July 28, 2017 • 52 mins
Over or under? One ply or two? How about six? TP has not been around that long, but is has been embraced in a big way by the United States. Learn all about the interesting history behind this decidedly dry product.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, we're going on tour in two thousand and seventeen,
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Welcome to Stuff you should know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, you'm welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
(00:46):
and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry and
we're about to get our hands dirty the How Toilet
Paper Works episode dumb Dude. There were so many puns
in this article. I was like driving in pain. I
will say that this was a a draft of a
future House to Works article. Yeah, I gathered so it
(01:09):
hasn't been through the editing and a process, and I'm
hoping and praying the editor will have some good, the
good taste. To remove some of these euphemisms about poop. Yeah,
because it's not necessary. No, you don't have to get
hilarious about poop. It's hilarious on its own, sure, you know. Yeah,
(01:31):
I like this one. By the way. Yeah, toilet paper
has a pretty interesting history actually, And there's the one
thing I didn't quite realize. It's pretty American actually toilet
paper is if you go elsewhere in the world, people
have different feelings about toilet paper than Americans do. You
(01:54):
come back and you realize, like, wow, America really really
loves its toilet paper. And you start to look at
statistics and it really kind of comes home, like, for example, yeah,
here's some editing that needs to happen. This guy's got
some numbers wrong. But what I found, Yeah, what I
found was that Americans spend something like six billion dollars
(02:20):
on toilet paper every year. Yeah, it is about rolls
per person, is that right? Yep? Per year? Um, and
we do we do something like we go through something
like thirty six and a half billion rolls of toilet
paper each year in America. Thirty six and a half
billion rolls of toilet paper every year. That is a
(02:43):
lot of toilet paper, um, and we're we were not
showing many signs of stopping. As a matter of fact,
toilet paper is getting more expensive by the year. It's
it's rising by about two in cost every year, and
we we're saying give it to us. There's lots of
theories that if toilet paper somehow became a luxury item, Um,
(03:06):
Americans would just say, well, I have to buy this
luxury item. I cannot live without toilet paper. Yeah, but
it's because we love our toilet paper, and you don't
think about it until you experience something other than toilet paper,
which is usually a stream of water up your pot. Yes,
and we've talked about this before, but for those of
(03:27):
you who haven't heard our various statements on this, I
want to officially go on record again saying that toilet
paper is gross and disgusting and the idea of wiping
poop from your butt with dry paper is counterintuitive. It
makes no sense. And if you don't involve water in
some way to the process, then you're doing it wrong. Huh,
(03:48):
You're you're a communist. I'm a badatist. Yeah, so do
you have one at home? Well, now I need to
rehook it up. I bought one of the toilet ones
because after I said that a couple of years ago,
everyone was like, dude, here you go, sent me the
link to the product. I bought one immediately and hooked
it up. But um, we did some bathroom renovations and
(04:11):
it is uh now somewhere in a bag in my
house and I just need to find it and get
it going again. So you have a bidday floating around
your house in a bag somewhere. Yeah, what what kind
is Is it? Like one that's like a toilet lid
slash biday Uh, it's it. It fits under the lid
and um squirts a jet of water to your butt.
(04:36):
I've got one of those Japanese UM toilet seats that
has a bidet and a dryer and everything, and really
they're fantastic, buddy man. And they're not. I mean it's
it's it's more expensive than a regular toilet seat, but
there it's not so outrageously expensive that you know. Yeah,
well you probably say some on toilet paper. I do
(04:57):
a little bit. I mean toilet paper. You still need
to at yourself dry you definitely do, although if you
have a dryer, do you. Yeah, but you'd have to
sit there for fifteen minutes to get So what's the problem.
I remember there was a George Carlin album where he
was talking about some game show contestant, and one of
the one of the game show contestants hobbies was, um,
(05:20):
sitting on the toilet till my legs go numb. That's
so funny. The little things that stand out from your childhood. Yeah,
like that's locked in there, but you probably don't remember
something really important about your family, like multiplication. Oh yeah,
we're schooling alright. So history of toilet paper, uh, man,
(05:41):
like so many things. If you go back to ancient China,
they were apparently future people because it seems like so
many things, Um, the ancient Chinese people thought of and
then it just sort of went away for a thousand years.
Well they they invented paper, right, so if you're making
(06:01):
paper and you're pooping, eventually you're gonna put the two together, like, oh,
I'll just use this because at the time, or prior
to this, all around the world basically humans used whatever
was handy, like leaves. Moss was very popular for men.
Uh leaves not bad, Yeah, moss, I would say a
little messy but softish beat moss is the bomb, especially
(06:25):
if it's fresh. It says on here coconuts, I don't
even know where to start with that. Yeah, I guess
if you went with the grain it would be okay.
But you I'm sure it's not like a whole coconut.
You're using like a part of a shell or something
like a shard. Yeah, don't say shard in that area.
That's but I think a coconut shell, the outer shell
(06:47):
would be at least like it would probably do the job,
you know, right, it's kind of rough, right, it says shells.
Yeah that if you live near the coast, you could
use shells. And there's definitely only some kind of mollusks
that would be better than others. I saw somebody point
out that there's such a thing as razor clams. Yeah,
(07:08):
I know what a razor clam has. Not want to
use that? Uh Snow, you're definitely on the right track
with that. Corn cobs huge, huge in America. I think
that makes a lot of sense. Sure, it's got like
the kind of rough bits, but it's can turn it
about perfectly shaped, continually turn it and you get you know,
(07:30):
new coverage. Or whatever. Yeah, the only thing like the
corn cob. Using a corn cob is that you have
to like, um, play banjo music in your head while
you're using it. It's the only way to do it.
Sheep's wool not bad. No, And uh, if you were
a rich type frenchie from the Renaissance on, you would
(07:51):
probably use lace. Lace. I saw that, and that, Uh,
that doesn't make any sense because lace is full of holes.
That seems so French royalty, like I'll only wipe my
bottom with handmade lace, right. And I think also if
you were royalty, you weren't actually the one doing your
your own bottom, like for example, um, King Henry the Eighth,
(08:13):
who I know wasn't French, he had a position called
the groom of the stool. That wasn't just him. No,
So I think if you were super rich, you had
people wipe for you, which is now the only time
you do that is if you've broken both of your arms.
Where here here's the deal. I looked up groom of
the stool because that immediately piqued my interests. First of all,
(08:34):
they're not talking about a stools in poop. They're talking
about like a stool sample. No, it means like this
portable commode that looked like a stool that they would
carry around. I wonder if that's where the term for
poop stool came from. That I don't know, let's just
say yes, okay. I also found that and this was
(08:57):
a position that all of royalty held, like it was
he He was not the only one. They're all all
the kings had them in queens and dukes and duchesses.
But they were their very closest helpers obviously, But apparently
they didn't actually help them wipe. Um. They would help
them undress, for sure, they would be in charge of
the commode upkeep, and apparently they would um just kind
(09:23):
of track their meal schedule and dietary goings on, like
what goes in and what comes out. But I didn't
see anywhere where they actually like wiped their butts for them.
I see you've pastor beans. It is Tuesday. Uh. Most
of them were nights and King George the third Matt.
(09:47):
King George actually had a groom of the stool. John
Stewart with you, a RT who eventually became Prime Minister
of England. Wow, how about that man? Thank you for
bringing us up to date because I was grossly misled
by this how stuff works article. Well, yeah, it sounds like,
wipe your butt for you. I failed to do the
(10:08):
proper outside research, so thank you for saving me and
shaming me at the same time. Well, that sounds like
I don't blame you. Probably read groom in the stool
and you're like, Yep, don't need to know anything more
about that. No, but I should have known better. You know,
I've been doing this for years. I'm supposed to be professional,
all right. Ancient Greeks used clay and stone, and the Romans,
they were on the right track. They used like a
(10:30):
sponge on a stick which was wet and that they
would then clean with saltwater. Yeah. Well, actually taking it
back a second, the Greek's actually used polished bits of stone. Yeah,
puss pussy. And then there was also something called um
I think a stroiky oh stroiky um, and that was
(10:52):
where if you would um, if the town was voting
on like kicking somebody out, they would have there be
these like bits of ceramic with the person's name engraved
on it and they just throw it into this pot
or whatever. Well, to really show your disdain for somebody,
you could use one of these astroy kys um as
(11:15):
a stone for wiping yourself. You're wiping yourself with the
person's name, which is about as bad as it gets.
But that's where the word ostracize comes from because it
sounds like an Australian like exclamation astro y. People get
the point. Um. People are using whatever they can to
(11:35):
wipe their butts like it's an issue. Things get messy
since the dawn of time took took. It was like,
you know, it doesn't feel good to walk around after
a poop if I haven't cleaned myself. So it was
an issue. And let's fast forward in time two uh seven,
(11:56):
this is where it's starting to get good. In New
York City. Uh, there was a man named Joseph Gaietti
and he invented something called Gayeties Medicated paper sheets yep.
And they were it was toilet paper, but it was
not yet on a roll. They were more like a
tissue that you would put pull out of a box
like Kleenex. Yeah. They were like, if you want a
(12:18):
brand name, Buzzet, that's fine. Proprietary him, uh about fifty
cents for five sheets, and he was so proud. He
had his name printed on them. But I didn't think
that through. Um but here's the deal. You had a
hard time selling it because at the time, and this
is no joke, Americans used literally used the Farmer's Almanac
(12:39):
and the Sears Catalog to wipe their butts. Yeah. As
a matter of fact, both of them I think came
with a hole punched in like the top corner to
make it easier just hang from a nail in your outhouse. Azing.
So that was definitely one reason why Gaiety's medicated paper
didn't take off. But another part of it was that
(12:59):
this is like a boo thing, right. You got the
Sears robut catalog and the mail. It served a couple
of purposes, one of which was unspoken, right, Yeah, like
the mail. The mail delivery guy would just walk up
and just like kind of hand it to the person
and say, here's your catalog. Thanks, wink wink nudge. Just
(13:19):
should last year a couple of months, alright. I was
wondering how long it would last. I mean, like, these
things were a couple of hundred pages, Um, so I
wonder how long it would last. But yes, most especially
in rural America, that was toilet paper. That in corn cops.
