Toothbrush is an instrument used for oral hygiene that cleans the teeth and the gums. A toothbrush is made up of bristles tightly clustered together and attached to a handle to help clean hard to reach areas of the teeth. Toothpaste is used together with toothbrush to make brushing more effective. They are available in different sizes, for toddlers, kids and adults. They also have different textured bristles like soft, medium and hard. Most dentists recommend the soft ones because hard bristles often damage the enamel of the teeth and irritate the gums. They are also made in different forms. Some take up the shape of cartoon characters to make brushing fun for kids.
But just how did the toothbrush come about? Many kinds of oral hygiene tools have been used throughout history and even prehistoric times. This had been verified through diggings done all over the world. These diggings uncovered a variety of tools that included chew sticks, bird feathers, animal bones, tree twigs and even porcupine quills and were used to clean the teeth. The first recorded toothbrush was made in Babylon around 3500 B.C. It was a twig with a frayed end and was called chew stick. As years passed, the chew stick evolved into a pencil like tool, one end was pointed and used to pick the teeth and the other end was chewed making it soft and turning it into a brush-like fiber.
The first real toothbrush was made in China at around the 1200's. The Chinese used horse tail hair for brush and attached them to ox bone that served as handle. The word toothbrush was only used in the year 1690 when Anthony Wood wrote about it. In 1780, William Addis was able to mass produce the toothbrush. He drilled small holes on a small animal bone, tied some bristles into small tufts and passed them through the holes and glued them, and he did this while in prison. When he got out, he sold them in large quantities and became very rich. In the 1840's, toothbrush was also being mass produced in England, France, Germany and Japan. There were two kinds of brushes during that time; the cheaper ones were made from pig hair and the more expensive ones from badger hair.
In 1857, N.H. Wadsworth patented the toothbrush in the United States, but mass production only took place in 1885. Up to this time, animal hair was being used for bristles. This was not ideal because they do not dry quickly, retains bacteria and the bristles fall out. The bristles were replaced with synthetic nylon in 1938 the Dupont company. Many innovations have then taken place, like the shape of the handle, the shape of the bristles and its texture.
The first electric toothbrush was invented in Switzerland in 1954. In 1987, Drs. David Engel and Roy Martin formed a new company to promote an oral hygiene device using a piezoelectric multimorph transducer. They launched it, after years of research, as the Sonic Care toothbrush in 1995. In 2000, Philips bought their company and by the end of 2001, Philips Sonic Care toothbrush became the number one selling rechargeable toothbrush in the US.
