Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for tuning in. Let's hear it for mister Mourning himself or super producer mister Max Williams.
You're saying about about like I'm such a night owl, even years after being a getting out of the bartending. It came like if I stay up way too late, like one night, it goes straight back to it.
It's tough. So you get to a certain age you got to catch up on that sleep. I've become the same way. It's like ninety thirty PM to bed for me sometimes in six am to rise. The morning routine is a big part of my life these days. And I'm here for it, y'all.
And I don't really sleep. My name is Ben Bullen. That voice you just heard is none other than mister Noel Brown. And in this episode we are exploring the history of something that a lot of us don't think about through this lens. For many, the majority of people, I imagine, when you wake up, whatever time that is, you have a wake up routine, if you're rising in the morning. We see this all the time. In real life and in fiction, you have rituals right. They may
be elaborate, for some they may be very simple. You might have your morning shower, brush your teeth right, give your hair a comb, and wink at yourself in the mirror. You might also have a bunch of makeup and so on.
Some words of affirmation, perhaps what is it? Stuart Smalley from snl O Old School Essay says, I'm smart enough, I'm something enough, and gosh darn and I I matter. I forget it. You know, people like me? People like me. That's exactly right now. You know, maybe not all that, but I'm serious when I say that the morning routine and just routine and ritual in general has become a lot more important to me of late, as far as like a way to kind of center things and focus
energies in the right direction. I always was kind of like down on it or thought it was stupid, but I am fully on board these days. Whether it be skincare, you know, hair washing, shampoo, face washes, I'm here for all of it, guys. Beard poultices not poultices has leaves and sticks in it. We are going to talk about ungwint and ungwint. That's the word hundreds. I can jump in here real quick. I mean Todill's point right there.
Like I was always just like you know, brush your teeth, go to class, brush teeth go to work type of person. But you know, as age, I've learned more and more, and it's actually funny enough, like your blood pressure is often the highest, like an hour or so before you wake up. Your brain is just running through rem and
stuff like that. So I've learned that in the morning it's super important for me to just kind of take some time and not to run out the door, because I can just run out of the door and do things and just be a jerk to every person I meet.
You have to have those quiet moments with yourself. A lot of these processes or processes whatever you prefer, that we're going to talk about today, they have varying levels of importance to varying individuals. I'm not gonna get into my weird routines, but we know they have ancient origins.
They tend to write, especially your routines megachees, jeez, thank you like Eldritch origins. Mist oh Man.
Yeah, the Blood Covenant holds, but still everybody.
Everything has to make a living.
And we wanted to start with the origins of soap, which nol I feel that we have we have discussed somehow in the past.
Yeah, it's another accidental invention. Yeah, because I believe there was material running down a mountain from burning of bodies. Yeah, and then it created.
At animal sacrifice.
Yeah, and it went down Mount Sapo.
But the problem is, no one has ever found a Mount Sapo or anything referred to Mount Stapo.
And this is coming to us thanks to some excellent research by our good pal and research associate, Jeff Factor G.
Bartlett.
I asked him what he wanted to be called, and he said factor Gen.
Okay, that's mysterious. That sounds like a brand of fuel, like a Alvaline rating of something like that. But yeah, I mean, look that the whole you know, coming down the mountain situation does Reek of Apocrypha, but at least it doesn't Wreek of bo and that's because of soap, which it may or may not have invented.
Yeah, the origin of soap is apocryphals right word. It's as mysterious as the origin of cheese, right, which also has a cool story about its providence that has not been proven. The thing is the history of soap. Its origin story is gross. You could tell we were referencing an earlier episode on Sacrifices Soap. Apparently this is according to the New York Times. By the way, soap most likely originated as a product of a long ago cookout.
So if you've ever roasted meat over a spit we are all three big fans of cookouts, then you'll see that these globs of unctuous fat driven to the ashes.
