(first published in 1917)
On December 20 there flitted past us, absolutely without public notice, one of the most important profane anniversaries in merican history, to wit, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the introduction of the bathtub into These States. Not a plumber fired a salute or hung out a flag. Not a governor proclaimed a day of prayer.
Not a newspaper called attention to the day.
Bathtubs are so common today that it is almost impossible to imagine a world without them. They are familiar to nearly everyone in all incorporated towns; in most of the large cities it is unlawful to build a dwelling house without putting them in; even on the farm they have begun to come into use. And yet the first American bathtub was installed and dedicated so recently as December 20, 1842, and, for all I know to the contrary, it may still be in existence and in use.
Curiously enough, the scene of its setting up was Cincinnati, then a squalid frontier town, and even today surely no leader in culture. But Cincinnati, in those days as in these, contained many enterprising merchants, and one of them was a man named Adam Thompson, a dealer in cotton and grain. Thompson shipped his rain by steamboat down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans, and from there sent it to England in sailing vessels. This trade frequently took him to England, and in that country, during the ‘30s, he acquired the habit of bathing.
The bathtub was then still a novelty in England. It had been introduced in 1828 by Lord John Russell and its use was yet confined to a small class of enthusiasts. Moreover, the English bathtub, then as now, was a puny and
inconvenient contrivance - little more, in fact, than a glorified dishpan - and filling and emptying it required the attendance of a servant. Taking a bath, indeed, was a rather heavy ceremony, and Lord John in 1835 was said to be
the only man in England who had yet come to doing it every
day.
Thompson, who was of inventive fancy - he later devised
the machine that is still used for bagging hams and bacon
- conceived the notion that the English bathtub would be
much improved if it were made large enough to admit the
whole body of an adult man, and if its supply of water,
instead of being hauled to the scene by a maid, were
admitted by pipes from a central reservoir and run off by
the same means. Accordingly, early in 1842 he set about
building the first modern bathroom in his Cincinnati home
- a large house with Doric pillars, standing near what is
now the corner of Monastery and Orleans streets.
There was then, of course, no city water supply, at least
in that part of the city, but Thompson had a large well in
his garden, and he installed a pump to lift its water to
the house. This pump, which was operated by six Negroes,
much like an old-time fire engine, was connected by a pipe
with a cypress tank in the garret of the house, and here
the water was stored until needed. From the tank two other
pipes ran to the bathroom. One, carrying cold water, was a
direct line. The other, designed to provide warm water, ran
down the great chimney of the kitchen, and was coiled
inside it like a giant spring.
The tub itself was of new design, and became the
grandfather of all the bathtubs of today. Thompson had it
made by James Cullness, the leading Cincinnati cabinetmaker
of those days, and its material was Nicaragua mahogany. It
was nearly seven feet long and fully four feet wide. To
make it water-tight, the interior was lined with sheet
lead, carefully soldered at the joints. The whole
contraption weighed about 1,750 pounds, and the floor of
the room in which it was placed had to be reinforced to
support it. The exterior was elaborately polished.
In this luxurious tub Thompson took two baths on December
20, 1842 - a cold one at 8 a.m. and a warm one some time
during the afternoon. The warm water, heated by the kitchen
fire, reached a temperature of 105 degrees. On Christmas
day, having a party of gentlemen to dinner, he exhibited
the new marvel to them and gave an exhibition of its use,
and four of them, including a French visitor, Col.
Duchanel, risked plunges into it. The next day all
Cincinnati - then a town of about 100,000 people - had
heard of it, and the local newspapers described it at
length and opened their columns to violent discussions of
it.
The thing, in fact, became a public matter, and before long
there was bitter and double- headed opposition to the new
invention, which had been promptly imitated by several
other wealthy Cincinnatians. On the one hand it was
denounced as an epicurean and obnoxious toy from England,
designed to corrupt the democratic simplicity of the
Republic, and on the other hand it was attacked by the
medical faculty as dangerous to health and a certain
inviter of “phthisic, rheumatic fevers, inflammation of the
lungs and the whole category of zymotic diseases.” (I quote
from the Western Medical Repository of April 23, 1843.)
