment. It was the Roman word for beard,
barba
, that gave us the term “barber.”

In the Americas, Indian men stoically pulled out their beards hair by hair, using clam shells as tweezers. One American who used a razor selectively was General Ambrose Everett Burnside, commander of the Union Army of the Potomac during the Civil War. His most distinguished feature, which launched a trend, was his profuse side-whiskers, growing down along the ears to the cheeks, and known as “burnsides.” Around the turn of the
century, the word experienced a linguistic transposition, which has never been satisfactorily explained, to become
sideburns
.