Shous I love that word, so whether or not the specifics of the like and then it slid down the side of Mount whatever, and they discovered it and soap was born. That usually is an oversimplification whenever you hear like a one story worry solution to something that all encompassing like soap. Once again, parallel thinking and also just
parallel accidents, because it is a result of something. In every interesting discovery, Many interesting discoveries are the results of something happening as a byproduct and someone thinking, oh what if I like rubbed this all over my filthy body. You know, not everything specifically soap, but you know, like a mushroom. We talk about this like the someone decided
they were going to eat it, then they died. Then enough people tried to eat different ones that they figured out that this one was tasty, and this one will kill you, and this one will make you see funny pink elephants.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so they they did figure out. Now, listen, the past was a very dirty time, just to be quite honest, And that point about bo holds true. If you traveled back to the past, depending on when you emerged in the timeline, what of your first impressions would
be just the hellish combination of unpleasant smells. So people somewhere figured out that you could take this stuff, this fat dripped into ashes, and you would have a substance that was kind of slippy, slippery, and it could lift dirt off your skin. We know that. So we don't really know the origin of soap, and I love the way you frame that story, Nol. We do know, however, that written recipes for soap date back almost five thousand years, and there's a lot of it's a phrase that you
often use. There's a lot of parallel thinking. It's something that people probably independently invented at multiple points in history.
Because everyone was cooking flesh, and all that flesh was excreting. That's the wrong word, the unctious dripping fluids. Gosh, I'm really not doing myself any favors linguistically here, but you get nail image. This is happening the world over. I mean, that was one of the first things man figured out, was how to sustain themselves by eating living things. So talo or animal fat or if you remember that pretty gross little subplot and Fight Club where they used liposuction
material to make soap. Tyler Durden and all that movie maybe didn't age the best, but I still hold the place a fond place in my heart to Tala or animal fat reacts with lie, which is also something that is featured in Fight Club, and a process called stephonification. We have discussed a lot of this soap stuff in previous episodes, but this is just step one of the morning routine, and we're gonna get to a myriad of
others very quickly. We thought we'd do a little bit of a review on soap for everyone absolutely ed.
While we're reviewing that, let's take a brief excursion to talk about the origin of the morning shower. Back in the day when your beloved ancestors were waking up up in ancient mournings fell ridiculous historians. They also liked a good morning shower, and the best way to get clean was to go under a waterfall if you were lucky enough to live by one, or to bathe in a pool or a lake. The water fall has natural water pressure, so it's better at getting junk and dirt.
Off of you. Right.
This also shows us that people who are not lucky enough to have this access didn't really have much recourse or much agency to clean themselves up. Society had to advance with the invention of the jug.
It's so crazy because you never think to transport water, right, There were so people as that that was how do we do this? It comes from these places and it's falling through our fingers. What do we do?
I just love it because that's that's peak ridiculous history. To imagine that communities and civilizations rose and fell without ever figuring out jugs.
Yeah, the humble vessel vessel and then you know, it's also why you see early culture of course bathing directly in rivers. I mean, not that they hadn't also figured out jugs by that point. But even before that, like when we think of, like perhaps in India, cultural significance of folks bathing in the Ganges, which of course held
religious significance as well, but they obviously had vessels. But I can just imagine early man, for lack of a better term, early sapiens, coming upon these bodies of water and figuring out that if you just kind of splash the stuff on, even without soap or just you know, took a little swim, it would be refreshing and potentially defunctifying.
And really quickly, I just want to say, we're talking about the shower, and immediately popped into my mind my favorite European word for shower, which is from courtesy of the French, which is of course la douche. Yes, it's just it's good, it's visual. It's like I can I can hear it. I can hear what it's described, the sound of the water cleansing you and splashing upon you, making a little hunder sound.
You know. I also I am a fan. We come from very different backgrounds, folks. I am a fan of the Schwitz. Yes, I love which is right, yes them bath.
Can we talk about this recently in the sopranos. There was a whole situation where he wouldn't take a Schwitz, he wouldn't make because he was he was a rat, the rat.
