We have a few days left in National Children’s Dental Health Month, so today we’re telling the story of how an incarcerated guy helped make dental history.
He was William Addis, who in the 17th century became the first person to mass produce toothbrushes.
I want to be very clear, he did not invent the toothbrush: there were bristle brushes similar to the ones in use today in 15th Century China, and Europeans knew about bristle brushes before Addis came along.
And, well before all that, people around the world had been cleaning their teeth with toothpicks and what were called “chew sticks.”
But those weren’t the most common tools to clean teeth in Addis’s time and place.
People then were more likely to use a cloth or a sponge with some salt on it to prevent tooth decay.
Addis ended up changing that, and while most of the sources I found don’t go into detail, they all say that, at the time of his big inspiration, he was serving a sentence at Newgate Prison for inciting a riot (!)
Rather than let time keep dragging on in the joint, Addis whittled a piece of bone, and then decided to drill holes that could hold hairs from a boar.
He kept working and reworking his design while in the prison, and then, when his sentence was up he formed his own company to sell his brushes.
They were a hit with wealthy English households and took off from there.
Toothbrushes reached their current form in the 20th Century, when manufacturers started using plastics for the base instead of bone, and nylon bristles replaced the ones made of animal hairs.
To my knowledge, those changes were not thought up by people who had been convicted of inciting riots.
It’s National Pistachio Day, and where better to celebrate than Alamagordo, New Mexico.
The owner of a pistachio ranch, Tim McGinn, wanted to honor his dad, who’d founded the ranch.
So he built, promoted and trademarked the 30 foot tall World’s Largest Pistachio.
And this was decades before Dubai chocolate made everyone a pistachio fan.
Who invented the toothbrush and when was it invented? (Library of Congress via Archive.org)
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