I wonder if there are are arguments to broke out
in families like ma, it's winter and we're already to
(13:41):
the tool section. Yeah, your own. I'm sure there's always
been miserly jerks who yelled about using too much toilet paper. Um.
So that was one reason that that gaiety had trouble
with his medicated paper. Right. Another part was that the
abou right, no one wanted to talk about that, um,
(14:03):
and he actually sold his thing as like medicine. It
was meant to be u for the prevention or treatment
of hemorrhoids, right, which obviously that would help, and it was.
It was very much what we would consider the first
toilet paper, but um, it didn't take off. It wasn't
until about thirty or forty years later that Clarence and
(14:24):
e Irvin Scott Scott brothers whose name still appears on
toilet paper rolls, got together and actually created the first
toilet paper on a roll. Yeah. That changed everything, it
really did. But apparently the shame, the stigma of of
creating toilet paper was so much that they released their
(14:45):
product in It wasn't until nineteen o two that they
finally acknowledged that it was there their product. Yeah, they
were just a shame. Yeah. Uh, they didn't have to
put their name on it, I mean no. And apparently
they use some of the companies that their company owned
to under Yeah. They really were like trying to to
(15:06):
put some distance in between them and the toilet paper
they created. Yeah, I get it. They did manage to
sell a lot of it though, because they were smart
enough to market it to like hotels and drug stores
and stuff, and so they sold a lot of it,
not like direct to customer, right, and they said, you
know your hotel needs this. Trust me, no one wants
(15:27):
to talk about it, but just put these in your
bathrooms and everyone will say great. And and again, like
it was. It worked kind of well. But then, um,
toilet paper as a as we understand it today, really
didn't become like a staple what what you would call
an icon of American culture, frankly, until like three things
(15:48):
happened from about the beginning of the twentieth century until
about the nineteen thirties, right. And one of the first
things was that America started getting indoor plumbing flushing toilets.
That deal. I think it was because you can't use
corn cobs in that any longer. So this is largely
in the city's um where where you would find indoor plumbing.
(16:11):
Still in rural America, up to the thirties, people were
still using corn cobs in the Sears and Robot catalog.
That's when the second thing that that took place that
changed everything happened. The Sears catalog went to a clay
based glossy paper and no longer was it soft and
absorbent any longer. It was slick and you you can't
(16:32):
use that to wipe your bottom after pooping. That was
the second thing that happened. And lastly, the third thing
that happened was um a company called the was it
the Hubert Hubert Paper Company Hoberg Paper Company released a
brand of toilet paper called Sharman, and they very very
(16:55):
wisely branded it in such a way that this focused
on it's femininity, it's softness, it's gentleness, and you could
talk about how soft and gentle and wonderful this product
was without talking about what it was actually used for,
which meant that now you could market it to the public.
And as a result, Charman took off. Yeah, I mean
(17:16):
that that's sort of became the name in toilet paper
for many years, uh, in no small part thanks to
a man named Dick Wilson, who, from nineteen six to
eighty five and more than five hundred TV commercials played
the beloved Mr. Whipple George Whipple grocery store manager, who
very famously would urge usually women in the commercials not
(17:39):
to squeeze the charmon because apparently, from sixty four to
eighty five, women and grocery stores were compelled to squeeze
toilet paper yeah constantly, always feels so nice and soft,
which apparently did something wrong to the toilet paper. Well, yeah,
you didn't want your toilet paper, that's who You bought
(18:00):
a toilet paper for yourself so you could squeeze in
the comfort of your own home. So at exact, John
schure Focus actually came up with that tagline um or phrase,
and the actor's original name was Ricardo the Googliemo. The
Googlielmo from from England. That did not anticipate that. I
(18:21):
thought it was gonna say Rome, Italy. Another little known
fact about Dick Wilson is that he is the father
of Stephanie Balki's love interest in Perfect Strangers in real life. Yeah,
that's his daughter. And another factoid is, uh, he was
in Bewitch, the TV show. Yeah, he played the drunk
(18:42):
that you'd see at the bar who just couldn't believe
the witchery he had just seen, Mr Whipple. Uh so
did you say that he was in more than five
hundred of those Sharman ads, Um, there was a point
where he was. There was a pole that was taken
in and found on that in America, he was the
third most recognized person by Americans after Richard Nixon and
(19:05):
Billy Graham. That's so America. That is a home run
for an ad AD agency. That's just so America. The president,
a preacher, and a toilet paper guy. Mr Whipple, I
love it. Do you want to take a break, Yeah,
we'll take a break in. Um kind of bring us
into the modern age of butt wiping. All right. So
(19:47):
we're at a point now where Sharman has uh, well
before that, uh, we were at a point where toilet
paper was now being championed by plumbers by doctors as
being a good thing. Sharman comes along said, man, this
stuff is soft and don't squeeze it though, But boy,
I know you want to Johnny Carson's joking about it
(20:09):
on the Tonight Show. Yeah, that was that was kind
of a significant thing. Yeah, he said that there was
And this was uh in nineteen seventy three when there
were like gas shortages and energy shortages, and Johnny Carson
made a joke about their being a toilet paper shortage,
and people thought he was serious and apparently went out
and like bought out grocery stores the next day. Yeah,
(20:30):
and it was a self sustaining um. Yeah, when people
when people ran out and bought it, it it created the shortage.
And then the successive waves of people came and saw
for themselves that there was no toilet paper, so they
panicked and they bought whatever they could, and apparently for
weeks in some places there there was you couldn't find
you couldn't buy toilet paper because it had been hoarded
(20:51):
because of Johnny Carson's joke. Man, and he took it back.
But you know, back in those days, it takes little
while for people to get that information. Sure you been
on the Tonight Show, that's right. So, um, this one
article you sent was great, the history one, which one
you're said kind of the longer one. Oh the I
(21:12):
think it was a Mental Floss article. What absolutely was?
You're right, so I always love to use mental floss articles.
Oh and by the way, we would be remiss if
we didn't mention that Will and Mangus, who started Mental
Floss are colleagues. Now, yeah they are. They have a
podcast called Part Time Genius that's put out by our
venerable umbrella brand company. That's right. And I made a
(21:35):
guest appearance, and I think you're probably in the queue
as well. Uh. Yeah, I have not been approached, but
I just assume I thank you. I think so, let's hope.
So But anyway, congratulations to Will and Mango for Part
Time Genius and go check it out. You cannot find
it anywhere you find us stuff you should know. Yeah,
so anyway, Uh, they made a pretty good point here
(21:58):
at the end of it, which I never really consider dared.
But toilet paper is actually sort of a marker of
where you are as a country. Uh, Like developing nations.
When they start buying more toilet paper, that means they
are getting more sanitary as a nation, means they have
extra money to spend as a nation. Uh, that means
(22:20):
that they're basically just sort of ah, their demographics are
changing in a positive direction. Speaking from a neoliberal standpoint,
that is correct, right, Yeah, but it's interesting and ever
thought about it. Like Brazil they've doubled the amount of
toilet paper they've sold since two thousand four, Yeah, which
is pretty significant considering, um, American toilet paper has plateaued,
(22:44):
like we buy as much as we we possibly can.
Were saturated, but I mean we're still spending six billion
on it, you know. Yeah, and all over the world
there are I mean, you know, when we went to Guatemala,
we certainly saw the bucket, uh and the wall here
next to the toilets. There are still many places all
over the world where you clean yourself with whatever water
(23:08):
you have, and you and if you do have something
to wipe yourself with, you don't even flush it down
the toilet. You you know, you have a little water
hose in a bucket maybe and kind of take care
of business right or with There are some places, um
where the plumbing just can't even handle actual toilet paper.
You just throw that away as well. Yeah, you want
(23:30):
to talk about how toilet papers made? Yeah, I mean
we can talk about it for sure, but I strongly
encourage everyone to go uh to YouTube and watch a
little six minute Discovery Channel bit from I think it
was from How It's Made Canadian How It's Made? Oh,
is that what it was? The lady just stopped short
of saying, hey, I did kind of notice that. Yeah.
(23:53):
It's amazing though, And I know I can obsessively watch
manufacturing videos like all day and all night, but this
one was especially cool looking. Chuck, did you get the
same sense where like you were just watching those huge
rolls of toilet paper going over the rollers and just
think like that is so delicate, Like all you have
to do is lift your hand up and just completely
(24:13):
throw production off. It was just I didn't feel like
I wanted to do that, but I kept wondering, like,
how in the world are these machines just rolling this
toilet paper so fast without breaking? Yeah, it's it's pretty impressive.
So let's start at the beginning. The whole thing starts
with a tree. Go out in your backyard, you cut
(24:35):
down a tree, You take it to the toilet paper manufacturer,
and you sell it to them for a few dollars,
and then you leave. And since you've left, it's not
your tree any longer because you took money for it.
And what the toilet paper manufacturers are gonna do with
what's now their tree, They're gonna grind it up into
little chips. They're gonna soak it in some water. They're
(24:57):
gonna grind it up even more. And what you had
have are um called pulp. Well, you gotta cook it first.
You gotta cook it in a what's called a digester,
and that turns it into pulp. Yeah. And if you
look at this video, it's like it looks I mean,
it kind of looks like wet toilet paper. Yeah, that's
exactly what it looks like. And it but when it's dried,
(25:18):
it crumbles really easily too, right, So um, that means
you've got a few extra steps. The next step is
you gotta bleach it because you're removing the color. If
you've ever seen like, um, that kind of grayish tan
like um, like paper towels or something that you see
in like an office building or jail or something like that,
(25:39):
like that is what pulp looks like if you don't
bleach it. Yeah, which I think the only reason they
do that is because they found that people don't like
their toilet paper to be anything other than white unless
it's Yeah, man, I've got to say. I found this
um blog post from a site called History's Dumpster, and
(26:00):
they have pictures of Northern brand toilet paper and light green,
light blue and pink, and it was just like remember
swallow my tongue from nostalgia. It was very cute. Yeah. Well,
and I guess we should go ahead and say the
reason they don't do that anymore is because, um, those
inc dies they found good cause cancer in some cases. Uh,
(26:23):
they are expensive, more expensive to use dies. Uh. And yeah,
it was basically a health thing. People like you don't
need these plus and also the dies also kept m
the toilet paper from breaking down as quickly too. Yeah.