I see, Yeah, Schwitz means a lot of different things. But but we love, we we love these different words for these mourning routines, and the shower, the cleansing of the body is one of the ancient and most fundamental
aspects of most mourning routines. We also, I love thanks to the humble jug the vessel, because now I can't get it out of my I'm picturing like thousands of years of human beings finding a river or a lake or a waterfall and saying, well, I live here now because I don't know how to move this.
Yeah. And then of course we get into more advanced versions of water moving in the form of aqueducts and then of course indoor plumbing. The Greeks, however, when it comes to the morning routine, adopted the idea of this morning cleanse, this bath, this douche and improved upon it by developing the first as we're alluding to, drainage systems drainage e LII trainage.
Yeah, and this is another pivotal moment in the history of cleanliness because the Greeks adopted this idea of kind of again cribbing from earlier concepts discovered and invented by ancient egypt and Mesopotamian society. Egyptians never really got past the primary stage of having water carried in and out of a room manually. So the Greeks looked around. This is all perfect for an ancient made for TV commercial.
The Greeks looked around and said, there's got to be a better way, and so they came up with this, as you described, ingenious drainage system. For the first time in known history, water could be transported in and out of rooms via pipes asterisk caveat. It's not a total win because the first pipes were made of lead.
Oh yeah, yeah, And I think we talked about on stuff they don't want you to know in a strange news segment. A study that recently showed that the fall of Rome was at least in part due to all the lead that they were taking in. They experienced a decline in let's just say intellect.
Yeah yeah, and impulse control and things like that. Please check out later studies. We're going to do an episode about lead in the near future, but please also check out these studies about lead exposure in more modern times. There's some real science to it, and it's disturbing.
If we want to.
Keep it on a positive note, I guess we could say, Nolan Max that this means the ancient Greeks were history's first plumbers. The showers were also made accessible to people who were not the one percenters. There were bath houses, you know, communal areas just like a modern public pool where everybody can have a schitz together.
For sure, and there definitely still are We've talked about I think more than one occasion. Here in Atlanta, we've got an amazing Korean bath house out in the Buford Highway area called Jesu. And in Europe, in Germany in particular, other places in Europe, for sure, bath house culture is huge, and there are these incredibly elaborate and ornate, these Roman style kind of bath houses that are very popular for you know, young and old alike.
Yeah, I can't wait, Well, finally get our ridiculous history field trips in play. I can't wait to take you guys to an Onsend in Japan. Those are so this communal bathhouse thing to your point, still is very much a extant invention and phenomenon. Unfortunately for ancient history, as we know spoiler, the Roman and the Greek empires collapsed and this technology, all the progress that we're making on
it was consequentially held back. It was put on pause for centuries, not exactly lost, but the breaks were indeed pumped shift in priorities.
We could call it.
Maybe this is this is not us talking trash about Western Europe back in the day. Instead, we're referring directly to Cleaninginstitute dot org, which tells us the following after Rome fell around four to six seven CE, Europe got dirty bathing habits declined so much that it became a public health crisis, Oh for sure.
And you can check out our episode on the Great Stink of London, which deals with a lot of these same concepts. The idea of miasma theory or diseased air which which as we know, you know, there is such a thing as airborne contagions. The idea of a virus becoming airborne is very very real. But stink can't exactly kill you, but bacteria can, you know, I mean, the really really nasty byproducts of you know, sewage, untreated sewage flowing through the streets, and while it's not exactly the
same as an airborne contagion, it's it's not good. But this idea of miasma theory was it was debunked. This is what I'm getting at.
Yeah, it was debunked, but they were on the right track, you know what I mean. So picture the open sewers. Picture all the nasty stuff that a product of human society becoming a vector for bacteria, for mold, for fungus, for vermin, for intestinal parasites, you know, things that humans at the time didn't really have an understanding of. Hence we have miasthma theory. So there were a couple of areas of the medieval world where people still try to
keep themselves themselves clean. Oh we should also mention, yes, if you are thinking this as you play along your home, being dirty was a factor that led to the Black Death the pleasure. It was not the only reason. The main reason was the fleas on the rats, but not having cleanliness rituals also helped. Still, daily bathing was a common custom in Japan by this time by what we call the Middle Ages, and at Iceland, people did the
coolest thing. They went to hot springs. Have you ever been to a hot spring once?
