Speaker 1: Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works, Hey, brain stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogelbaum. Here without teeth, life is tough. Sure we
Speaker 1: have all sorts of fancy dentistry tricks these days, but
Speaker 1: nothing tops the Choppers were born with. In fact, when
Speaker 1: rocker Patti Smith gave the commencement address at the Pratt
Speaker 1: Institute in New York, she gave those graduating seniors some
Speaker 1: incredibly sound advice. She said, now that I'm here, my
Speaker 1: greatest urge is to speak to you of dental care.
Speaker 1: My generation had a rough go dentally. Our dentists were
Speaker 1: the army dentists who came back from World War Two
Speaker 1: and believed that the dental office was a battle ground.
Speaker 1: You have a better chance at dental health. And it
Speaker 1: may be true that our big dental procedures are considerably
Speaker 1: better than they were in the middle of the last century.
Speaker 1: But it's the maintenance that Smith was probably talking about.
Speaker 1: We've got to scrub our teeth each and every day,
Speaker 1: or else bacteria will calcify into tartar, which is where
Speaker 1: the tooth troubles really begin. Keeping all your teeth in
Speaker 1: your head and avoiding life threatening infection has always required
Speaker 1: constant vigilance, which is where toothpaste comes in. Now, nobody
Speaker 1: knows who invented the toothbrush. Most ancient civilizations seem to
Speaker 1: have had some variation of a frayed choo stick that
Speaker 1: they used to keep their teeth clean. But don't teeth
Speaker 1: also need some sort of well cleaning agent. Is that
Speaker 1: minty plaster like goo that we smear on our modern
Speaker 1: chewing sticks just capitalist snake oil? Not of history has
Speaker 1: anything to say about it. Toothpaste might actually predate the
Speaker 1: tooth brush. While there's evidence that ancient Egyptians were using
Speaker 1: toothbrushes as far back as three thousand, five hundred BC,
Speaker 1: recipes for tooth powder have been found the date back
Speaker 1: to five thousand BC. The earliest Egyptian toothpowder recipe contained
Speaker 1: plenty of abrasives to scrape off all the sticky residue.
Speaker 1: The ashes of burnt eggshells and oxen hoofs mixed with
Speaker 1: pumice seemed to be popular. By the fourth century, Egyptians
Speaker 1: had set up their tooth powder with abrasives like rock
Speaker 1: salt and flavorings like mint and peppercorns. They even added
Speaker 1: dried iris flour, perhaps because it was associated with purification.
Speaker 1: Good thing are tooth enamel is harder than bone or
Speaker 1: even iron or steel. If it wasn't, those Egyptians would
Speaker 1: have brushed their teeth right down to nubs. But when
Speaker 1: this recipe was revealed in two thousand three at a
Speaker 1: dental conference in Vienna, Austrian dentist Tynes Newman told the
Speaker 1: Telegraph that he tried it and it wasn't half bad.
Speaker 1: He said, I found that it was not unpleasant. It
Speaker 1: was painful on my gums and made them bleed as well,
Speaker 1: but that's not a bad thing, and afterwards my mouth
Speaker 1: felt fresh and clean. I believe that this recipe would
Speaker 1: have been a big improvement on some of the soap
Speaker 1: toothpastes used much later around the world. Different cultures continued
Speaker 1: mixing crushed abrasives like oyster shell or bone and nice
Speaker 1: tasting herbs like mint and jin sing together to clean
Speaker 1: teeth and keep platosis that's bad breath at bay. But
Speaker 1: as with literally everything else, the Middle Ages didn't really
Speaker 1: do much for toothpaste technology. During this time, Europeans settled
Speaker 1: on a mixture of honey, salt, and dry flour, which
Speaker 1: they supplemented by giving their teeth a good scrubbing with
Speaker 1: the bark of certain trees. It wasn't until the nineteenth
Speaker 1: century that the toothpaste biz as we know it really
Speaker 1: started heating up. Recipes for tooth powders and pastes that
Speaker 1: included abrasives like charcoal, chalk, and burned bread crumbs, as
Speaker 1: well as incense like dragon's blood, were popular in England
Speaker 1: until eighteen fifty when Coalgate introduced its first crem dentifriese,
Speaker 1: which came in a jar. Mass production of this product
Speaker 1: started in the eighteen seventies and twenty years later they
Speaker 1: introduced the collapsible tube and from then on toothpaste was
Speaker 1: a thing. Before World War Two, most toothpastes on the
Speaker 1: market were sold in a lead tube. They also contained soap,
Speaker 1: which was unnecessary and in some cases even counterproductive, but
Speaker 1: we humans seem to have a hang up about wanting
Speaker 1: our cleansers to foam. Toothpastes today still tend to contain soap,
Speaker 1: namely sodium laurel sulf fight because it's not clean unless
Speaker 1: it's foamy, but soap also helped maintain an even creamy texture.
Speaker 1: We can also get this smooth texture with humicants like
Speaker 1: sorbitol glycerin and propylene glycol, which have the added bonus
Speaker 1: of being a little bit sweet. Fluoride was first added
Speaker 1: to toothpaste in nineteen fourteen, but it wasn't until the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties that it was proven to fight cavities, and
Speaker 1: modern toothpaste no longer uses chalk as an abrasive. We
Speaker 1: most often use hydrated silica, which is exactly the same
Speaker 1: stuff you find in those little packets in your vitamin
Speaker 1: bottles and shoe boxes. So that's the story of toothpaste.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go brush my teeth. Today's episode was written
Speaker 1: by Jescelin Shields and produced by Tyler Clang. For more
Speaker 1: on this and lots of other minty fresh topics, visit
Speaker 1: our home planet, how stuff Works dot com.