The noise of the controversy soon reached other cities, and
in more than one place medical opposition reached such
strength that it was reflected in legislation. Late in
1843, for example, the Philadelphia Common Council
considered an ordinance prohibiting bathing between
November 1 and March 15, and it failed of passage by but
two votes. During the same year the legislature of Virginia
laid a tax of $30 a year on all bathtubs that might be set
up, and in Hartford, Providence, Charleston and Wilmington
(Del.) special and very heavy water rates were levied upon
those who had them. Boston, very early in 1845, made
bathing unlawful except upon medical advice, but the
ordinance was never enforced and in 1862 it was repealed.
This legislation, I suspect, had some class feeling in it,
for the Thompson bathtub was plainly too expensive to be
owned by any save the wealthy; indeed, the common price for
installing one in New York in 1845 was $500. Thus the low
caste politicians of the time made capital by fulminating
against it, and there is even some suspicion of political
bias in many of the early medical denunciations. But the
invention of the common pine bathtub, lined with zinc, in
1847, cut off this line of attack, and thereafter the
bathtub made steady progress.
The zinc tub was devised by John F. Simpson, a Brooklyn
plumber, and his efforts to protect it by a patent occupied
the courts until 1855. But the decisions were steadily
against him, and after 1848 all the plumbers of New York
were equipped for putting in bathtubs. According to a
writer in the Christian Register for July 17, 1857, the
first one in New York was opened for traffic on September
12, 1847, and by the beginning of 1850 there were already
nearly 1,000 in use in the big town.
After this medical opposition began to collapse, and among
other eminent physicians Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes declared
for the bathtub, and vigorously opposed the lingering
movement against it in Boston. The American Medical
Association held its annual meeting in Boston in 1849, and
a poll of the members in attendance showed that nearly 55
per cent of them now regarded bathing as harmless, and that
more than 20 per cent advocated it as beneficial. At its
meeting in 1850 a resolution was formally passed giving the
imprimatur of the faculty to the bathtub. The homeopaths
followed with a like resolution in 1853.
But it was the example of President Millard Fillmore that,
even more than the grudging medical approval, gave the
bathtub recognition and respectability in the United
States. While he was still Vice-President, in March, 1850,
he visited Cincinnati on a stumping tour, and inspected the
original Thompson tub. Thompson himself was now dead, but
his bathroom was preserved by the gentlemen who had bought
his house from the estate. Fillmore was entertained in this
house and, according to Chamberlain, his biographer, took a
bath in the tub. Experiencing no ill effects, he became an
ardent advocate of the new invention, and on succeeding to
the Presidency at Taylor's death, July 9, 1850, he
instructed his secretary of war, Gen. Charles M. Conrad, to
invite tenders for the construction of a bathtub in the
White House.
This action, for a moment, revived the old controversy, and
its opponents made much of the fact that there was no
bathtub at Mount Vernon, or at Monticello, and that all the
Presidents and other magnificoes of the past had got along
without any such monarchical luxuries. The elder Bennett,
in the New York Herald, charged that Fillmore really
aspired to buy and install in the White House a porphyry
and alabaster bath that had been used by Louis Philippe at
Versailles. But Conrad, disregarding all this clamor, duly
called for bids, and the contract was presently awarded to
Harper & Gillespie, a firm of Philadelphia engineers, who
proposed to furnish a tub of thin cast iron, capable of
floating the largest man.
This was installed early in 1851, and remained in service
in the White House until the first Cleveland
administration, when the present enameled tub was
substituted. The example of the President soon broke down
all that remained of the old opposition, and by 1860,
according to the newspaper advertisements of the time,
every hotel in New York had a bathtub, and some had two and
even three. In 1862 bathing was introduced into the Army by
Gen. McClellan, and in 1870 the first prison bathtub was
set up at Moyamensing Prison, in Philadelphia.
So much for the history of the bathtub in America. One is
astonished, on looking into it, to find that so little of
it has been recorded. The literature, in fact, is almost
nil. But perhaps this brief sketch will encourage other
inquirers and so lay the foundation for an adequate
celebration of the centennial in 1942.
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