And they probably also looked and said, you know what,
my poop doesn't look any better on baby blue than
it does on white. No. But the the whole reason
(26:47):
that they had those is because everybody loved to um
color coordinate every room of their house in the seventies,
including the bathroom. Everything in the bathroom is bank so
people would people would buy mauve toilet paper to go
with their mauve bathroom or whatever. It is great, it was.
That's so super seventies too, And that's just yet another
(27:08):
reason that the seventies were hands down the greatest decade
in the history of Humanity's pretty great. So one other thing, Chuck,
there's a company called Renova and they actually sell colored
toilet paper again. Oh really Yeah, it's like seven seven
euros and fifteen cents, which isn't that much less than
(27:29):
it would be in dollars these days for six rolls. Okay,
so we're in the factory. Where do you leave this? Uh?
So we've made the pulp and we've bleached it. Now
it's white. Then you take the pulp and you mix
it with water and you've created a paper stock. That's right,
(27:49):
and then you press it onto a screen. This one
was this blew me away. Yeah, they pressed it onto
a screen. I guess you're you're draining a lot of
the water. Uh's one reason? And well I guess that's
the main reason, because what you're left with is that
dry white product. Yeah. That that lady, the Canadian lady
on how it's made, said that they hit them with
(28:10):
a dryer when they're on that screen and it instantly
drives it out. That's just amazing because you think of
this stuff is so delicate that but they if you
watch the process that they're they're pretty rough with it. Yeah.
So then well, concurrently, what's going on to we should
say is they're also making the the cardboard rolls, which
(28:32):
is kind of the tubes, you know, which is kind
of neat to watch that happen on its own. They
just make this one long, continuous tube that they cut
into like sixty in It probably depends on you know
which company, but the one they feature, I think we're
sixty inch tubes, which would then roll toilet paper around,
(28:53):
so you would have basically a sixty inch roll giant
roll of TP, right, which looks really neat, and then
they glue it. That is definitely glue that they used
to keep it, uh you know, not tucked, but affixed
a fixed thank you, so it doesn't unravel. Yeah, like
(29:14):
when you when you rip that toilet paper off at
the very beginning, that that's a glue that's holding it together, right,
And then they have these circular saws that come through
and just cut that that big long roll into several
small rolls. That was the coolest part, it was. And
then um, they can be individually wrapped or put in
packs of like four or six or a million UM
and then you sell them. It's it is a very
(29:36):
cool short video. I could watch that stuff forever. So
that's if you're making it UM from scratch. There's also
recycled toilet paper, which isn't quite as popular here in
the United States because it's a little coarser, the fibers
are a little longer with with toilet paper. The shorter
the fiber, the softer the toilet paper is going to
(29:58):
be UM. And then they also add some proprietary chemical
combinations UM that include like extruders that kind of pull
the fibers out of like a horizontal position and just
kind of tough them a little bit. Uh. And then
they'll put in like emboss and stuff like that too,
which kind of gives a quilted feel. So all of
(30:19):
that is to make it softer and to make it
um more grabby grabs the poop right out of your bottom. Yeah,
And those fibers is sort of a balance. They're a
delicate balance. They're walking because they want it to be soft,
but they also want it to be strong enough because
if it's too flimsy, like the junk. You get it. Uh,
you know public restrooms and your office probably you know
(30:41):
that everyone probably has a nightmare story about their fingers
busting through that stuff, which is worst case scenario, uh
when it's clean up time. So they're trying to basically
walk that balance of soft and strong, right, And one
way they've done that is to add more um layers applies.
(31:03):
So apparently it's up to six plies. I didn't know that.
I didn't either. I can't imagine you could. You couldn't
even fold that. Yeah, what does that feel like? I
wonder I'm probably a cloud. You're just wiping your bottom
with a cloud. And that In ninety two that started
as St Andrew. St Andrew's paper Mill in England invented
(31:23):
the two ply. Uh and I didn't know. This is
another nice little tidbit um Until the nineteen thirties they
would market toilet paper as splinter free like that. They
would they were forced to, right because apparently that was
a thing. So, um, that's kind of that's where I
(31:43):
was going with recycled toilet paper. It's kind of the
new splinter splintery toilet paper, which I mean compared to
the toilet papers of your recycled toilet papers just completely luxurious.
But compared to actually like six ply super soft stuff
that you can get, it is a little rough. Um.
(32:03):
And again the reason why is the fibers are a
little longer. And it follows the same process, but there's
a step at the beginning where you take all these
different papers and you put them in and mash them
together in some water and you inject some air and
it creates foam and the ink and the paper sticks
to the foam and the foam floats, so then they
(32:24):
just skim the foam off the top and you just
remove the ink and then you start the rest of
the process making a pulp. Again, what a world. It
is pretty amazing. All right, let's take another break and
we're gonna come back and wrap it up with some
more amazing facts about t P. Another thing we forgot
(33:02):
to mention before we broke was the you said that
the embosed ones right like with the whatever, the scallop
shell or whatever you find um, they say that. Another
reason they do that is just so they know that
that's their toilet paper, just to differentiate themselves from other brands.
Oh yeah, I never really thought about that. Yeah, but
(33:22):
Scott's like, Noah, that's ours. You can see the scalop
shell right there. Yeah. Although I don't know what there's is,
there was definitely scalloping in that. Um how it's made video? Yeah?
Uh all right, So can we talk about the over
or under thing? Yes? So everybody's seen that Simpsons where
(33:46):
margin Homer go to the spa for a day and
Child Protective Services ends up coming by and they write
a report and they call the Simpsons house a squalid
hell hole point out that the toilet paper is hung
in an improper overhand fashion. Um. So apparently, I'm not
sure who wrote that episode weighed in on that, but
(34:09):
they're in the minority because apparently only do the underhang.
I'm a definite overhanged person. What about you? I'm an
overhanger for sure. Um apparently. And I remember seeing this
online a few years ago. It kind of went around
that was a guy named Seth Wheeler of Albany Perforated
(34:31):
Wrapping Paper Company submitted a patent for the first perforated
toilet paper on a roll and that showed the the
over position and everyone was like, but it said it's subtle.
This was the first one that's how it was supposed
to be, which really proved nothing. No, I mean, it's
still preference. But there are definite pros and cons of
(34:52):
the whole thing, right, Yeah, But here's the thing for me,
it's a lot of the pro of the pros they
list as UM, like your little kid or your dog
won't be tempted to go yanket if it's UM in
the under position, right, presumably because it's hidden. No, because
it's so if you're a little kid or a doggie
(35:14):
and you come up, if you if it's in an
overhand fashion, if it's overhanging, you can just come up
and start slapping downward on the toilet paper roll and
it will just come right offhang. You know, it just stays.
It just flips around and stays together. Yes, it does.
You have to pull downward on the toilet paper if
(35:36):
it's going from an underhang to get it off the roll.
If you slap downward on the front top of the
toilet paper roll, that that it's never gonna come loose.
To see, trifical force holds it in place. I think
I disagree on this notion. I think that's presuming that
you're using the old school built into the wall toilet
(35:56):
paper dispenser, No, because I have the one where it
sits on a free standing stand, and if I put
my hand on the back of that thing and just
give it a spin, it will come unspoiled. I see,
I see what you mean. Yeah, if you approached it
that way, then then all of a sudden, now you've
changed your perspective down. I know, it's all crazy. Yeah,
(36:21):
I just I haven't seen that many of the Uh
they're kind of out of fashion now. The ones that
are built into the wall, are they? Yeah, you don't
see those as much anymore. No, I have I have
mind coming off of the wall. It's not built into it,
but it's it's you can only yeah, like you can't
get to it from behind. Yeah, the classic ceramic holder
(36:41):
built onto the wall, right, I don't have that. Although
my bathroom is mauv is it really? No? I wish
it's salmon that. I would love to have a color,
a color coordinated bathroom. I know you would. That would
be sweet. Um. Yeah, we just have those stands where
the toilet papers all stacked up a up a post, yeah,
(37:04):
and then then in the top it's got a little
l shaped thing and the dude hangs on there. Yeah,
we just have one that like drills into the wall. Yeah,
so it's not okay, but it's it's the same thing.
I can't get to the backside of it. Yeah, see
I can get to the back of mine, so okay.
But if you are using a kind that's a fixed
to the wall, then that if you if you have
(37:25):
it underhanged, you can't. You can't just slap it pretty easily, right, Well,
that seems like a it's kind of a minor thing
to really champion as a reason. Yeah, especially if you
don't have kids or mischievous dogs. Right. Yeah, my dog
has never done that, and the worst dogs right Okay,
now you don't, well one of them. So um, you've
got you've got that. And that's that's for the underhang,
(37:48):
for the overhang. One of the other things about the
underhang is that you can't see the unsightly end of
the toilet paper roll. Right, that's not insightly, No, I agree,
And in fact, there's a whole book out there, um
you my sister got it for it's pretty awesome. It's
called the Toilet Paper or Gami, and it teaches you
all sorts of different ways to like fold the end
of a toilet paper roll to make it. Yeah, and
(38:12):
you you can just wake up one day and there
it's all nice and fold and you're like, where am
I there? Rits, Oh no, I'm at my house still,
and just surprised Emily not even tell her, I think
for sure. And then when she goes what it turns
around you're just holding the book in front of you
with a huge smile and your face saying the new
chapter in our life. Yeah, and she says pooping. Why
(38:34):
are you in the bathroom all right? Get out? Yes, yes, Emily, Yes,
speaking of get Out. I just saw it last night, finally,
what do you think? It was great? And I got
Emily to watch it and she was reticent. She loved it. Yeah,
and that's really not her jam either. I just don't
see how you could not ultimately leave that movie feeling
like pretty great, pretty happy that you saw it. But
(38:56):
there are some pretty scary aspects to it too. Yeah,
it was like a good straight up horror movie. Yeah,
I called I called all the twists though, Oh yeah, yeah,
I just and she was like, oh wow, you kind
of nailed that one. Did you call the bad guy
from Billy Madison being the bad guy Billy was he
and Billy Madison? Yeah, Eric, I don't know if I
(39:20):
saw Billy Madison. That's another one of those like what
was I doing not seeing Tommy Boy and Billy Madison? Yeah,
I think that was in my like, oh, I'm watching
art films. Only got you? I got you? Uh anyway, sorry,
(39:40):
get out? Highly recommended. Yeah, I agreed finally by me.