It is literally a town I want to stay in North Carolina called hot springs, and there are these like open kind of I don't know, like that's sort of coming out of the earth that have this bubbling, you know, kind of jacuzzi water in it, and they're great. I actually went with my kid's mom when she was pregnant with said kid, and it was there were like some really low temperature ones which were okay for her to sit in, and then some that got really really really
really hot as well. But it's interesting how they were the thermal vents. I think like the location of them and the number of them sort of determined how hot the particular pool would be.
Absolutely I've been to. I think I've been to the one you're describing. I've also been to some in several other countries, and I got to tell you, they're not all created equal, that's right. Some of the most disappointing, some of the most disappointed hot springs I visited were in Guatemala when I was living there. But I you want to give points for honesty if you go to
warm springs Georgia. Yeah, they don't say they're hot because they're not springs worm springs, Yeah, which sounds better than tepid butcher. Anyhow, here we are, we are fast forwarding. We see that right around the seventeenth century, excuse me, cleanliness and bathing starts to be a priority again in society, particularly if you have a lot of money and prestige.
Right, cleanliness is next to godliness. Isn't an old adage for nothing? Right? I mean it was literally intended to wash their ass as some people might say. Beat me on that, Max, because it was a genuine public health crisis. But it's interesting too. We're going to get to a place where the tables kind of turn and people are like washing too much, and that could cause a problem too. Yes, teezer,
tezer for what's to come? So fast forward to seventeen sixty seven, when the first you know, modern equivalent of the shower hit the market and was patented by a stove maker by the name of William Feetham from London Town.
I just want his name to be pronounced feet Ham, Sophie.
Ham, yeah, or Ham feet you know whatever. And it piggyback on a lot of this incredibly innovative technology, not least of which is the humble basin, the humble vessel, the humble jug. Water was pumped into this basin above a user's head before a chain was pulled. That would basically it's like the remember the ice bucket challenge. Yeah, it's just getting dumped by a bucket of water dumped on your head that you have a little bit of control over it. So on a hinge, right, which is so weird.
Because this guy also manufactured stoves, So why wouldn't he figure out some warm or hot water process anyway?
Isn't that funny? Yeahn't that funny? Ben? Sometimes the answers right right under your nose and it takes somebody else looking into the outside to figure that part out, which we're gonna get to, Yes we are.
And by eighteen ten, well, obviously, just to summarize here, folks, that first modern shower had some serious disadvantages. It didn't have a way to purify water for what, and it reused a lot of water growth. That's no, that's the opposite of cleaning yourself. That what's what they call wallowing down filth? Yeah, a little bit of bathrot. By eighteen ten, the English Regency shower is invented.
Now we go fancy.
We don't know who invented this, but we know it did offer the first hot shower of its kind for people. And then in eighteen fifty, after the Greek and Roman method of reliable plumbing was rediscovered, people looked around and said, oh my gosh, we don't have to reuse the same dirty bath water and that's great. Yeah, I'm sorry. I don't mean to put a gross image in anyone's head. But if anybody has seen.
The film Gummo, there's a very intense scene where there's a kid eating a chocolate bar now eating spaghetti in a in the filthiest bathwater you've ever seen. And then he starts eating chocolate bar and he drops it in the water and picks it uph Yeah, it is the ick y'all cool movie. Arminy kurran very very not for everyone, but not for every interesting film. Early Chloe seven performing.
