"Paper on which there are ...the names of sages, I dare” not use for toilet purposes."
Yan Zhitui, The Family Instructions of Master Yan (589)
The earliest recorded use of toilet paper comes from China in the sixth century when government official and scholar Yan Zhitui warned against using paper printed with philosophical utterances for the wiping of bottoms. By the end of the fourteenth century, when the rest of the world was using water, the Chinese were producing more than 700,000 sheets of aromatic toilet paper a year for the Imperial court.
Prior to the advent of the first commercially packaged, premoistened toilet paper by Joseph Gayetty of New York City in 1857, how people used to clean themselves depended to a large degree on where and how they lived, and their standing in society. Coconut shells were used widely throughout an egalitarian Hawaii, while lace and hemp proved popular within the French aristocracy. In ancient Rome combining rosewater with wool was common among the upper classes; colonial Americans used corncobs and old almanacs; while the ends of old anchor cables proved an unpopular but not uncommon option for Spanish and Portuguese maritime sailors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Toilet paper was manufactured on a roll for the first time in the United States by the Scott Paper Company in 1890. In 1935 the Northern Tissue Company began to advertise "splinter-free" paper, and a softer two-ply toilet paper made its debut in 1942.