So back to the overhand underhand thing, which, if you
can believe it, we're still talking about. There is one
thing in overhang, aside from the delightful toilet paper or gami,
you can do. I think I think definitely says um
s overhang. In an underhang, if you have a toilet
(40:04):
roll holder up against the wall, you are inevitably going
to brush your knuckles up against the wall of your
bathroom to grab the toilet paper. That's something you don't
want to do because if you leave the lid of
your toilet open when you flush an aerosol eyes cyclone
of p in poop goes all over your bathroom, including
(40:26):
your bathroom walls. So if you cannot touch your bathroom
walls when you're getting toilet paper, so much the better.
Well that's not a problem for me. But you know
that people around here behind your back call you big knuckles.
I know, big hairy knuckles. It's been your nickname for years.
I know, I know shut it's here. When I hear
I just pretend like I haven't heard. All right, So
(40:46):
let's talk about the future. Let's wind this up with
like you said, Americans, apparently, um like you can pride
this gun from my cold dead hand type of thing.
Except it's toilet paper. Well it's it's toilet paper to
right in one hand. Uh. A lot of other countries,
(41:07):
especially you're in Europe and Japan have roundly sided with
the bidet. Yeah, which I researched the bidet a little
bit because I'm like, how do you even use a bidet?
I've seen him before. And a true biday is you'll
have a toilet and then next to that you'll have
a toilet, but it doesn't have a lid, and there's
like some um faucet knobs and everything in there, and
(41:29):
you'll turn it on and like water comes up out
of the bottom. So a bidet is actually French for
small horse. And the reason they call it that is,
because you're supposed to straddle the bidet like you would
be riding a horse basically, right, and then you turn
on the water and adjust it just how you want
to the temperature you want, and then you adjust yourself
so that it's getting those spots that it needs to get.
(41:50):
Turn it off, dry off, wash your hands, and you're
done right. And the bidet, actually that biday I just described,
the porcelain fixture that goes next to the toilet was
actually Americanized, Like the Americans came up with that version
of the bidet and still didn't catch on in America,
but Europe, where it had already been invented before. This
(42:11):
is like the improved version of it went nuts for
this Americanized version, and it just kind of got lost
to time that the Americans were the ones who gave
Europe the modern bidet, and we just never took it
on ourselves. Well, it's definitely if you have that style,
that's definitely an extra expense because you have to have
that fully plumbed and uh, you have to have the
(42:34):
space for it, you know, like it's not a cheap
thing if you want to get the full deal. No,
it's not, but like you have and like I have, Um,
you can just basically just us as an extra hose
that comes out of your already existing water supply and
goes into your toilet seat. And again the expense is
not utterly outrageous to get one of these. You get
(42:56):
a quality when it's probably gonna last a while, especially
if you get a Japanese one. Um. But one of
the reasons why around the world bi days are so prevalent,
Like in Japan, six restrooms have bi days. In Venezuela,
I didn't know this have bidets actually, Um. One of
the reasons why people are behind them so much is
(43:16):
because I know I heard that to you, Um, they
use way less water than toilet paper does. Oh like
the manufacturing of toilet paper. Yeah, so get this man,
this is a scientific American blog posts I found average
bidet use is going to take about an eighth of
a gallon of water to get yourself where you want
(43:38):
to be, right, which is clean. Yeah. To make a
roll of toilet paper one role, it takes thirty seven
gallons of water, one point three kilowatt hours of electric,
one and a half pounds of wood. So in America
we use thirty six point five billion rolls of toilet
(43:58):
paper every year. That re wires fifteen million trees, It
uses four hundred and seventy three billion, five hundred and
eighty seven million, five hundred thousand gallons of water, and
requires seventeen point three tarawatts of electricity. Now I don't
know how much taro wat is, but brother, that sounds
like a lot of electricity. Man, that's disheartening. I'm gonna
(44:21):
get my bidet going. It really is, and it makes
it really kind of makes you think like, oh, toilet
papers and an environmental catastrophe, so maybe a bidet is
is preferable. Well. And the other thing, if you use
the wet wipes, um, regardless of their flush ability on
the package, they they are not great for the environment.
(44:42):
Like it might not clog up your toilet right there,
but they don't break down like toilet paper does. Um.
Did you see that Consumer Reports short video on it? No? Oh,
it's like forty seconds long. And they're like, this is
what toilet paper looks like when you flush. And they
had just kind of like a little whirlpool going in
a beaker of glass of glass, beaker of water, and
(45:04):
they dropped in some toilet paper and then immediately broke
apart into five pieces. Right. They did that to wipe
a flushable wipe, no less, and it did nothing, and
they're like, well, let's try something harder. They put into
a kitchen aid mixer with water and let it sit
for ten minutes. It didn't break up at all. So
they don't really break up or no one really knows
(45:25):
how long it takes to degree, but they certainly don't
break up like they actually grew in size and swelled
up and turned into Nicolas cage. That's right. So the
fact that this stuff uh isn't good for your your
sewer system, and certainly if you have a septic system,
it's probably reason enough not to always use wipes. Um.
(45:46):
Some people apparently, uh they say, if you know, if
you have an issue and you're maybe hemorrhoid or something,
then you might want to use a wipe for a
little while. Um, you know, follow your your heart, Like
there's chemicals a lot of that stuff. Yeah, there's this.
(46:07):
We found a self article about women using wipes or
um regular toilet paper because we're creeps and we read
articles like that, and um, the I think a a
guy incologist was saying, you know, I think it was
a dermatologist. He said that, Um, whenever a patient comes
in and says, I got irritation down there, I think
(46:28):
it's you know, probably from these wipes I'm using most
of the time. It is because they have like aloe
in them that someone might be allergic to. They might
have like antibacterial stuff that somebody could be allergic to.
And he just prescribed using basic, cheap toilet paper instead. Yeah,
and um, with with with kids and babies, you know,
when you're doing the work, uh, doing all that work,
(46:51):
you obviously are gonna use wipes. Um, but I will
buzz market this brand that we use water wipes and
it's just water. What it's just it's just water that's
the only ingredient. Oh. And I was like, it's not like,
you know, we're anti fragrance in my house anyway, but
(47:11):
it doesn't have fragrances or chemicals or anything like that.
And then it's just I'll buzz market them all day
because that's a good product, water wipes. Oh. One other
thing we'd be remiss and saying, um that if you
are a Muslim, you use something called a lota and
I would strongly encourage everybody go read a great Vice
(47:32):
article called a Muslims Guide to Anal Hygiene that explains lotas,
which is basically like carrying your own pot of water
to clean yourself off with. We're having one next to
your your toilet. Oh one more thing too. You sent
this to me. It is not your imagination. Toilet paper
is getting smaller. Uh. It's decreased by about a half
(47:54):
an inch narrower square. Yeah, four and a half inches
and now to half an inch narrower and shorter. They
were saying the same thing. Uh. And not only that,
but they're making See this is how they get you.
They make it a little bit smaller, they increase the
(48:14):
size of the tube, and so you're actually getting less paper,
but they're still charging the same or more per year.
And it's actually yeah, remember we said it's going up
by about two percent a year. So but you're getting
less paper. And so here's how they get you. They
are increasing the size of the cardboard tube. They're making
it narrower, so you're actually getting less toilet paper now
(48:39):
actual paper for either the same price or more money.
Because I think you said prices are going up about
two each year. So these companies that make toilet paper
selling usually paper towels as well, and napkins paper napkins, uh,
And apparently those are on the decline, so they're they're
kind of ripping you off by juicing you with the
(49:01):
toilet paper rolls now. Even though they call it like
a double roll, it's pretty much what used to be
a single roll. So that that's my toilet paper soapbox.
You want to start a bloody revolution in the streets,
let that word get out right. Yeah, I got nothing else.
I got nothing else either, Man, toilet paper has been done.
(49:23):
If you want to know more about toilet paper, you
can type those words eventually into the search part how
stuff works dot com. You can also check it out
a mental flass. Just go onto the internet, go watch
some charm and commercials. Go look at pictures of um
of colored toilet paper from the seventies. You'll love it.
And since I said the seventies, it's time for listener mail.
(49:44):
What we call this proper pronouns? Hey guys, in your
last episode on standardized Patients, you read a listener mail.
At the end, you weren't sure what pronouns to use
for someone. Uh, they them is always a good way
to go when you don't know. Maybe it's because I'm
twenty two, or maybe it's because I grew up in
monest Story, but I've always known they them to be
plural or singular. Uh. I know that's not familiar for some.
(50:08):
Josh also suggested the word cis gender or a neutral gender,
and I just wanted to give a friendly correction. The
word cis gender refers to someone who is not transgender
and identifies with the gender they were assigned at birth.
Cis being derived from the Latin prefix cis meaning on
the side of, as opposed to trans meaning across. From
(50:28):
the neutral term uh to use now is a gender
the prefix a being without though that's just one of
many terms being used these days. Thanks for everything you
bring to my days. I love how much I learned
from you, guys. I hope I can return the favor
here your friendly neighborhood queer person, Chase, Hey, Chase, thank
you for that. That was awesome. Yeah, we certainly try
(50:50):
to always use the right terminology. It's we dropped the
ball sometimes. It's hard to keep up sometimes, but we
always will take those corrections and try and do it
right the future. Yes, we will never ever refer to
L G B T q I A as alphabet soup.
Does people say that? Yeah, man, it's the worst. It's
(51:14):
just like just a dismissive. Yeah, I hate that. Man
Joves crazy. If you hear somebody saying that, set him straight, John,
Josh and Chuck, Josh and Chuck, I'll get on board.
Um and Jerry got that right, buddy. Jerry was over
here waving like, hey, hey, hey, don't forgive me choose
stomping madly. Uh Well, if you want to get in
(51:37):
touch with this, like Chase did, you can tweet to
us at Josh, I'm Clark or s Y s K podcast.
You can join us on Facebook, dot com, slash Charles W.
Chuck Bryant, or slash stuff you Should Know. You can
send us an email the Stuff podcast at how stuff
Works dot com and has always joined us at our
home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com.
