On 22 December 1891, the United States Patent Office granted patent 465,588 to Seth Wheeler of Albany, New York. It covered a roll of connected sheets of paper with small cuts running across it at intervals, stopping short of the middle, so that one sheet could be pulled away without tearing the next.
That is the perforation. It is still there this morning, in your bathroom, working exactly as drawn.
US Patent 465,588 — S. Wheeler, "Toilet-Paper Roll," granted 22 December 1891. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Wheeler did not invent toilet paper, and this was not even his first patent on it — he had been patenting rolls, holders and perforated wrapping paper since 1871. What 465,588 did was settle the format. And the format never moved again.
Since 1891 we have had two world wars, powered flight, penicillin, the Moon landing, the computer, the internet, the phone in your pocket and artificial intelligence. The object beside the toilet has had its paper made softer, thicker, whiter and scented. The idea has not been touched.
We find that more interesting than any statistic about trees. A product used by billions of people several times a day simply stopped developing, and almost nobody has ever remarked on it.
Paper got there thirteen centuries earlier
The roll is recent. The paper is not.
The earliest known written reference comes from China in 589, when the scholar-official Yan Zhitui wrote that he did not dare use paper bearing quotations from the Five Classics, or the names of sages, for toilet purposes. He was drawing a line about which paper was acceptable — which tells us the practice already existed. An Arab traveller in China in 851 noted, with evident surprise, that the Chinese did not wash with water afterwards but wiped themselves with paper.
By the Ming dynasty it was an industry. Records from 1393 show the imperial court at Nanjing receiving an annual supply of 720,000 sheets, each roughly 60 by 90 cm, with a separate run of 15,000 smaller sheets — soft, pale yellow and perfumed — reserved for the family of the Hongwu Emperor.
Europe did not follow for another twelve hundred years.
What everyone else used
Before paper, people used whatever was nearby, and the choice said more about class and geography than about hygiene: wool and cloth for the wealthy, leaves, moss, hay, stones, shells, corncobs for everyone else.
Rome is the famous case. Public latrines held a sponge fixed to a stick — the tersorium or xylospongium — rinsed in a channel of running water, sometimes with salt or vinegar, and shared between users.
Replica of a Roman tersorium. Photo: D. Herdemerten (Hannibal21), CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
We should be honest about this one: the sources are thin, and several researchers now argue the sponge was a toilet brush rather than something applied to the body. It is repeated everywhere as settled fact. It is not.
What is not in doubt is the pattern. For most of human history, cleaning yourself was improvised from whatever was free — and in the nineteenth century, in North America and northern Europe, what was free was the mail. Sears Roebuck catalogues and the Farmer's Almanac arrived at the house for nothing and ended up in the outhouse. The Almanac was eventually printed with a hole in the corner so it could hang on a nail.
The product that could not say its name
In 1857, a New York entrepreneur named Joseph Gayetty began selling flat sheets of manila hemp paper, moistened with aloe, in packs of 500. He called it Medicated Paper, claimed it prevented haemorrhoids, and was proud enough of it to have his name watermarked on every single sheet.
Advertisement for Gayetty's Medicated Paper, the first commercially sold toilet paper in the United States. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
It did not sell well. Americans could see no reason to pay for something the postman delivered free. A medical society called him a quack. But the interesting part is what happened next, when the product finally did work commercially.
The Scott brothers of Philadelphia built the roll business in the 1880s and 1890s — and would not put the family name on it. They sold the tissue to dealers, who marketed it under some two thousand different brand names. Scott bought the rights to one of them, Waldorf, in 1902, and only in 1903 began printing its own name on the product. The company that would dominate the category spent a generation hiding from it.
Germany produced the clearest statement of the problem. Hans Klenk founded Hakle in 1928 with a slogan that is almost too perfect: ask for a roll of Hakle, and you won't have to say "toilet paper."
The brand's own history calls it the first attack on the taboo. Read it the other way and it is a confession. The product was designed to be purchased without being named.
That is the mechanism. A thing nobody will name is a thing nobody will compare, complain about, or ask to be improved.
After 1891, only the paper changed
Look at what the industry has actually announced since the perforation.