A singular vision for sure. So all right, the thing is, as we mentioned, interest in personal cleanliness, or prioritization of personal cleanliness. It waxes and wings over over time. Now, if you've ever had to spend some time sleeping rough. You know, no judgment, but you know that personal cleanliness becomes its own job. And it may be surprising to realize that at certain points in Western Europe, and even before the mid nineteen cent tree in the United States,
people didn't really bathe for personal cleanliness. It might be a religious ritual if you're a knight right before a big fight or something, but it's washing of the feet of your apostles, for example, right right, So it had more of a spiritual significance. But when it came to the average, you know, wake up at sunset and take your shower kind of thing, a lot of Americans thought it was unhealthy. They thought, you know, similar to that
coating on a chicken's egg. They thought that the dirt and grime they picked up in their day to day lives was a protective layer, and that if they got rid of the layer, they would expose their body to unclean things the miasmas or diseased are as you mentioned earlier. And for a long time, Americans associated the bathing of the body with these bad stereotypes of stuck up Europeans who were soft and opulent. Eventually, people start installing bathtubs
in their homes. But this did not roll out at a uniform pace, and a lot of working class people living in tenements did not have access to running water in cities. And being a person with some very rural backgrounds in my past, I can assure us all that running water took a long time to get across the United States, and some people still don't have running water today, which is a crime shame.
When you picture that, Ben, I did in my mind think like so literally about the idea of how long it would take to run water across the entire country. That would take a really long time. But yeah, in terms of the evolution of it and the availability of it,
you are absolutely correct. Hell man, it's a little bit of an inexact science in certain houses to this day, I have a bit of an older house, and uh, you really got to keep on top of them pipes, man or else things because water, boy, oh boy, it's great for a lot of things. But man, is it insidious when it is not being your friend? Yeah? It is also unstoppable and tenacious hundred percent water. Does it
take a nap? Yeah, it's crazy. It's like fire. I mean, I mean staying in the obvious there, but like how how crucial it is for life, but how also deadly and anti life. It can be drowning, floods, and you know, the decimation of entire homes, whether it be through storms or just a slow leak that you're not aware of that can cause rot and literally entirely damage the foundation of one's home.
Dude, I don't want to sound too Buddhist on it's outside of the scope of this show, but think about it, folks. In a PvP, a one on one contest, a match between stone and water, the water will always win if there is not a time limit.
Yeah, there's the race. It's true. It's true. Tenacity is it will always come out to if you've got time and water has nothing but time.
Water's petty, That's what we're saying. Sure, anyway, we are
saying there's some great marketing. If you enjoyed our conversation about hair dye earlier, Eel of Clock to Tour, shout out to Edward Burne's marketing is a huge part of selling cleanliness to Americans in New York in eighteen ninety one, they're trying to sell the idea of a public bath a bath house, and so New Yorkers who visit this public bathhouse are given a free bar or cake as they called it, of Colgate soap as they're waiting in line to go into this big communal bathhouse. And now
personal hygiene starts. The stereotypes flip once again. Now if you are clean and reverend, you were seen as being a good American. It even made it into the boy Scout oath for sure.
And just like Loreal got it on the ground floor with hair dye and then expanded their reach to all aspects of beauty, Colgate did the very same thing. And it all started with a humble cake of soap, a freebie, the ultimate marketing maneuver, exactly.
Yeah. And so from this we see that around the nineteen twenties, the US begins pushing the shower as an idea in a wide social move, and they say, look, you don't have to be a robber baron or a trained tycoon to get a shower. You know, you should have a shower just to be a good clean American. And the US then emerges as this sort of underdog, becoming a front runner in the world of normalizing cleanliness.
The UK is lacking behind folks. They don't start pushing for showers on a wide scale until about the nineteen sixties.
I find this insane, and that never occurred to me. It's so wild not to mention that wasn't really until the eighties when the shower became like a must have. Let's insane. I just assume, you know what's funny though, I do recall a time as a little kid, namely where I only took baths. Yeah, and then there came a crossover point where I never really took a bath again. It was just all showers.
I think that happens to a lot of people, because now a bath is especially in these are hurried times. A bath is seen more as a meditative event, you know.
