Toilet Paper: A History

[Smucky]

Toilet Paper: A History

Origins

Paper itself came from China (around the 2nd century BCE), and so did the idea of using it for the bathroom. The earliest clear reference is from the scholar Yan Zhitui, who wrote around 589 CE that he was careful not to use paper containing quotations from the sages for toilet purposes — which tells us people were doing exactly that. By the Ming dynasty it was industrial: in 1393 the imperial court's supply bureau produced hundreds of thousands of sheets a year, including thousands of soft, perfumed ones for the emperor's family.

Everyone else made do with whatever was at hand. Romans shared a tersorium — a sponge on a stick soaked in vinegar or salt water — and also used pessoi, smooth ceramic shards. Others through history used corncobs, leaves, moss, hay, wool, snow, sand, mussel shells, or simply water and the left hand. Sailors used a communal rope trailing in the sea. Early American outhouses famously ran on old Sears catalogs and newspapers.

The Modern Product

• 1857 — Joseph Gayetty of New York sold the first commercial toilet paper in the US: flat aloe-treated sheets marketed as a medical product, with his name watermarked on each one.
• 1871/1891 — Seth Wheeler patented perforated paper on a roll (his patent drawings are still cited in the over-vs-under debate; they show over).
• 1890s onward — Scott Paper made rolls mainstream, though discreetly, since the subject was unmentionable in advertising.
• 1930s — Northern Tissue advertised its paper as "splinter-free," which says something about what came before.
• 1942 — Two-ply arrives in Britain.

Who Uses It, Who Doesn't

Paper-dominant: the US, Canada, the UK, most of Northern and Eastern Europe, Australia, New Zealand. Americans use the most per person in the world by a wide margin.

Water-dominant, paper rare or supplementary: most of the Muslim world, where washing with water (istinja) is a religious practice — the Middle East, North Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia. Also India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, where the lota jug or the handheld sprayer ("bum gun") is standard. In these places paper, if present, is often used just to dry off.

Mixed: Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal pair paper with a bidet. Japan is a special case — heavy paper use and the electronic washlet, which Toto launched in 1980 and which is now in most Japanese homes.

One practical wrinkle: in Greece, Turkey, Ukraine, much of Latin America, and parts of Southeast Asia, people use paper but throw it in a bin rather than the bowl, because older narrow plumbing clogs easily. Worth knowing before you travel.

[Smucky]

Is washing with water actually a religious practice?

Yes, though "religious practice" needs a bit of unpacking — it's not that the washing is a devotional act in itself, like praying. It's that ritual purity is a precondition for prayer.

In Islamic law, a Muslim must be free of najasa (ritual impurity) to perform salah, the five daily prayers. Urine and feces are najasa. So cleaning yourself properly after the toilet isn't just hygiene — it's what makes your prayers valid a few times a day, every day. That elevates it from a habit to something governed by law, with actual rules that jurists have worked out in detail.

Some of those rules:

• Istinja is cleaning with water; istijmar is cleaning with dry material (traditionally stones, an odd number, at least three) when water isn't available. Water is preferred; using both is considered best.
• The left hand does the work. The right is reserved for eating, greeting, and clean tasks — a distinction that shows up across South Asia and the Middle East, including among non-Muslims.
• There are recommended etiquettes around the whole business: entering with the left foot, not facing or turning your back to the qibla while relieving yourself, short supplications on entering and leaving.
• The lota (or bodna, ibriq) is the traditional water vessel; the modern handheld sprayer is the same idea with plumbing.

It's not unique to Islam, either. Hindu practice has similar purity logic around the toilet — water, left hand, the concept of shaucha — which is part of why the norm is so widespread across South Asia regardless of religion. Judaism has the Asher Yatzar blessing recited after using the bathroom, though it doesn't prescribe the washing method.

So the honest framing is: much of the world washes with water for the same reason anyone does anything — it works and it's what they grew up with. But in a large part of it, there's also a religious floor under the practice that makes it non-optional in a way "personal preference" doesn't capture. The reverse framing is worth sitting with too: from that vantage point, the odd thing isn't washing, it's the idea that dry paper alone counts as clean.