In 1935 the Northern Tissue Company advertised its paper as splinter-free. Sit with that for a second: it was a selling point, which means that until then there were splinters.
Two-ply arrived in Britain in the 1940s, at the St Andrew's mill in Walthamstow that gave Andrex its name. Tissue-quality paper replaced crêpe in the 1950s. Perfume was added in the 1960s. Three-ply in the 1970s, four-ply in the 1980s, quilting, lotion, embossing, puppies and bears on the packaging.
Every one of those is an improvement to the material. Not one of them is a change to the method. The method is: press dry fibre against skin and move it.
The two times we all paid attention
In December 1973, a congressman from Wisconsin issued a press release warning of a potential toilet paper shortage. Johnny Carson's writers dropped the word "potential," and on 19 December he told roughly twenty million viewers there was an acute shortage in the United States. There wasn't. Within days there was, because everyone bought at once. Scott introduced an allocation system. Carson went back on air to say he did not want to be remembered as the man who caused a false toilet paper scare.
In 2020 it happened again, worldwide, without a comedian to blame.
Empty shelves, March 2020. Public domain (CC0), via Wikimedia Commons.
Both panics are usually told as stories about crowd psychology, and they are. But notice what the crowd was actually reacting to. Not to a product that had failed. To the possibility of not having it.
In more than a century, the only moments this habit entered public conversation were the two moments when supply was threatened. The method itself has never been up for discussion.
What the habit costs
This is where most articles on the subject reach for a dramatic number. As with our piece on the bidet, we would rather give you the few figures that hold up.
Estimates put the average person in western Europe and North America at somewhere between 15 and 25 kg of toilet paper a year. The band is wide because national consumption is measured differently in different places, and we would rather show you the width than pick a number from inside it.
Tissue products account for roughly 10 per cent of global paper production, according to the Environmental Paper Network, and the category is growing. The European Environmental Bureau notes that converting wood into paper is a polluting process, and that the fragrances added to toilet paper introduce chemicals that serve no hygienic purpose whatsoever.
And the point that gets lost most often: making paper uses water too. The honest comparison is not water against no water. It is water used once, at the point of use, against water used upstream in pulping and bleaching — plus the fibre, the transport and the packaging.
Why it was never fixed
The obvious answer is that there was no alternative that fit. For three hundred years, every water-based option asked you to change the building: a second ceramic fixture, a water line beside the toilet, a power socket in a room that may not have one. You cannot adopt a habit that begins with a renovation, and you certainly cannot take it with you.
But the deeper answer is the one Hakle put in its advertising in 1928. Habits that cannot be spoken about cannot be compared. A German family and an Italian family can be friends for twenty years and never establish that they do this differently. Nobody asks for a better solution to a problem nobody will name.
Seth Wheeler's roll survived not because it was the best answer, but because for a hundred and thirty-five years nobody was willing to say the question out loud.
We would rather say it out loud. That is most of what Spray Up is.
A note on our numbers
Spray Up publishes figures with their sources, labels estimates as estimates, and does not claim measured results we do not have. Where the historical record is contested — the Roman sponge, the exact chain of events in 1973 — we say so rather than tidy it up.
Spray Up is a non-profit association working to reduce toilet paper consumption through water-based hygiene.
Sources
- US Patent 465,588 — Seth Wheeler, "Toilet-Paper Roll," granted 22 December 1891 (and Wheeler's earlier 1871 patent on perforated wrapping paper)
- Joseph Needham & Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin, Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 5 Part 1 — Yan Zhitui (589), the Arab traveller's account (851), and the 1393 imperial supply records
- Pennsylvania Center for the Book — the Scott brothers, the unbranded years, and the Waldorf trademark
- Hakle brand history — Hans Klenk's 1928 slogan
- Northern Tissue Company advertising, 1935 — the splinter-free claim
- CBS News and Snopes — the December 1973 shortage, Congressman Harold Froehlich and the Carson monologue of 19 December 1973
- Euronews, The average European uses 20kg toilet paper a year, February 2025 — consumption band of 15–25 kg
- Environmental Paper Network — tissue as a share of global paper production
- European Environmental Bureau — environmental profile of paper manufacturing
On 22 December 1891, the United States Patent Office granted patent 465,588 to Seth Wheeler of Albany, New York. It covered a roll of connected sheets of paper with small cuts running across it at intervals, stopping short of the middle, so that one sheet could be pulled away without tearing the next.
