The evolution of bathing systems

The evolution of bathing systems

Summary

It is said that a person takes more than 7,000 baths in his lifetime, and that men spend an average of 177 days bathing in their lifetimes, while women spend three times as much time in baths as men. "Bathing" is such a daily and important thing, do you really know enough about it?

The evolution of bathing systems
Primitive society: bathing under a waterfall became the prototype of today's shower.
In primitive society, human beings had to go out to hunt, go into the water to catch fish and shrimp, waterfalls and rivers naturally became the most convenient bathing places, which is also the most primitive way of bathing: bathing with heaven and earth. The earliest records of bathing are of the Egyptians.
Ancient Greece: The birth of the first public baths
Later, the wise and wise ancient Greeks finally ushered in a new era of human bathing. Because the Greeks love sports and exercise, there are always bathrooms between stadiums. But the Greeks bathed with cold water. They invented the first bathhouse, which introduced water into the public bathhouse through a water delivery system.
The Romans loved bathing
It was the Romans who inherited the mantle of bathing in Greece.

The Romans loved bathing very much, and they loved to take hot baths. Public baths were planned as urban planning in Rome, and at its peak there were more than 1,000 baths in Rome. For the Romans, the baths were a theater, a leisure center, a place of social interaction, and a place of recreation (if you are interested, you can search the frescoes of Pompeii).

The Roman baths are luxurious, with high ceilings for the sun to shine in, majestic marble columns, appliquéd tiles, and even high-end towels made of pure wool.
The taps in the city of Rome can't be turned off
It is a bronze faucet from the Roman era, built around 100 AD. It is a relic excavated from the ancient city of Pompeii. It is now in the Museum of History of Naples.

However, due to the abundance of water in Europe (the quality of tap water in Italy is still very high), the Romans built a large number of canals, which brought water from rivers, lakes and springs into the city of Rome, stored in hundreds of reservoirs and cisterns, and then delivered to thousands of households and public baths through water supply channels. So for a long time, they didn't have the word "water saving" in their concept at all, and this faucet that can be opened and closed was also born for overhauling pipelines.

So as a Roman, you can't turn off the tap when you take a bath.
Han Dynasty in China: Establishment of a statutory holiday "bath leave"
When did the Chinese start to pay attention to bathing? Its history can be traced back to the Shang and Zhou dynasties, and according to the records on the oracle bone inscriptions and inscriptions, people in the Shang and Zhou dynasties have begun to pay attention to "bathing".

In the Han Dynasty, which was the same era as Rome, bathing even became a kind of gentleman's etiquette, and it also had a statutory holiday - Xiu Mu, on which officials could go home to bathe and change clothes, tidy up their appearance, and wash their hands before going to work.

What was a Chinese bathroom like at that time? The new archaeological discovery in 2017 - the bathroom of the Qin King in the Qin and Han Dynasty oak Yang City can be referenced. There are three high-spec imperial bathrooms with terracotta tiles, wooden floors, floor drains, and even a fireplace to keep the room warm.
In the Tang Dynasty, our most familiar story is Yang Guifei's Huaqing Pool, a sentence "Spring cold baths Huaqing Pool, hot spring water heating and washing cream", can not help but make people's minds appear Yang Guifei's beautiful appearance when she bathes. Huaqing Pond is directly poured in with the hot spring water from Lishan Mountain, which is commonly known as hot springs.

Because the court nobles of the Tang Dynasty loved to bathe, and gradually the common people were also deeply affected, and the Tang people regarded bathing as a cleansing ceremony, forming a bathing trend in the prosperous era of the Tang Dynasty.
The birth of the family shower: one person bathing and the whole family busy
The modern and recognized shower was invented in 1767 by the Englishman William Fatham. But the original design was too simple, and it was a home product, although it had a place in the market, but it was not widespread.
Why not be extensive, if you were going to shower at home at that time, you would have to come up with this classic print: one person bathing and the whole family busy.
Modern collective shower system
Nearly 100 years later, in 1872, a French physician, François Merry Delabost, ran into a problem in Rouen, France: the work on the collective farm was to make horn buttons and salvage the water, and bathing became a must. But the objective conditions do not allow everyone to take a bathtub, which costs too much money and hot water.

So De La Poster referred to the British design above and proposed the large-scale use of shower heads, which save water, wash quickly, and install cheaply. So there is the following set of showers.
The design of the French is extremely complete, from the invention to the present, basically nothing has changed, the boiler is still the boiler, the shower head is still the shower head, the shower room is still a single room.
The advent of water heaters
Finally, in the next world, water heaters appeared.

The original prototype of the water heater came from the British painter Benjamin Waddy Maughan. This is a gas water heater.

By 1889: German Edmund Ruud drew inspiration from the wisdom of his predecessors and advanced his design by adding a safety function (flue extract).