What's the History of Toothpaste?

Toothpaste actually predates the toothbrush in dental hygiene's history. Learn the long history behind this everyday item in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works, Hey, brain stuff,
Lauren Vogelbaum. Here without teeth, life is tough. Sure we
have all sorts of fancy dentistry tricks these days, but
nothing tops the Choppers were born with. In fact, when
rocker Patti Smith gave the commencement address at the Pratt
Institute in New York, she gave those graduating seniors some

(00:24):
incredibly sound advice. She said, now that I'm here, my
greatest urge is to speak to you of dental care.
My generation had a rough go dentally. Our dentists were
the army dentists who came back from World War Two
and believed that the dental office was a battle ground.
You have a better chance at dental health. And it
may be true that our big dental procedures are considerably

(00:46):
better than they were in the middle of the last century.
But it's the maintenance that Smith was probably talking about.
We've got to scrub our teeth each and every day,
or else bacteria will calcify into tartar, which is where
the tooth troubles really begin. Keeping all your teeth in
your head and avoiding life threatening infection has always required
constant vigilance, which is where toothpaste comes in. Now, nobody

(01:10):
knows who invented the toothbrush. Most ancient civilizations seem to
have had some variation of a frayed choo stick that
they used to keep their teeth clean. But don't teeth
also need some sort of well cleaning agent. Is that
minty plaster like goo that we smear on our modern
chewing sticks just capitalist snake oil? Not of history has

(01:30):
anything to say about it. Toothpaste might actually predate the
tooth brush. While there's evidence that ancient Egyptians were using
toothbrushes as far back as three thousand, five hundred BC,
recipes for tooth powder have been found the date back
to five thousand BC. The earliest Egyptian toothpowder recipe contained
plenty of abrasives to scrape off all the sticky residue.

(01:52):
The ashes of burnt eggshells and oxen hoofs mixed with
pumice seemed to be popular. By the fourth century, Egyptians
had set up their tooth powder with abrasives like rock
salt and flavorings like mint and peppercorns. They even added
dried iris flour, perhaps because it was associated with purification.
Good thing are tooth enamel is harder than bone or

(02:13):
even iron or steel. If it wasn't, those Egyptians would
have brushed their teeth right down to nubs. But when
this recipe was revealed in two thousand three at a
dental conference in Vienna, Austrian dentist Tynes Newman told the
Telegraph that he tried it and it wasn't half bad.
He said, I found that it was not unpleasant. It
was painful on my gums and made them bleed as well,

(02:33):
but that's not a bad thing, and afterwards my mouth
felt fresh and clean. I believe that this recipe would
have been a big improvement on some of the soap
toothpastes used much later around the world. Different cultures continued
mixing crushed abrasives like oyster shell or bone and nice
tasting herbs like mint and jin sing together to clean
teeth and keep platosis that's bad breath at bay. But

(02:55):
as with literally everything else, the Middle Ages didn't really
do much for toothpaste technology. During this time, Europeans settled
on a mixture of honey, salt, and dry flour, which
they supplemented by giving their teeth a good scrubbing with
the bark of certain trees. It wasn't until the nineteenth
century that the toothpaste biz as we know it really
started heating up. Recipes for tooth powders and pastes that

(03:18):
included abrasives like charcoal, chalk, and burned bread crumbs, as
well as incense like dragon's blood, were popular in England
until eighteen fifty when Coalgate introduced its first crem dentifriese,
which came in a jar. Mass production of this product
started in the eighteen seventies and twenty years later they
introduced the collapsible tube and from then on toothpaste was

(03:39):
a thing. Before World War Two, most toothpastes on the
market were sold in a lead tube. They also contained soap,
which was unnecessary and in some cases even counterproductive, but
we humans seem to have a hang up about wanting
our cleansers to foam. Toothpastes today still tend to contain soap,
namely sodium laurel sulf fight because it's not clean unless

(04:02):
it's foamy, but soap also helped maintain an even creamy texture.
We can also get this smooth texture with humicants like
sorbitol glycerin and propylene glycol, which have the added bonus
of being a little bit sweet. Fluoride was first added
to toothpaste in nineteen fourteen, but it wasn't until the
nineteen sixties that it was proven to fight cavities, and

(04:22):
modern toothpaste no longer uses chalk as an abrasive. We
most often use hydrated silica, which is exactly the same
stuff you find in those little packets in your vitamin
bottles and shoe boxes. So that's the story of toothpaste.
I'm gonna go brush my teeth. Today's episode was written

(04:43):
by Jescelin Shields and produced by Tyler Clang. For more
on this and lots of other minty fresh topics, visit
our home planet, how stuff Works dot com.