What Did People Use Before Toothbrushes?

  • Women brush their teeth
Women brush their teeth
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Since the fourth millennium BCE, when urban civilizations first appeared in ancient Mesopotamia, humans have strived to achieve proper dental hygiene. Yet the nylon-bristled toothbrush we use today didn’t come along until the 1930s. For the thousands of years in between, people relied on rudimentary tools that evolved with scientific knowledge and technological advancements over time. Some of the earliest toothbrush predecessors date as far back as 3500 BCE. Here’s a look at how people kept their teeth clean before the modern toothbrush.

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Chew Sticks and Toothpicks

Sometime around the year 3500 BCE, the ancient Babylonians (located near modern-day Iraq) created a tool known as a “chew stick.” This simple, handheld piece of wood is considered the earliest known direct predecessor to the toothbrushes we use today. Chew sticks were simple wooden twigs cut to approximately 5 or 6 inches long. One end of the stick was then softened in boiling liquid to help separate the fibers, creating an almost brushlike effect. Individuals would chew on these sticks to freshen their mouths, as the frayed fibers would slide between the teeth and help loosen debris. Many early Arab cultures used a specific shrub called Salvadora persica (also known as the “toothbrush tree”) to create their chew sticks, which they called miswak. The shrub was particularly aromatic in nature and thought to have a stronger mouth-freshening effect than other plants.

Around this same time, civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and elsewhere in the ancient world also used early versions of a toothpick to keep their teeth clean. These were often made of thin pieces of wood, though in later years, wealthy individuals began crafting toothpicks from brass and silver for added opulence and durability. In ancient Greece, toothpicks were known as karphos, roughly meaning “blade of straw,” suggesting the Greeks may have used coarse fibers such as straw in addition to wood.

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The Fascinating History of Las Vegas

  • Las Vegas, Nevada sign
Las Vegas, Nevada sign
Credit: Sung Shin/ Unsplash

Since the middle of the 20th century, Las Vegas has been known as the capital of the American id. Gambling has long been at the center of its appeal, as nicknames such as “Sin City” and “Lost Wages” suggest. “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” is the city’s well-known slogan, while others have remarked, “Las Vegas is where losers come to win, and winners come to lose.” 

Rising up from the Nevada desert, the city’s built environment is so extravagant that it’s difficult to imagine a time when its spectacle did not exist, fully formed. Let’s go back and trace the origins of this uniquely American city.

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A Desert Oasis

Even though Las Vegas occupies a unique place in American culture, its metropolitan origin was sparked by the same thing that gave rise to many other U.S. cities: the development of the railroad. The area that includes present-day Nevada became a United States territory with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which ended the U.S. war with Mexico. Despite its location in the basin of the Mojave Desert, the site of what is now Las Vegas was a sort of oasis — a valley that included a water source in the form of artesian springs. 

The water source was the selling point for railroad magnate and U.S. Senator William Clark. In 1902, he bought 2,000 acres of land and water rights in order to create a waypoint for the San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad he incorporated to connect those cities. The railroad line through Nevada began construction in 1904, and the following year, Clark auctioned off parcels of his land, which was located east of the railroad tracks. 

Around the same time, civil engineer John T. McWilliams was attempting to build a township west of the railroad tracks. Though he was working with far less acreage than Clark — 80 acres to Clark’s 2,000 — the development provoked competition and intensified Clark’s efforts to build his township. Clark offered refunds on the $16 train fare to town in order to attract buyers. Newspaper advertisements promised, “Get into line early. Buy now, double your money in 60 days,” though accounts differ on which of the two were commissioning that ad. 

Ultimately, McWilliams couldn’t really compete. After all, Clark owned the water rights and far more land, and he had a major stake in the railroad. On September 5, 1905, a fire almost completely consumed McWilliams’ townsite, and ensured that the competition between the two was short-lived; development would be concentrated west of the railroad tracks. Clark formed the Las Vegas Land & Water Company with his partners, and vowed, “I will leave no stone unturned and spare myself no personal effort to do all that lies within my power to foster and encourage the growth and development of Las Vegas.”

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What 6 Major State Capitals Looked Like 100 Years Ago

  • Nashville street in 1933
Nashville street in 1933
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One hundred years is a long time in the life of a city. New technologies emerge and wane, people come and go, cultural factors ebb and flow. But not all cities change at the same rate; some stay comparatively similar to their older incarnations, while others become drastically different. Here’s a glimpse at what a few iconic state capitals looked like a century ago.