What I mean. Yeah, whale songs, candles.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe a nice book, some instrumental music. So all right, Now we are in twenty twenty five, as we record on May twenty ninth year of Our Lord, it is considered in a central part of being a modern person in the United States to bathe yourself, to have a good hygiene regiment. Katherine Ashenberg points out nearly one in four American houses built in two thousand and five had three or more bathrooms. So twenty five percent of the homes built that year had three bathrooms or more.
That's a lot of bathrooms. I don't object to it. I am pro bathroom. I like that there are options. But this goes to something we mentioned earlier that I think we should dive into right now. Take a dip in this. Folks, Americans now bathe so frequently that they can cause themselves harm. This is coming to us from our friends at the National Museum of American History. And this reminds me of an episode our pals Josh Chuck recorded way back in the day about the danger of
antibacterial soaps. Can you tell us what's going on with that?
For sure? I mean it's about antibiotic resistance, the idea of superbugs as well. When we expose ourselves to this anti biotic I guess, which is essentially what antibacterial soap is, we develop a resistance to it, especially if we use it too much. And I do remember a time where antibacterial soap was a selling point, and I do think
that that is not as much the case anymore. It was specifically soaps containing the compound triclosan, which had become so popular that some scientists were truly concerned this could contribute to the aforementioned antibiotic resistance and the development of superbugs antibiotic resistant viruses.
Yeah. Yeah. The pickle of it is that over using type bacterial soap can it can decimate the good bacteria that you need, and it can also at the same time encourage, you know, that skyrocketing evolution of a superbug. And that's why you have to be a little bit careful about it. Doctors will warn you that there are skin conditions that can be caused by the soaps we used to wash our bodies and clothing. And I don't experienced that too. It's not pretty. And here we are
going to pause. This turned out to be a two parter. We have it, maybe more than a two parter. We haven't even gotten to hair gel, hairspray, history of deodorant, the history of toothpaste, and brushing your teeth.
We've got a wash malfloride skincare. I was gonna say, when we're talking about developing these resistance and cleaning off things that you need. I recently went through a situation where I was like you know what, I'm gonna start washing my face. I've never been a face wash guy. I've never had like a skincare routin love it and the face wash that I picked, all of a sudden, it caused me to break out, and I've never broken out in my life. I was sort of like, well,
I guess I should do this. So you do have to kind of be careful and not wash your face too much because you can wash off these certain oils that you actually need on your skin to maintain a healthy, you know, biome. Kind of right, yeah, this is this is true.
I'm laughing because I've been in those situations as well, and it kind of reminds me of other non human cleaning products where they tell like a fabric cleaner or something that says, test this on a small area that's cospicuous before you put it all over the floor.
Yeah, and who does that? Does anybody else actually do that? I'm always just willy nilly, just let's go. I'm all in, right, this is my time for this.
Uh yeah, I've been in some non ideal situations with that, but we are in an ideal situation and right now, folks, we are going to call it a day. We're going to be back later in the near future where we're going to explore some of the other aspects of the modern morning routine. We can't wait for you to tune in. Big big thanks to our super producer, mister Max Williams, Big big thanks to our research associate Jeff Factor G. Bartlett.
And let's see who else? What do you think Jonathan Strickland ak the quizters morning routine.
Is like, huh, it's a good question. But polished his dome perhaps?
Yeah? Maybe wash himself in the tears of children. Oh yeah, that's tracks so big, thanks dude, Jonathan, of course, man, we're just messing with you. Who else know?
Who else? Wills aj Bahamas Jacobs who I believe uses the morning ritual that was very popular during the Revolutionary War exclusively. You think he probably like bathes in like cold tars.
Maybe that's the one part of living constitutionally that he just doing after that year.
If it works, tried and true, Yeah, time on our tradition.
If it works, it works, as you said, big thanks to the Rude Dudes of Ridiculous Crime. Do check out their show. If you like us, you'll love them and Noel. Thanks to you, Man, I can't wait for us to get into more of this stuff you need to.
We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.