That is the perforation. It is still there this morning, in your bathroom, working exactly as drawn.
US Patent 465,588 — S. Wheeler, "Toilet-Paper Roll," granted 22 December 1891. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Wheeler did not invent toilet paper, and this was not even his first patent on it — he had been patenting rolls, holders and perforated wrapping paper since 1871. What 465,588 did was settle the format. And the format never moved again.
Since 1891 we have had two world wars, powered flight, penicillin, the Moon landing, the computer, the internet, the phone in your pocket and artificial intelligence. The object beside the toilet has had its paper made softer, thicker, whiter and scented. The idea has not been touched.
We find that more interesting than any statistic about trees. A product used by billions of people several times a day simply stopped developing, and almost nobody has ever remarked on it.
Paper got there thirteen centuries earlier
The roll is recent. The paper is not.
The earliest known written reference comes from China in 589, when the scholar-official Yan Zhitui wrote that he did not dare use paper bearing quotations from the Five Classics, or the names of sages, for toilet purposes. He was drawing a line about which paper was acceptable — which tells us the practice already existed. An Arab traveller in China in 851 noted, with evident surprise, that the Chinese did not wash with water afterwards but wiped themselves with paper.
By the Ming dynasty it was an industry. Records from 1393 show the imperial court at Nanjing receiving an annual supply of 720,000 sheets, each roughly 60 by 90 cm, with a separate run of 15,000 smaller sheets — soft, pale yellow and perfumed — reserved for the family of the Hongwu Emperor.
Europe did not follow for another twelve hundred years.
What everyone else used
Before paper, people used whatever was nearby, and the choice said more about class and geography than about hygiene: wool and cloth for the wealthy, leaves, moss, hay, stones, shells, corncobs for everyone else.
Rome is the famous case. Public latrines held a sponge fixed to a stick — the tersorium or xylospongium — rinsed in a channel of running water, sometimes with salt or vinegar, and shared between users.
Replica of a Roman tersorium. Photo: D. Herdemerten (Hannibal21), CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
We should be honest about this one: the sources are thin, and several researchers now argue the sponge was a toilet brush rather than something applied to the body. It is repeated everywhere as settled fact. It is not.
What is not in doubt is the pattern. For most of human history, cleaning yourself was improvised from whatever was free — and in the nineteenth century, in North America and northern Europe, what was free was the mail. Sears Roebuck catalogues and the Farmer's Almanac arrived at the house for nothing and ended up in the outhouse. The Almanac was eventually printed with a hole in the corner so it could hang on a nail.
The product that could not say its name
In 1857, a New York entrepreneur named Joseph Gayetty began selling flat sheets of manila hemp paper, moistened with aloe, in packs of 500. He called it Medicated Paper, claimed it prevented haemorrhoids, and was proud enough of it to have his name watermarked on every single sheet.
Advertisement for Gayetty's Medicated Paper, the first commercially sold toilet paper in the United States. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
It did not sell well. Americans could see no reason to pay for something the postman delivered free. A medical society called him a quack. But the interesting part is what happened next, when the product finally did work commercially.
The Scott brothers of Philadelphia built the roll business in the 1880s and 1890s — and would not put the family name on it. They sold the tissue to dealers, who marketed it under some two thousand different brand names. Scott bought the rights to one of them, Waldorf, in 1902, and only in 1903 began printing its own name on the product. The company that would dominate the category spent a generation hiding from it.
Germany produced the clearest statement of the problem. Hans Klenk founded Hakle in 1928 with a slogan that is almost too perfect: ask for a roll of Hakle, and you won't have to say "toilet paper."
The brand's own history calls it the first attack on the taboo. Read it the other way and it is a confession. The product was designed to be purchased without being named.
That is the mechanism. A thing nobody will name is a thing nobody will compare, complain about, or ask to be improved.
After 1891, only the paper changed
Look at what the industry has actually announced since the perforation.