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Atlanta, Georgia

Atlanta was named after the Western and Atlantic Railroad, for which it was a terminus. In the early 20th century, the city was well established as a major railway hub, and the downtown was built around its first train station. Hotels were concentrated in an area near the station (called, fittingly, Hotel Row) in order to serve train travelers, and by the 1920s, masonry high-rises created the city’s skyline.

Like many cities during this period, Atlanta was beginning to expand its roads in order to accommodate increasing numbers of cars. In the 1920s, the city built three major viaducts to allow traffic to bypass the high number of railroad crossings. The Central Avenue, Pryor Street, and Spring Street (later renamed Ted Turner Drive) viaducts not only improved vehicle safety, but also led to development outside the city’s downtown core. 

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We Tried Writing With a Quill, and Here’s What We Learned

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Writing with a quill pen
Kristina Wright

The use of quill pens dates back to the sixth century CE, when the feathers of large birds — primarily geese, turkeys, swans, and even crows — replaced the reed pens that had been used previously. Though it’s an obsolete writing utensil today, the quill pen remains a symbol of education, literature, and artistic expression. Many important historical documents were written using quill and ink, from the Magna Carta to the Declaration of Independence, and white quills are still laid out every day the U.S. Supreme Court is in session. 

In pop culture, the Harry Potter series has helped generate interest in the old-fashioned writing instrument, and Taylor Swift, noting the influences of Charlotte Brontë and period films, has referred to some of her music as “Quill Pen Songs.” “If my lyrics sound like a letter written by Emily Dickinson’s great-grandmother while sewing a lace curtain, that’s me writing in the quill genre,” she explained at the Nashville Songwriter Awards in 2022.

So what is it actually like to write with the quill pens of yore? To answer that question, I turned to the internet for authentic supplies and expert advice, and set out scribbling. Here’s what I learned from the experience.

Photo credit: Kristina Wright

First, What Is a Quill?

A traditional quill pen consists of a feather that has been trimmed to around 9 inches long, had its shaft stripped of barbs, and had the inside and outside of the hollow barrel cleaned of membrane and wax. The quill is then dried, typically by curing it in sand, and the tip is shaped into a nib with a channel split (cut) to hold the ink.

The earliest fluid inks were carbon-based black inks that are believed to have originated in China around 2700 BCE. Iron gallotannate (iron gall) ink eventually replaced carbon and became the primary ink used with quill pens from the Middle Ages until the beginning of the 20th century. Iron gall ink is a permanent, deep purple-black or blue-black ink that darkens as it oxidizes, and is made from iron salts and gallotannic acids from organic sources (such as trees and vegetables). The Codex Sinaiticus, written in the fourth century CE and containing the earliest surviving manuscript of the Christian Bible, is one of the oldest known texts written with iron gall ink. 

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5 Facts About the Golden Age of Radio

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Tuning a radio
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It’s easy to take for granted today, but the emergence of broadcast radio was a seismic shift in early 20th-century culture. Born out of ship-to-shore wireless telegraph communication at the turn of the 20th century, broadcast radio represented an entirely new pastime by the time it began to mature in the 1920s. The golden age of radio was the period from the 1920s to the 1950s when the medium was at its absolute peak in both program variety and popularity. Radio grew massively during this era: In 1922, Variety reported that the number of radio sets in use had reached 1 million. By 1947, a C.E. Hooper survey estimated that 82% of Americans were radio listeners. 

In addition to the music, news, and sports programming that present-day listeners are familiar with, radio during this period included scripted dramas, action-adventure series such as The Lone Ranger, science fiction shows such as Flash Gordon, soap operas, comedies, and live reads of movie scripts. Major film stars including Orson Welles got their start in radio (Welles became a household name in the wake of the infamous panic sparked by his 1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds), and correspondents such as Edward R. Murrow established the standard for broadcast journalism. President Franklin D. Roosevelt used the medium to regularly give informal talks, referred to as fireside chats, to Americans listening at home. But radio was also largely influenced by advertisers, who sometimes wielded control of programming right down to casting and the actual name of the program, resulting in some awkward-sounding show titles, such as The Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour. The golden age of radio was a combination of highbrow and lowbrow content, offering both enduring cultural touchstones and popular ephemera — much like the television that eclipsed it. Read on for five more facts from this influential era.