(52:00):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how Stuff Works dot com. M
Hey, everybody, we're going on tour in two thousand and seventeen,
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com and buy your tickets now because they're going fast.
Welcome to Stuff you should know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, you'm welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
(00:46):
and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry and
we're about to get our hands dirty the How Toilet
Paper Works episode dumb Dude. There were so many puns
in this article. I was like driving in pain. I
will say that this was a a draft of a
future House to Works article. Yeah, I gathered so it
(01:09):
hasn't been through the editing and a process, and I'm
hoping and praying the editor will have some good, the
good taste. To remove some of these euphemisms about poop. Yeah,
because it's not necessary. No, you don't have to get
hilarious about poop. It's hilarious on its own, sure, you know. Yeah,
(01:31):
I like this one. By the way. Yeah, toilet paper
has a pretty interesting history actually, And there's the one
thing I didn't quite realize. It's pretty American actually toilet
paper is if you go elsewhere in the world, people
have different feelings about toilet paper than Americans do. You
(01:54):
come back and you realize, like, wow, America really really
loves its toilet paper. And you start to look at
statistics and it really kind of comes home, like, for example, yeah,
here's some editing that needs to happen. This guy's got
some numbers wrong. But what I found, Yeah, what I
found was that Americans spend something like six billion dollars
(02:20):
on toilet paper every year. Yeah, it is about rolls
per person, is that right? Yep? Per year? Um, and
we do we do something like we go through something
like thirty six and a half billion rolls of toilet
paper each year in America. Thirty six and a half
billion rolls of toilet paper every year. That is a
(02:43):
lot of toilet paper, um, and we're we were not
showing many signs of stopping. As a matter of fact,
toilet paper is getting more expensive by the year. It's
it's rising by about two in cost every year, and
we we're saying give it to us. There's lots of
theories that if toilet paper somehow became a luxury item, Um,
(03:06):
Americans would just say, well, I have to buy this
luxury item. I cannot live without toilet paper. Yeah, but
it's because we love our toilet paper, and you don't
think about it until you experience something other than toilet paper,
which is usually a stream of water up your pot. Yes,
and we've talked about this before, but for those of
(03:27):
you who haven't heard our various statements on this, I
want to officially go on record again saying that toilet
paper is gross and disgusting and the idea of wiping
poop from your butt with dry paper is counterintuitive. It
makes no sense. And if you don't involve water in
some way to the process, then you're doing it wrong. Huh,
(03:48):
You're you're a communist. I'm a badatist. Yeah, so do
you have one at home? Well, now I need to
rehook it up. I bought one of the toilet ones
because after I said that a couple of years ago,
everyone was like, dude, here you go, sent me the
link to the product. I bought one immediately and hooked
it up. But um, we did some bathroom renovations and
(04:11):
it is uh now somewhere in a bag in my
house and I just need to find it and get
it going again. So you have a bidday floating around
your house in a bag somewhere. Yeah, what what kind
is Is it? Like one that's like a toilet lid
slash biday Uh, it's it. It fits under the lid
and um squirts a jet of water to your butt.
(04:36):
I've got one of those Japanese UM toilet seats that
has a bidet and a dryer and everything, and really
they're fantastic, buddy man. And they're not. I mean it's
it's it's more expensive than a regular toilet seat, but
there it's not so outrageously expensive that you know. Yeah,
well you probably say some on toilet paper. I do
(04:57):
a little bit. I mean toilet paper. You still need
to at yourself dry you definitely do, although if you
have a dryer, do you. Yeah, but you'd have to
sit there for fifteen minutes to get So what's the problem.
I remember there was a George Carlin album where he
was talking about some game show contestant, and one of
the one of the game show contestants hobbies was, um,
(05:20):
sitting on the toilet till my legs go numb. That's
so funny. The little things that stand out from your childhood. Yeah,
like that's locked in there, but you probably don't remember
something really important about your family, like multiplication. Oh yeah,
we're schooling alright. So history of toilet paper, uh, man,
(05:41):
like so many things. If you go back to ancient China,
they were apparently future people because it seems like so
many things, Um, the ancient Chinese people thought of and
then it just sort of went away for a thousand years.
Well they they invented paper, right, so if you're making
(06:01):
paper and you're pooping, eventually you're gonna put the two together, like, oh,
I'll just use this because at the time, or prior
to this, all around the world basically humans used whatever
was handy, like leaves. Moss was very popular for men.
Uh leaves not bad, Yeah, moss, I would say a
little messy but softish beat moss is the bomb, especially
(06:25):
if it's fresh. It says on here coconuts, I don't
even know where to start with that. Yeah, I guess
if you went with the grain it would be okay.
But you I'm sure it's not like a whole coconut.
You're using like a part of a shell or something
like a shard. Yeah, don't say shard in that area.
That's but I think a coconut shell, the outer shell
(06:47):
would be at least like it would probably do the job,
you know, right, it's kind of rough, right, it says shells.
Yeah that if you live near the coast, you could
use shells. And there's definitely only some kind of mollusks
that would be better than others. I saw somebody point
out that there's such a thing as razor clams. Yeah,
(07:08):
I know what a razor clam has. Not want to
use that? Uh Snow, you're definitely on the right track
with that. Corn cobs huge, huge in America. I think
that makes a lot of sense. Sure, it's got like
the kind of rough bits, but it's can turn it
about perfectly shaped, continually turn it and you get you know,
(07:30):
new coverage. Or whatever. Yeah, the only thing like the
corn cob. Using a corn cob is that you have
to like, um, play banjo music in your head while
you're using it. It's the only way to do it.
Sheep's wool not bad. No, And uh, if you were
a rich type frenchie from the Renaissance on, you would
(07:51):
probably use lace. Lace. I saw that, and that, Uh,
that doesn't make any sense because lace is full of holes.
That seems so French royalty, like I'll only wipe my
bottom with handmade lace, right. And I think also if
you were royalty, you weren't actually the one doing your
your own bottom, like for example, um, King Henry the Eighth,
(08:13):
who I know wasn't French, he had a position called
the groom of the stool. That wasn't just him. No,
So I think if you were super rich, you had
people wipe for you, which is now the only time
you do that is if you've broken both of your arms.
Where here here's the deal. I looked up groom of
the stool because that immediately piqued my interests. First of all,
(08:34):
they're not talking about a stools in poop. They're talking
about like a stool sample. No, it means like this
portable commode that looked like a stool that they would
carry around. I wonder if that's where the term for
poop stool came from. That I don't know, let's just
say yes, okay. I also found that and this was
(08:57):
a position that all of royalty held, like it was
he He was not the only one. They're all all
the kings had them in queens and dukes and duchesses.
But they were their very closest helpers obviously, But apparently
they didn't actually help them wipe. Um. They would help
them undress, for sure, they would be in charge of
the commode upkeep, and apparently they would um just kind
(09:23):
of track their meal schedule and dietary goings on, like
what goes in and what comes out. But I didn't
see anywhere where they actually like wiped their butts for them.
I see you've pastor beans. It is Tuesday. Uh. Most
of them were nights and King George the third Matt.
(09:47):
King George actually had a groom of the stool. John
Stewart with you, a RT who eventually became Prime Minister
of England. Wow, how about that man? Thank you for
bringing us up to date because I was grossly misled
by this how stuff works article. Well, yeah, it sounds like,
wipe your butt for you. I failed to do the
(10:08):
proper outside research, so thank you for saving me and
shaming me at the same time. Well, that sounds like
I don't blame you. Probably read groom in the stool
and you're like, Yep, don't need to know anything more
about that. No, but I should have known better. You know,
I've been doing this for years. I'm supposed to be professional,
all right. Ancient Greeks used clay and stone, and the Romans,
they were on the right track. They used like a
(10:30):
sponge on a stick which was wet and that they
would then clean with saltwater. Yeah. Well, actually taking it
back a second, the Greek's actually used polished bits of stone. Yeah,
puss pussy. And then there was also something called um
I think a stroiky oh stroiky um, and that was
(10:52):
where if you would um, if the town was voting
on like kicking somebody out, they would have there be
these like bits of ceramic with the person's name engraved
on it and they just throw it into this pot
or whatever. Well, to really show your disdain for somebody,
you could use one of these astroy kys um as
(11:15):
a stone for wiping yourself. You're wiping yourself with the
person's name, which is about as bad as it gets.
But that's where the word ostracize comes from because it
sounds like an Australian like exclamation astro y. People get
the point. Um. People are using whatever they can to
(11:35):
wipe their butts like it's an issue. Things get messy
since the dawn of time took took. It was like,
you know, it doesn't feel good to walk around after
a poop if I haven't cleaned myself. So it was
an issue. And let's fast forward in time two uh seven,
(11:56):
this is where it's starting to get good. In New
York City. Uh, there was a man named Joseph Gaietti
and he invented something called Gayeties Medicated paper sheets yep.
And they were it was toilet paper, but it was
not yet on a roll. They were more like a
tissue that you would put pull out of a box
like Kleenex. Yeah. They were like, if you want a
(12:18):
brand name, Buzzet, that's fine. Proprietary him, uh about fifty
cents for five sheets, and he was so proud. He
had his name printed on them. But I didn't think
that through. Um but here's the deal. You had a
hard time selling it because at the time, and this
is no joke, Americans used literally used the Farmer's Almanac
(12:39):
and the Sears Catalog to wipe their butts. Yeah. As
a matter of fact, both of them I think came
with a hole punched in like the top corner to
make it easier just hang from a nail in your outhouse. Azing.
So that was definitely one reason why Gaiety's medicated paper
didn't take off. But another part of it was that
(12:59):
this is like a boo thing, right. You got the
Sears robut catalog and the mail. It served a couple
of purposes, one of which was unspoken, right, Yeah, like
the mail. The mail delivery guy would just walk up
and just like kind of hand it to the person
and say, here's your catalog. Thanks, wink wink nudge. Just
(13:19):
should last year a couple of months, alright. I was
wondering how long it would last. I mean, like, these
things were a couple of hundred pages, Um, so I
wonder how long it would last. But yes, most especially
in rural America, that was toilet paper. That in corn cops.
