Bathing culture: The history of the bathtub – your SZ

“Can you tell me why you are sitting in my bathtub?” “I came from the ping-pong basement and got the room number wrong. The hotel is a bit confusing.” “But now you know you’re in someone else’s tub and you keep bathing anyway.”

In 1978, Mr. Müller-Lüdenscheidt and Doctor Klöbner argued in the bathtub in Loriot’s sketch “Herren im Bad”. At that time, this had not long been part of the standard in the bathroom. Mankind has known the basic concept for thousands of years.

It is not clear when the first person used a tub for personal hygiene. Some archaeologists report clay bathtubs from around 4500 BC. Philipp Stockhammer, Professor of Prehistoric Archeology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, is skeptical: “With many early clay tubs, one cannot say with certainty whether they were intended for bathing or for some other purpose, such as dyeing laundry.” However, real bathtubs from Syria have been known since the early 2nd millennium BC at the latest.

Spectacular bathing culture in the Bronze Age is documented in the palace of Nestor in Pylos in today’s Greece. Around the year 1300 BC, the local ruler had a tub made of clay walled in. Spirals decorate the edges. “But finding this magnificent bathtub also means that it was about celebrating the bathroom and not just about getting clean,” says Stockhammer. While people had been using wooden tubs long before that, bathing culture reached its first peak in the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean region.

The Romans also knew bathtubs – and unusual bathing habits. The Roman scholar Pliny the Elder wrote in his work “Naturalis Historia” in the first century AD: “In any case, Poppaea, the wife of Domitius Nero, carried with her everywhere five hundred donkeys who had thrown up and softened her whole body with this milk in the bath tub .”

After the fall of the Roman Empire, baked and brick bathtubs disappeared from Europe. One of the few exceptions is the 9th-century Bath of Pope Formosus. Otherwise, wooden tubs covered with cloths dominate in the Middle Ages. So no one could get a splinter.

While the lower classes went to the emerging bathhouses, the nobility set up their own bathhouses and rooms. The Queen’s Bathroom in the moated English castle of Leeds Castle, owned by Queen Catherine de Valois, wife of King Henry V, is well preserved. The room shows how complex bathing used to be. Servants heated the water over a fire, brought it to the tub in buckets and, after the bath, took it out again the same way. This procedure partially survived into the 20th century. With a pause: In the Baroque period, people thought differently. Bathing was considered dangerous, water the cause of diseases. “For almost two centuries people were content with personal hygiene without water,” writes author Francoise de Bonneville in his book Le Livre du Bain.

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This only changed in the 18th century, when new materials replaced the wooden tub. For example, under the keyword “Bath” in the “Oeconomische Encyklopädie” by Johann Georg Krünitz from 1782 it says: “The usual bathtubs are made of copper and tinned on the inside.”

But they didn’t have much in common with today’s tubs. They are called “boots” and “slippers” because of their shape. The bathers climbed in through a hole, the shaft of the boot, so to speak, and stretched their bodies into the “foot” of the tub. The American politician and scientist Benjamin Franklin bathed in this way, and the French revolutionary Jean Paul Marat was probably murdered in such a tub.

However, even the upper bourgeoisie hardly had any of their own to wash in their own homes. Instead, special dealers heated water in barrels and transported them to customers in handcarts, and they also delivered the tub for bathing.

The first whirlpools had to be operated with muscle power

In the second half of the 19th century, the educated middle class then developed a technically oriented bathroom culture and became a pioneer when it came to bathtubs. Tubs made of copper, zinc, cast steel, fireclay, tiles or marble moved into the apartments. Often they were not in a specially equipped bathroom, but in living rooms or bedrooms. If you didn’t have enough space, you bought a folding bathtub.

Around the turn of the century, more and more inventions for the tub came onto the market, such as brush discs that massaged the bather. For example, the company Moosdorf & Hochhäusler from Berlin advertised the “only tub that offers a refreshing wave pool with two buckets of water”. It was a kind of whirlpool powered by muscle power.

The middle class and workers, on the other hand, did not have their own bathtub until well into the 20th century. The people’s bath tub was introduced in the mid-1920s. The Krauss company from Schwarzenberg, for example, manufactured up to 1000 hot-dip galvanized sheet metal tubs per day. But whether one could afford such a piece was not only a question of price, but also of space.

For many people, the bathroom therefore remained pure luxury. Ilse Schneider, who was born in Hanau in 1927, remembers in the book “Warm water – white goods”: “We used to bathe, but once a week in a large washtub that was set up in the kitchen.” She always last because she was the dirtiest.

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It was not until the 1950s that the bathtub became standard, even in normal homes. Glass fiber reinforced plastic and, from the 1960s, acrylic were added as new materials.

At the end of the 1960s, the manufacturers finally rethinked: Instead of constructors, they commissioned designers such as André Courrèges and Luigi Colani. Feeling good and having fun replaced functionality and the obligation to clean in the bathroom. Location for tubs were usually corners or at least a place on the wall, just like thousands of years ago in Pylos. That has only changed in the last few years. According to the German Sanitary Industry Association, free-standing bathtubs are becoming increasingly popular. A trend that can already be observed in Queen Catherine de Valois’ Queen’s Bathroom.