In 1935 the Northern Tissue Company advertised its paper as splinter-free. Sit with that for a second: it was a selling point, which means that until then there were splinters.
Two-ply arrived in Britain in the 1940s, at the St Andrew's mill in Walthamstow that gave Andrex its name. Tissue-quality paper replaced crêpe in the 1950s. Perfume was added in the 1960s. Three-ply in the 1970s, four-ply in the 1980s, quilting, lotion, embossing, puppies and bears on the packaging.
Every one of those is an improvement to the material. Not one of them is a change to the method. The method is: press dry fibre against skin and move it.
The two times we all paid attention
In December 1973, a congressman from Wisconsin issued a press release warning of a potential toilet paper shortage. Johnny Carson's writers dropped the word "potential," and on 19 December he told roughly twenty million viewers there was an acute shortage in the United States. There wasn't. Within days there was, because everyone bought at once. Scott introduced an allocation system. Carson went back on air to say he did not want to be remembered as the man who caused a false toilet paper scare.
In 2020 it happened again, worldwide, without a comedian to blame.
Empty shelves, March 2020. Public domain (CC0), via Wikimedia Commons.
Both panics are usually told as stories about crowd psychology, and they are. But notice what the crowd was actually reacting to. Not to a product that had failed. To the possibility of not having it.
In more than a century, the only moments this habit entered public conversation were the two moments when supply was threatened. The method itself has never been up for discussion.
What the habit costs
This is where most articles on the subject reach for a dramatic number. As with our piece on the bidet, we would rather give you the few figures that hold up.
Estimates put the average person in western Europe and North America at somewhere between 15 and 25 kg of toilet paper a year. The band is wide because national consumption is measured differently in different places, and we would rather show you the width than pick a number from inside it.
Tissue products account for roughly 10 per cent of global paper production, according to the Environmental Paper Network, and the category is growing. The European Environmental Bureau notes that converting wood into paper is a polluting process, and that the fragrances added to toilet paper introduce chemicals that serve no hygienic purpose whatsoever.
And the point that gets lost most often: making paper uses water too. The honest comparison is not water against no water. It is water used once, at the point of use, against water used upstream in pulping and bleaching — plus the fibre, the transport and the packaging.
Why it was never fixed
The obvious answer is that there was no alternative that fit. For three hundred years, every water-based option asked you to change the building: a second ceramic fixture, a water line beside the toilet, a power socket in a room that may not have one. You cannot adopt a habit that begins with a renovation, and you certainly cannot take it with you.
But the deeper answer is the one Hakle put in its advertising in 1928. Habits that cannot be spoken about cannot be compared. A German family and an Italian family can be friends for twenty years and never establish that they do this differently. Nobody asks for a better solution to a problem nobody will name.
Seth Wheeler's roll survived not because it was the best answer, but because for a hundred and thirty-five years nobody was willing to say the question out loud.
We would rather say it out loud. That is most of what Spray Up is.
A note on our numbers
Spray Up publishes figures with their sources, labels estimates as estimates, and does not claim measured results we do not have. Where the historical record is contested — the Roman sponge, the exact chain of events in 1973 — we say so rather than tidy it up.
Spray Up is a non-profit association working to reduce toilet paper consumption through water-based hygiene.
Sources
- US Patent 465,588 — Seth Wheeler, "Toilet-Paper Roll," granted 22 December 1891 (and Wheeler's earlier 1871 patent on perforated wrapping paper)
- Joseph Needham & Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin, Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 5 Part 1 — Yan Zhitui (589), the Arab traveller's account (851), and the 1393 imperial supply records
- Pennsylvania Center for the Book — the Scott brothers, the unbranded years, and the Waldorf trademark
- Hakle brand history — Hans Klenk's 1928 slogan
- Northern Tissue Company advertising, 1935 — the splinter-free claim
- CBS News and Snopes — the December 1973 shortage, Congressman Harold Froehlich and the Carson monologue of 19 December 1973
- Euronews, The average European uses 20kg toilet paper a year, February 2025 — consumption band of 15–25 kg
- Environmental Paper Network — tissue as a share of global paper production
- European Environmental Bureau — environmental profile of paper manufacturing
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