I wonder if there are are arguments to broke out
in families like ma, it's winter and we're already to
(13:41):
the tool section. Yeah, your own. I'm sure there's always
been miserly jerks who yelled about using too much toilet paper. Um.
So that was one reason that that gaiety had trouble
with his medicated paper. Right. Another part was that the
abou right, no one wanted to talk about that, um,
(14:03):
and he actually sold his thing as like medicine. It
was meant to be u for the prevention or treatment
of hemorrhoids, right, which obviously that would help, and it was.
It was very much what we would consider the first
toilet paper, but um, it didn't take off. It wasn't
until about thirty or forty years later that Clarence and
(14:24):
e Irvin Scott Scott brothers whose name still appears on
toilet paper rolls, got together and actually created the first
toilet paper on a roll. Yeah. That changed everything, it
really did. But apparently the shame, the stigma of of
creating toilet paper was so much that they released their
(14:45):
product in It wasn't until nineteen o two that they
finally acknowledged that it was there their product. Yeah, they
were just a shame. Yeah. Uh, they didn't have to
put their name on it, I mean no. And apparently
they use some of the companies that their company owned
to under Yeah. They really were like trying to to
(15:06):
put some distance in between them and the toilet paper
they created. Yeah, I get it. They did manage to
sell a lot of it though, because they were smart
enough to market it to like hotels and drug stores
and stuff, and so they sold a lot of it,
not like direct to customer, right, and they said, you
know your hotel needs this. Trust me, no one wants
(15:27):
to talk about it, but just put these in your
bathrooms and everyone will say great. And and again, like
it was. It worked kind of well. But then, um,
toilet paper as a as we understand it today, really
didn't become like a staple what what you would call
an icon of American culture, frankly, until like three things
(15:48):
happened from about the beginning of the twentieth century until
about the nineteen thirties, right. And one of the first
things was that America started getting indoor plumbing flushing toilets.
That deal. I think it was because you can't use
corn cobs in that any longer. So this is largely
in the city's um where where you would find indoor plumbing.
(16:11):
Still in rural America, up to the thirties, people were
still using corn cobs in the Sears and Robot catalog.
That's when the second thing that that took place that
changed everything happened. The Sears catalog went to a clay
based glossy paper and no longer was it soft and
absorbent any longer. It was slick and you you can't
(16:32):
use that to wipe your bottom after pooping. That was
the second thing that happened. And lastly, the third thing
that happened was um a company called the was it
the Hubert Hubert Paper Company Hoberg Paper Company released a
brand of toilet paper called Sharman, and they very very
(16:55):
wisely branded it in such a way that this focused
on it's femininity, it's softness, it's gentleness, and you could
talk about how soft and gentle and wonderful this product
was without talking about what it was actually used for,
which meant that now you could market it to the public.
And as a result, Charman took off. Yeah, I mean
(17:16):
that that's sort of became the name in toilet paper
for many years, uh, in no small part thanks to
a man named Dick Wilson, who, from nineteen six to
eighty five and more than five hundred TV commercials played
the beloved Mr. Whipple George Whipple grocery store manager, who
very famously would urge usually women in the commercials not
(17:39):
to squeeze the charmon because apparently, from sixty four to
eighty five, women and grocery stores were compelled to squeeze
toilet paper yeah constantly, always feels so nice and soft,
which apparently did something wrong to the toilet paper. Well, yeah,
you didn't want your toilet paper, that's who You bought
(18:00):
a toilet paper for yourself so you could squeeze in
the comfort of your own home. So at exact, John
schure Focus actually came up with that tagline um or phrase,
and the actor's original name was Ricardo the Googliemo. The
Googlielmo from from England. That did not anticipate that. I
(18:21):
thought it was gonna say Rome, Italy. Another little known
fact about Dick Wilson is that he is the father
of Stephanie Balki's love interest in Perfect Strangers in real life. Yeah,
that's his daughter. And another factoid is, uh, he was
in Bewitch, the TV show. Yeah, he played the drunk
(18:42):
that you'd see at the bar who just couldn't believe
the witchery he had just seen, Mr Whipple. Uh so
did you say that he was in more than five
hundred of those Sharman ads, Um, there was a point
where he was. There was a pole that was taken
in and found on that in America, he was the
third most recognized person by Americans after Richard Nixon and
(19:05):
Billy Graham. That's so America. That is a home run
for an ad AD agency. That's just so America. The president,
a preacher, and a toilet paper guy. Mr Whipple, I
love it. Do you want to take a break, Yeah,
we'll take a break in. Um kind of bring us
into the modern age of butt wiping. All right. So
(19:47):
we're at a point now where Sharman has uh, well
before that, uh, we were at a point where toilet
paper was now being championed by plumbers by doctors as
being a good thing. Sharman comes along said, man, this
stuff is soft and don't squeeze it though, But boy,
I know you want to Johnny Carson's joking about it
(20:09):
on the Tonight Show. Yeah, that was that was kind
of a significant thing. Yeah, he said that there was
And this was uh in nineteen seventy three when there
were like gas shortages and energy shortages, and Johnny Carson
made a joke about their being a toilet paper shortage,
and people thought he was serious and apparently went out
and like bought out grocery stores the next day. Yeah,
(20:30):
and it was a self sustaining um. Yeah, when people
when people ran out and bought it, it it created the shortage.
And then the successive waves of people came and saw
for themselves that there was no toilet paper, so they
panicked and they bought whatever they could, and apparently for
weeks in some places there there was you couldn't find
you couldn't buy toilet paper because it had been hoarded
(20:51):
because of Johnny Carson's joke. Man, and he took it back.
But you know, back in those days, it takes little
while for people to get that information. Sure you been
on the Tonight Show, that's right. So, um, this one
article you sent was great, the history one, which one
you're said kind of the longer one. Oh the I
(21:12):
think it was a Mental Floss article. What absolutely was?
You're right, so I always love to use mental floss articles.
Oh and by the way, we would be remiss if
we didn't mention that Will and Mangus, who started Mental
Floss are colleagues. Now, yeah they are. They have a
podcast called Part Time Genius that's put out by our
venerable umbrella brand company. That's right. And I made a
(21:35):
guest appearance, and I think you're probably in the queue
as well. Uh. Yeah, I have not been approached, but
I just assume I thank you. I think so, let's hope.
So But anyway, congratulations to Will and Mango for Part
Time Genius and go check it out. You cannot find
it anywhere you find us stuff you should know. Yeah,
so anyway, Uh, they made a pretty good point here
(21:58):
at the end of it, which I never really consider dared.
But toilet paper is actually sort of a marker of
where you are as a country. Uh, Like developing nations.
When they start buying more toilet paper, that means they
are getting more sanitary as a nation, means they have
extra money to spend as a nation. Uh, that means
(22:20):
that they're basically just sort of ah, their demographics are
changing in a positive direction. Speaking from a neoliberal standpoint,
that is correct, right, Yeah, but it's interesting and ever
thought about it. Like Brazil they've doubled the amount of
toilet paper they've sold since two thousand four, Yeah, which
is pretty significant considering, um, American toilet paper has plateaued,
(22:44):
like we buy as much as we we possibly can.
Were saturated, but I mean we're still spending six billion
on it, you know. Yeah, and all over the world
there are I mean, you know, when we went to Guatemala,
we certainly saw the bucket, uh and the wall here
next to the toilets. There are still many places all
over the world where you clean yourself with whatever water
(23:08):
you have, and you and if you do have something
to wipe yourself with, you don't even flush it down
the toilet. You you know, you have a little water
hose in a bucket maybe and kind of take care
of business right or with There are some places, um
where the plumbing just can't even handle actual toilet paper.
You just throw that away as well. Yeah, you want
(23:30):
to talk about how toilet papers made? Yeah, I mean
we can talk about it for sure, but I strongly
encourage everyone to go uh to YouTube and watch a
little six minute Discovery Channel bit from I think it
was from How It's Made Canadian How It's Made? Oh,
is that what it was? The lady just stopped short
of saying, hey, I did kind of notice that. Yeah.
(23:53):
It's amazing though, And I know I can obsessively watch
manufacturing videos like all day and all night, but this
one was especially cool looking. Chuck, did you get the
same sense where like you were just watching those huge
rolls of toilet paper going over the rollers and just
think like that is so delicate, Like all you have
to do is lift your hand up and just completely
(24:13):
throw production off. It was just I didn't feel like
I wanted to do that, but I kept wondering, like,
how in the world are these machines just rolling this
toilet paper so fast without breaking? Yeah, it's it's pretty impressive.
So let's start at the beginning. The whole thing starts
with a tree. Go out in your backyard, you cut
(24:35):
down a tree, You take it to the toilet paper manufacturer,
and you sell it to them for a few dollars,
and then you leave. And since you've left, it's not
your tree any longer because you took money for it.
And what the toilet paper manufacturers are gonna do with
what's now their tree, They're gonna grind it up into
little chips. They're gonna soak it in some water. They're
(24:57):
gonna grind it up even more. And what you had
have are um called pulp. Well, you gotta cook it first.
You gotta cook it in a what's called a digester,
and that turns it into pulp. Yeah. And if you
look at this video, it's like it looks I mean,
it kind of looks like wet toilet paper. Yeah, that's
exactly what it looks like. And it but when it's dried,
(25:18):
it crumbles really easily too, right, So um, that means
you've got a few extra steps. The next step is
you gotta bleach it because you're removing the color. If
you've ever seen like, um, that kind of grayish tan
like um, like paper towels or something that you see
in like an office building or jail or something like that,
(25:39):
like that is what pulp looks like if you don't
bleach it. Yeah, which I think the only reason they
do that is because they found that people don't like
their toilet paper to be anything other than white unless
it's Yeah, man, I've got to say. I found this
um blog post from a site called History's Dumpster, and
(26:00):
they have pictures of Northern brand toilet paper and light green,
light blue and pink, and it was just like remember
swallow my tongue from nostalgia. It was very cute. Yeah. Well,
and I guess we should go ahead and say the
reason they don't do that anymore is because, um, those
inc dies they found good cause cancer in some cases. Uh,
(26:23):
they are expensive, more expensive to use dies. Uh. And yeah,
it was basically a health thing. People like you don't
need these plus and also the dies also kept m
the toilet paper from breaking down as quickly too. Yeah.