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7 Things You Would Find on a City Street 100 Years Ago

  • Model T Fords at beach
Model T Fords at beach
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If we could travel back 100 years and land on a typical city street, we’d probably be mightily discombobulated. Some things would seem familiar: the buzz of the urban environment, people walking this way and that, and buildings with facades that could well still exist today. But looking around, we’d soon realize that we weren’t in Kansas anymore — or if we were, it would be Kansas City in the 1920s. 

A century ago, America was going through a monumental change. For the first time in U.S. history, more people were living in urban areas than in rural areas. The cities were booming, and for many middle-class Americans, the 1920s were a decade of unprecedented prosperity. People were earning more and spending more, advertising had reached new levels of sophistication, and the automobile was changing the way we live. 

So, before you step into that time machine, you’d better brace yourself. Here are seven things you’d find in a city street a century ago, back in the dizzying days of the Roaring ’20s. 

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Incandescent Street Lights

Before the development of practical light bulbs, street lights typically used piped coal gas, oil, or kerosene as fuel. The first electric streetlights were installed in Paris in 1878, but these used unwieldy and harsh arc lamps. Then came inventors such as Joseph Swan in the U.K. and Thomas Edison in the U.S., both of whom patented revolutionary incandescent light bulbs in 1880. Incandescent street lamps became the norm in many cities throughout the world, and the 1920s saw a wave of patents filed for innovative new street lighting. These electric lights, however, were often placed where they were needed rather than lining a whole street. So, 100 years ago, a city street at night would not have been as brightly lit as it is today, and pedestrians would often find themselves walking from one pool of yellowish light to the next. 

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6 Inventions That Came Out of the Victorian Era

  • Bike pneumatic tires
Bike pneumatic tires
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Queen Victoria ruled Britain from 1837 until her death in 1901. Her reign of 63 years and 216 days was longer than that of any of her predecessors, and was exceeded only by Elizabeth II’s time on the throne. This period, known as the Victorian era, saw the British Empire expand to become the first global industrial power. 

Fueled by the industrial revolution that began the previous century — which reshaped almost every existing sector of human activity — the era saw many breakthroughs in the arts and sciences (perhaps most notably, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution) as well as great social change and political reforms. And, as people from the countryside began to move to urban industrial hubs in search of work, there was a rise in both education and affluence, further driving the wave of ideas and innovation.

Victorian-era Brits were avid inventors, and many of the creations from this time had a major impact not only in Britain but across the globe. That’s not to say that all Victorian innovations were a hit. The hat cigar holder, ventilating top hat, anti-garroting cravat, reversible trousers, and “corset with expansible busts” all rank among the less successful ideas. These failures, however, were far outweighed by the era’s many influential developments, some of which laid the foundation for our modern age, and are still used every day. Here are some of the greatest innovations of the Victorian era, from the telephone to the electric light bulb. 

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Telephone

Scottish-born inventor Alexander Graham Bell is considered the father of the telephone, but a degree of controversy remains over who exactly invented the world-changing device. The American electrical engineer Elisha Gray filed a patent on the exact same day as Bell, in Washington, D.C., on February 14, 1876. We’ll never quite know how things played out in the patent office, but Bell’s documents were filed first, and he was awarded the patent on March 7. A few days later, he made the first-ever telephone call. He called his assistant, Thomas Watson, with the now-famous words, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.” 

Bell, who had lived in Boston since 1871, was keen to introduce his invention to Britain, where, as a young man, he had received an expansive Victorian education in Scotland and London, and where he first began his experiments in sound. In August 1877, he toured Britain with his wife Mabel (it was supposed to be their honeymoon), promoting his invention as he went. He even  demonstrated the newly invented telephone to Queen Victoria herself, who was so impressed she asked to keep the temporary installation in place.

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History’s Most Ingenious Engineering Marvels 

  • The Great Wall of China
The Great Wall of China
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Our planet is home to many talented engineers. Termites, for example, build complex structures that rise up to 10 feet in height, their “bricks” bonded by bio-cementation. Spiders, meanwhile, weave intricate webs, which, like suspension bridges, are capable of bearing heavy loads in even the stormiest weather. Then there are beavers and their well-engineered dams, bees and their cellular hives, and industrious ants whose largest recorded contiguous colony stretches a truly incredible 3,700 miles. 