And they probably also looked and said, you know what,
my poop doesn't look any better on baby blue than
it does on white. No. But the the whole reason
(26:47):
that they had those is because everybody loved to um
color coordinate every room of their house in the seventies,
including the bathroom. Everything in the bathroom is bank so
people would people would buy mauve toilet paper to go
with their mauve bathroom or whatever. It is great, it was.
That's so super seventies too, And that's just yet another
(27:08):
reason that the seventies were hands down the greatest decade
in the history of Humanity's pretty great. So one other thing, Chuck,
there's a company called Renova and they actually sell colored
toilet paper again. Oh really Yeah, it's like seven seven
euros and fifteen cents, which isn't that much less than
(27:29):
it would be in dollars these days for six rolls. Okay,
so we're in the factory. Where do you leave this? Uh?
So we've made the pulp and we've bleached it. Now
it's white. Then you take the pulp and you mix
it with water and you've created a paper stock. That's right,
(27:49):
and then you press it onto a screen. This one
was this blew me away. Yeah, they pressed it onto
a screen. I guess you're you're draining a lot of
the water. Uh's one reason? And well I guess that's
the main reason, because what you're left with is that
dry white product. Yeah. That that lady, the Canadian lady
on how it's made, said that they hit them with
(28:10):
a dryer when they're on that screen and it instantly
drives it out. That's just amazing because you think of
this stuff is so delicate that but they if you
watch the process that they're they're pretty rough with it. Yeah.
So then well, concurrently, what's going on to we should
say is they're also making the the cardboard rolls, which
(28:32):
is kind of the tubes, you know, which is kind
of neat to watch that happen on its own. They
just make this one long, continuous tube that they cut
into like sixty in It probably depends on you know
which company, but the one they feature, I think we're
sixty inch tubes, which would then roll toilet paper around,
(28:53):
so you would have basically a sixty inch roll giant
roll of TP, right, which looks really neat, and then
they glue it. That is definitely glue that they used
to keep it, uh you know, not tucked, but affixed
a fixed thank you, so it doesn't unravel. Yeah, like
(29:14):
when you when you rip that toilet paper off at
the very beginning, that that's a glue that's holding it together, right,
And then they have these circular saws that come through
and just cut that that big long roll into several
small rolls. That was the coolest part, it was. And
then um, they can be individually wrapped or put in
packs of like four or six or a million UM
and then you sell them. It's it is a very
(29:36):
cool short video. I could watch that stuff forever. So
that's if you're making it UM from scratch. There's also
recycled toilet paper, which isn't quite as popular here in
the United States because it's a little coarser, the fibers
are a little longer with with toilet paper. The shorter
the fiber, the softer the toilet paper is going to
(29:58):
be UM. And then they also add some proprietary chemical
combinations UM that include like extruders that kind of pull
the fibers out of like a horizontal position and just
kind of tough them a little bit. Uh. And then
they'll put in like emboss and stuff like that too,
which kind of gives a quilted feel. So all of
(30:19):
that is to make it softer and to make it
um more grabby grabs the poop right out of your bottom. Yeah,
And those fibers is sort of a balance. They're a
delicate balance. They're walking because they want it to be soft,
but they also want it to be strong enough because
if it's too flimsy, like the junk. You get it. Uh,
you know public restrooms and your office probably you know
(30:41):
that everyone probably has a nightmare story about their fingers
busting through that stuff, which is worst case scenario, uh
when it's clean up time. So they're trying to basically
walk that balance of soft and strong, right, And one
way they've done that is to add more um layers applies.
(31:03):
So apparently it's up to six plies. I didn't know that.
I didn't either. I can't imagine you could. You couldn't
even fold that. Yeah, what does that feel like? I
wonder I'm probably a cloud. You're just wiping your bottom
with a cloud. And that In ninety two that started
as St Andrew. St Andrew's paper Mill in England invented
(31:23):
the two ply. Uh and I didn't know. This is
another nice little tidbit um Until the nineteen thirties they
would market toilet paper as splinter free like that. They
would they were forced to, right because apparently that was
a thing. So, um, that's kind of that's where I
(31:43):
was going with recycled toilet paper. It's kind of the
new splinter splintery toilet paper, which I mean compared to
the toilet papers of your recycled toilet papers just completely luxurious.
But compared to actually like six ply super soft stuff
that you can get, it is a little rough. Um.
(32:03):
And again the reason why is the fibers are a
little longer. And it follows the same process, but there's
a step at the beginning where you take all these
different papers and you put them in and mash them
together in some water and you inject some air and
it creates foam and the ink and the paper sticks
to the foam and the foam floats, so then they
(32:24):
just skim the foam off the top and you just
remove the ink and then you start the rest of
the process making a pulp. Again, what a world. It
is pretty amazing. All right, let's take another break and
we're gonna come back and wrap it up with some
more amazing facts about t P. Another thing we forgot
(33:02):
to mention before we broke was the you said that
the embosed ones right like with the whatever, the scallop
shell or whatever you find um, they say that. Another
reason they do that is just so they know that
that's their toilet paper, just to differentiate themselves from other brands.
Oh yeah, I never really thought about that. Yeah, but
(33:22):
Scott's like, Noah, that's ours. You can see the scalop
shell right there. Yeah. Although I don't know what there's is,
there was definitely scalloping in that. Um how it's made video? Yeah?
Uh all right, So can we talk about the over
or under thing? Yes? So everybody's seen that Simpsons where
(33:46):
margin Homer go to the spa for a day and
Child Protective Services ends up coming by and they write
a report and they call the Simpsons house a squalid
hell hole point out that the toilet paper is hung
in an improper overhand fashion. Um. So apparently, I'm not
sure who wrote that episode weighed in on that, but
(34:09):
they're in the minority because apparently only do the underhang.
I'm a definite overhanged person. What about you? I'm an
overhanger for sure. Um apparently. And I remember seeing this
online a few years ago. It kind of went around
that was a guy named Seth Wheeler of Albany Perforated
(34:31):
Wrapping Paper Company submitted a patent for the first perforated
toilet paper on a roll and that showed the the
over position and everyone was like, but it said it's subtle.
This was the first one that's how it was supposed
to be, which really proved nothing. No, I mean, it's
still preference. But there are definite pros and cons of
(34:52):
the whole thing, right, Yeah, But here's the thing for me,
it's a lot of the pro of the pros they
list as UM, like your little kid or your dog
won't be tempted to go yanket if it's UM in
the under position, right, presumably because it's hidden. No, because
it's so if you're a little kid or a doggie
(35:14):
and you come up, if you if it's in an
overhand fashion, if it's overhanging, you can just come up
and start slapping downward on the toilet paper roll and
it will just come right offhang. You know, it just stays.
It just flips around and stays together. Yes, it does.
You have to pull downward on the toilet paper if
(35:36):
it's going from an underhang to get it off the roll.
If you slap downward on the front top of the
toilet paper roll, that that it's never gonna come loose.
To see, trifical force holds it in place. I think
I disagree on this notion. I think that's presuming that
you're using the old school built into the wall toilet
(35:56):
paper dispenser, No, because I have the one where it
sits on a free standing stand, and if I put
my hand on the back of that thing and just
give it a spin, it will come unspoiled. I see,
I see what you mean. Yeah, if you approached it
that way, then then all of a sudden, now you've
changed your perspective down. I know, it's all crazy. Yeah,
(36:21):
I just I haven't seen that many of the Uh
they're kind of out of fashion now. The ones that
are built into the wall, are they? Yeah, you don't
see those as much anymore. No, I have I have
mind coming off of the wall. It's not built into it,
but it's it's you can only yeah, like you can't
get to it from behind. Yeah, the classic ceramic holder
(36:41):
built onto the wall, right, I don't have that. Although
my bathroom is mauv is it really? No? I wish
it's salmon that. I would love to have a color,
a color coordinated bathroom. I know you would. That would
be sweet. Um. Yeah, we just have those stands where
the toilet papers all stacked up a up a post, yeah,
(37:04):
and then then in the top it's got a little
l shaped thing and the dude hangs on there. Yeah,
we just have one that like drills into the wall. Yeah,
so it's not okay, but it's it's the same thing.
I can't get to the backside of it. Yeah, see
I can get to the back of mine, so okay.
But if you are using a kind that's a fixed
to the wall, then that if you if you have
(37:25):
it underhanged, you can't. You can't just slap it pretty easily, right, Well,
that seems like a it's kind of a minor thing
to really champion as a reason. Yeah, especially if you
don't have kids or mischievous dogs. Right. Yeah, my dog
has never done that, and the worst dogs right Okay,
now you don't, well one of them. So um, you've
got you've got that. And that's that's for the underhang,
(37:48):
for the overhang. One of the other things about the
underhang is that you can't see the unsightly end of
the toilet paper roll. Right, that's not insightly, No, I agree,
And in fact, there's a whole book out there, um
you my sister got it for it's pretty awesome. It's
called the Toilet Paper or Gami, and it teaches you
all sorts of different ways to like fold the end
of a toilet paper roll to make it. Yeah, and
(38:12):
you you can just wake up one day and there
it's all nice and fold and you're like, where am
I there? Rits, Oh no, I'm at my house still,
and just surprised Emily not even tell her, I think
for sure. And then when she goes what it turns
around you're just holding the book in front of you
with a huge smile and your face saying the new
chapter in our life. Yeah, and she says pooping. Why
(38:34):
are you in the bathroom all right? Get out? Yes, yes, Emily, Yes,
speaking of get Out. I just saw it last night, finally,
what do you think? It was great? And I got
Emily to watch it and she was reticent. She loved it. Yeah,
and that's really not her jam either. I just don't
see how you could not ultimately leave that movie feeling
like pretty great, pretty happy that you saw it. But
(38:56):
there are some pretty scary aspects to it too. Yeah,
it was like a good straight up horror movie. Yeah,
I called I called all the twists though, Oh yeah, yeah,
I just and she was like, oh wow, you kind
of nailed that one. Did you call the bad guy
from Billy Madison being the bad guy Billy was he
and Billy Madison? Yeah, Eric, I don't know if I
(39:20):
saw Billy Madison. That's another one of those like what
was I doing not seeing Tommy Boy and Billy Madison? Yeah,
I think that was in my like, oh, I'm watching
art films. Only got you? I got you? Uh anyway, sorry,
(39:40):
get out? Highly recommended. Yeah, I agreed finally by me.
So back to the overhand underhand thing, which, if you
can believe it, we're still talking about. There is one
thing in overhang, aside from the delightful toilet paper or gami,
you can do. I think I think definitely says um
s overhang. In an underhang, if you have a toilet
(40:04):
roll holder up against the wall, you are inevitably going
to brush your knuckles up against the wall of your
bathroom to grab the toilet paper. That's something you don't
want to do because if you leave the lid of
your toilet open when you flush an aerosol eyes cyclone
of p in poop goes all over your bathroom, including
(40:26):
your bathroom walls. So if you cannot touch your bathroom
walls when you're getting toilet paper, so much the better.
Well that's not a problem for me. But you know
that people around here behind your back call you big knuckles.
I know, big hairy knuckles. It's been your nickname for years.
I know, I know shut it's here. When I hear
I just pretend like I haven't heard. All right, So
(40:46):
let's talk about the future. Let's wind this up with
like you said, Americans, apparently, um like you can pride
this gun from my cold dead hand type of thing.
Except it's toilet paper. Well it's it's toilet paper to
right in one hand. Uh. A lot of other countries,
(41:07):
especially you're in Europe and Japan have roundly sided with
the bidet. Yeah, which I researched the bidet a little
bit because I'm like, how do you even use a bidet?
I've seen him before. And a true biday is you'll
have a toilet and then next to that you'll have
a toilet, but it doesn't have a lid, and there's
like some um faucet knobs and everything in there, and
(41:29):
you'll turn it on and like water comes up out
of the bottom. So a bidet is actually French for
small horse. And the reason they call it that is,
because you're supposed to straddle the bidet like you would
be riding a horse basically, right, and then you turn
on the water and adjust it just how you want
to the temperature you want, and then you adjust yourself
so that it's getting those spots that it needs to get.
(41:50):
Turn it off, dry off, wash your hands, and you're
done right. And the bidet, actually that biday I just described,
the porcelain fixture that goes next to the toilet was
actually Americanized, Like the Americans came up with that version
of the bidet and still didn't catch on in America,
but Europe, where it had already been invented before. This
(42:11):
is like the improved version of it went nuts for
this Americanized version, and it just kind of got lost
to time that the Americans were the ones who gave
Europe the modern bidet, and we just never took it
on ourselves. Well, it's definitely if you have that style,
that's definitely an extra expense because you have to have
that fully plumbed and uh, you have to have the
(42:34):
space for it, you know, like it's not a cheap
thing if you want to get the full deal. No,
it's not, but like you have and like I have, Um,
you can just basically just us as an extra hose
that comes out of your already existing water supply and
goes into your toilet seat. And again the expense is
not utterly outrageous to get one of these. You get
(42:56):
a quality when it's probably gonna last a while, especially
if you get a Japanese one. Um. But one of
the reasons why around the world bi days are so prevalent,
Like in Japan, six restrooms have bi days. In Venezuela,
I didn't know this have bidets actually, Um. One of
the reasons why people are behind them so much is
(43:16):
because I know I heard that to you, Um, they
use way less water than toilet paper does. Oh like
the manufacturing of toilet paper. Yeah, so get this man,
this is a scientific American blog posts I found average
bidet use is going to take about an eighth of
a gallon of water to get yourself where you want
(43:38):
to be, right, which is clean. Yeah. To make a
roll of toilet paper one role, it takes thirty seven
gallons of water, one point three kilowatt hours of electric,
one and a half pounds of wood. So in America
we use thirty six point five billion rolls of toilet
(43:58):
paper every year. That re wires fifteen million trees, It
uses four hundred and seventy three billion, five hundred and
eighty seven million, five hundred thousand gallons of water, and
requires seventeen point three tarawatts of electricity. Now I don't
know how much taro wat is, but brother, that sounds
like a lot of electricity. Man, that's disheartening. I'm gonna
(44:21):
get my bidet going. It really is, and it makes
it really kind of makes you think like, oh, toilet
papers and an environmental catastrophe, so maybe a bidet is
is preferable. Well. And the other thing, if you use
the wet wipes, um, regardless of their flush ability on
the package, they they are not great for the environment.
(44:42):
Like it might not clog up your toilet right there,
but they don't break down like toilet paper does. Um.
Did you see that Consumer Reports short video on it? No? Oh,
it's like forty seconds long. And they're like, this is
what toilet paper looks like when you flush. And they
had just kind of like a little whirlpool going in
a beaker of glass of glass, beaker of water, and
(45:04):
they dropped in some toilet paper and then immediately broke
apart into five pieces. Right. They did that to wipe
a flushable wipe, no less, and it did nothing, and
they're like, well, let's try something harder. They put into
a kitchen aid mixer with water and let it sit
for ten minutes. It didn't break up at all. So
they don't really break up or no one really knows
(45:25):
how long it takes to degree, but they certainly don't
break up like they actually grew in size and swelled
up and turned into Nicolas cage. That's right. So the
fact that this stuff uh isn't good for your your
sewer system, and certainly if you have a septic system,
it's probably reason enough not to always use wipes. Um.
(45:46):
Some people apparently, uh they say, if you know, if
you have an issue and you're maybe hemorrhoid or something,
then you might want to use a wipe for a
little while. Um, you know, follow your your heart, Like
there's chemicals a lot of that stuff. Yeah, there's this.
(46:07):
We found a self article about women using wipes or
um regular toilet paper because we're creeps and we read
articles like that, and um, the I think a a
guy incologist was saying, you know, I think it was
a dermatologist. He said that, Um, whenever a patient comes
in and says, I got irritation down there, I think
(46:28):
it's you know, probably from these wipes I'm using most
of the time. It is because they have like aloe
in them that someone might be allergic to. They might
have like antibacterial stuff that somebody could be allergic to.
And he just prescribed using basic, cheap toilet paper instead. Yeah,
and um, with with with kids and babies, you know,
when you're doing the work, uh, doing all that work,
(46:51):
you obviously are gonna use wipes. Um, but I will
buzz market this brand that we use water wipes and
it's just water. What it's just it's just water that's
the only ingredient. Oh. And I was like, it's not like,
you know, we're anti fragrance in my house anyway, but
(47:11):
it doesn't have fragrances or chemicals or anything like that.
And then it's just I'll buzz market them all day
because that's a good product, water wipes. Oh. One other
thing we'd be remiss and saying, um that if you
are a Muslim, you use something called a lota and
I would strongly encourage everybody go read a great Vice
(47:32):
article called a Muslims Guide to Anal Hygiene that explains lotas,
which is basically like carrying your own pot of water
to clean yourself off with. We're having one next to
your your toilet. Oh one more thing too. You sent
this to me. It is not your imagination. Toilet paper
is getting smaller. Uh. It's decreased by about a half
(47:54):
an inch narrower square. Yeah, four and a half inches
and now to half an inch narrower and shorter. They
were saying the same thing. Uh. And not only that,
but they're making See this is how they get you.
They make it a little bit smaller, they increase the
(48:14):
size of the tube, and so you're actually getting less paper,
but they're still charging the same or more per year.
And it's actually yeah, remember we said it's going up
by about two percent a year. So but you're getting
less paper. And so here's how they get you. They
are increasing the size of the cardboard tube. They're making
it narrower, so you're actually getting less toilet paper now
(48:39):
actual paper for either the same price or more money.
Because I think you said prices are going up about
two each year. So these companies that make toilet paper
selling usually paper towels as well, and napkins paper napkins, uh,
And apparently those are on the decline, so they're they're
kind of ripping you off by juicing you with the
(49:01):
toilet paper rolls now. Even though they call it like
a double roll, it's pretty much what used to be
a single roll. So that that's my toilet paper soapbox.
You want to start a bloody revolution in the streets,
let that word get out right. Yeah, I got nothing else.
I got nothing else either, Man, toilet paper has been done.
(49:23):
If you want to know more about toilet paper, you
can type those words eventually into the search part how
stuff works dot com. You can also check it out
a mental flass. Just go onto the internet, go watch
some charm and commercials. Go look at pictures of um
of colored toilet paper from the seventies. You'll love it.
And since I said the seventies, it's time for listener mail.
(49:44):
What we call this proper pronouns? Hey guys, in your
last episode on standardized Patients, you read a listener mail.
At the end, you weren't sure what pronouns to use
for someone. Uh, they them is always a good way
to go when you don't know. Maybe it's because I'm
twenty two, or maybe it's because I grew up in
monest Story, but I've always known they them to be
plural or singular. Uh. I know that's not familiar for some.
(50:08):
Josh also suggested the word cis gender or a neutral gender,
and I just wanted to give a friendly correction. The
word cis gender refers to someone who is not transgender
and identifies with the gender they were assigned at birth.
Cis being derived from the Latin prefix cis meaning on
the side of, as opposed to trans meaning across. From
(50:28):
the neutral term uh to use now is a gender
the prefix a being without though that's just one of
many terms being used these days. Thanks for everything you
bring to my days. I love how much I learned
from you, guys. I hope I can return the favor
here your friendly neighborhood queer person, Chase, Hey, Chase, thank
you for that. That was awesome. Yeah, we certainly try
(50:50):
to always use the right terminology. It's we dropped the
ball sometimes. It's hard to keep up sometimes, but we
always will take those corrections and try and do it
right the future. Yes, we will never ever refer to
L G B T q I A as alphabet soup.
Does people say that? Yeah, man, it's the worst. It's
(51:14):
just like just a dismissive. Yeah, I hate that. Man
Joves crazy. If you hear somebody saying that, set him straight, John,
Josh and Chuck, Josh and Chuck, I'll get on board.
Um and Jerry got that right, buddy. Jerry was over
here waving like, hey, hey, hey, don't forgive me choose
stomping madly. Uh Well, if you want to get in
(51:37):
touch with this, like Chase did, you can tweet to
us at Josh, I'm Clark or s Y s K podcast.
You can join us on Facebook, dot com, slash Charles W.
Chuck Bryant, or slash stuff you Should Know. You can
send us an email the Stuff podcast at how stuff
Works dot com and has always joined us at our
home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com.
(52:00):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
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