Humans, of course, are in a league of their own when it comes to construction. For millennia, we have been building structures of awesome size and complexity: roads and bridges, cathedrals and stadiums, tunnels and skyscrapers. Among the innumerable structures built by humankind, some stand out for their sheer size and magnificence. Here are six of the greatest engineering marvels in history.

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The Great Wall of China

The Great Wall of China is widely considered one of the greatest engineering feats of all time. Built continuously from the third century BCE to the 17th century CE, this series of walls and natural barriers stretches for around 13,000 miles. (Still, despite a persistent myth, it is not visible from the moon or space, at least not with the naked eye.) The Great Wall was originally the idea of Emperor Qin Shi Huang, the founder of the Qin dynasty and the first emperor of a unified China, who wished to protect the country from barbarian attacks from the north. 

Under his orders, many older, unconnected state walls and fortifications were removed and a number of existing walls were joined into a single system stretching from the eastern Hebei province to Gansu province in the west. The wall itself was 15 to 30 feet high, topped with ramparts of at least 12 feet, with guard towers distributed at regular intervals. Much of the Great Wall that we now see was constructed during the powerful Ming dynasty, starting from around 1474. Today, the most famous and iconic section of the Great Wall of China is located 43 miles northwest of Beijing. This section was rebuilt in the late 1950s and now attracts thousands of tourists every day.

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6 Highways That Shaped America

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I-85 road sign
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In 1903, a Vermont doctor named Horatio Nelson Jackson drove from San Francisco to New York in a Winton touring car and became the first person to traverse the United States in an automobile. At the time, there were no more than 150 miles of paved road in the country, mostly concentrated within cities. The path that Jackson traveled was along rivers, mountain passes, flatlands, and the Union Pacific Railroad, and what roads he did encounter between cities were, in his description, “a compound of ruts, bumps, and ‘thank you m’ams’ [sic].” The trip took 63 days, 12 hours, and 30 minutes, but it inspired auto companies and other early car adopters to arrange trips of their own, sparking demand for long-distance highways.

The first automobile highways weren’t construction projects, and were referred to as “auto trails.” They were essentially suggested routes made up of existing thoroughfares, conceived of by private associations and codified with names such as Lincoln Highway, Victory Highway, National Old Trails Road, and so on. The associations marked the trails with signs or logos, and promoted the improvement of the routes, sometimes collecting dues from towns and businesses. Eventually, the U.S. government grew wary of the proceedings, and proposed the construction of a paved and nationalized numbered highway system. The proposal was adopted on November 11, 1926. 

The numbered highways were a marked improvement over the auto trails, but nearly 30 years after their adoption, Congress approved the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, revolutionizing the highway system by building 41,000 miles of interstate roads. The interstates repurposed existing numbered highways, connecting and extending them for greater efficiency, and these roads are to this day our main mode of distance auto travel. Let’s look at when some of the country’s biggest and most vital interstates were built. 

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7 Items You Would Find in a Doctor’s Office 100 Years Ago

  • Doctor’s office, 1930
Doctor's office, 1930
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In many historical contexts, 100 years isn’t a very long time. But when it comes to science, technology, and medicine — particularly in the last century — it’s a veritable eternity. The seeds of modern medicine were just being planted in the early 20th century: Penicillin was discovered in 1928, physicians were still identifying vitamins, and insulin was a new breakthrough. 

The doctor’s role itself was different than it is today, as preventative care was not yet an established practice; there was no such thing as a routine visit to a doctor’s office 100 years ago. A visit to the doctor typically meant that you were ailing (though in some cases during the Prohibition era, it meant that you and your doctor had agreed on a way around the alcohol ban). Thanks to advances in technology, doctors’ offices in the 1920s were also stocked with very different items than we see today. These are a few things you likely would have found there a century ago.

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Head Mirror

A metallic disc attached to a headband is generally considered part of a classic doctor costume, but what is the genuine article, exactly? It’s called a head mirror, and your doctor 100 years ago would’ve been wearing one. It wasn’t just an emblem; it provided a very core function, which was illumination for the examination of the ear, nose, or throat. The patient would be seated next to a lamp that was pointed toward the doctor, and the head mirror would focus and reflect the light to the intended target. Today, the easier-to-use pen light or fiber optic headlamp have largely replaced the head mirror, though some ENT specialists argue that the lighter weight and cost-effectiveness of the latter mean it may still have a place in contemporary medicine.

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