Waking up with Plato: the history of our morning

routine
Greg Jenner explores the history of our morning routine, from a Greek philosopher's alarm
clock to bizarre Tudor toothbrushes...

This article was first published in the January 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine

1 Sleep like a log on a stone

Since time immemorial, the morning routine has begun in bed.
Sleep has always been a physiological necessity and the oldest
evidence for a bed comes from the Middle Stone Age. Dating
to 77,000 years ago, the remains of a hand-stitched mattress,
woven out of leaves and rushes, have been found by
archaeologists in South Africa. These cave dwellers
presumably rolled out their mat on the floor, but if we jump to
Neolithic Orkney (5,000 years ago), the inhabitants of Skara
Brae slept on elevated beds carved from stone.
At the same time, in ancient Egypt, the nobility preferred beds
that sloped downwards, or bowed in the middle. Oddly, while
the poor slept on piles of cushions, the wealthy rested their
heads on curved pillows carved from wood, ivory or alabaster.
This was to protect their elaborate hair styles from morning
bedhead.
2 Whistle as you wake
We are certainly not the first to be startled from our slumber
by a timekeeping gadget. Allegedly, the first alarm clock was
invented by Greek philosopher Plato, who lived about 2,400
years ago. We don’t know what this device looked like, but it
may have been a water clock that used a draining mechanism
to force air through a small gap, thereby producing a whistling
sound to rouse Plato’s snoozing students.
Mechanical clockwork was miniaturized in the 17th century,
thanks to the discovery of the pendulum, allowing Charles II’s
subjects to own pocket watches. But it wasn’t until the 20th
century that alarm clocks began loitering on bedside tables.
Indeed, factory workers in Victorian Britain were awoken by a
knocker-upper who tapped on their windows with a long pole.
3 Spend a penny on a potty
Our plastic toilet seat is not too dissimilar to the stone models
used by the ancient Egyptians, though the flushing loo didn’t
arrive until Queen Elizabeth I’s godson, Sir John Harrington,
designed one in the 1590s. Yet he was too busy scribbling
scandalous poetry to market his invention. So it wasn’t until
the arrival of Josiah George Jennings’s washout toilets,
unveiled at the Great Exhibition of 1851, before the middle
class could abandon the potty in favour of plumbing.
We wouldn’t dream of using the loo today without wiping our
bums, and it was no different for our Stone Age ancestors,
who probably used moss and leaves on their backsides.
Somewhat more unnervingly, Roman public toilets were
equipped with a sponge, fixed on the end of a stick, which was
used by successive lavatory visitors.
The Chinese were wiping with hygienic paper in the ninth
century, but the west was a millennium off the pace. It took
until 1857 for Joseph Gayetty to mass-produce modern loo roll
impregnated with aloe plant extract for hygienic lubrication.
4 Exercise your right to take a shower
The modern shower was invented by William Feetham in
1767. Curiously, some versions were mounted on wheels,
meaning the user had to be careful not to roll away on what
was effectively a moistened skateboard. The following century
also witnessed the bizarre arrival of the velodouche – a shower
that only sprinkled water if you pedalled on an exercise bike.
But hygienic washing almost certainly extends back to the
Stone Age. And, by the Bronze Age, the people of ancient
Pakistan, the Harappans, were perfecting a public sanitation
infrastructure that was arguably unrivalled until the 19th
century. Though the Romans and Greeks built huge public
bathhouses, heated by elaborate hypocaust systems, the
Harappans delivered running water to most of their homes
2,500 years before ancient Athens was at its peak.
5 Put your pants on (if you’re wearing any)
When Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb in
1922, among the glorious golden treasures were also 145 pairs
of underpants. The linen loincloth (shenti) was standard
underwear of the time, regardless of class or wealth, but its
origins seem even older. The mummified corpse of Ötzi the
Iceman, who was murdered in the Tyrolean Alps 5,300 years
ago, revealed he sported a goatskin loincloth.
Most European men and women went pantless until the mid-
19th century, with ladies wearing long smocks under their
dresses and men merely tucking their long shirts between their
legs. However, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832)
was surprisingly found to have been wearing boxer shorts
when his preserved corpse was examined by modern
conservators.
6 Dress to impress the fashion police
Body lice thrive in the folds of clothing, and are thought to
have branched off from their near relatives, head lice,
thousands of years ago – as a result of people adopting fabric
clothing. We often depict Stone Age people in animal furs, but
they also wove flax on primitive looms and used needle and
thread to make clothes fit more snugly. In the Ice Age, well-
insulated clothes were key to survival.
Today, fashion is more about looking good, but the ‘fashion
police’ have been in operation for longer than you might think.
In the Middle Ages there were laws proscribing certain
colours and designs, and Edward IV demanded that purple,
gold and silver fabrics be limited to royalty. You had to be of
knightly class to get away with velvet.
In 17th-century Japan, a rule preventing merchants from
wearing ornate robes led some to have the designs tattooed on
their skin. This art of irezumi is still so highly regarded in
Japan that people have been paid to bequeath their flayed skin
to museums upon their death.
7 Spice on your cornflakes?
Strangely, our humble bowl of cornflakes first arrived in the
1890s as a treatment for patients with mental illness who
masturbated too much. Dr John Harvey Kellogg believed the
lack of sugar and spice would reduce a person’s sex drive. It
was his brother, Will, who sprinkled the sugar back on top and
made a fortune out of the Kellogg’s brand.
Of course, every bowl of cereal needs a splash of milk, but
this was only possible after the Neolithic farming revolution
saw humans domesticate animals. Indeed, the mutated gene
that allows most of us to drink cow’s milk without suffering
painful flatulence is only 6,000 years old, and the majority of
the world’s populations don’t have it.
8 Ask your slave to brush your teeth
People have been treating toothache for millennia, with
evidence of dental drilling in Pakistan dating back 9,000 years.
But avoiding surgery has always been preferable, so tooth
brushing with a frayed twig was part of the morning routine
for everyone from the medieval residents of India to the
Elizabethans.
Roman aristocrats had slaves to brush their teeth for them,
applying powdered antler horn to brighten the enamel. Oddly,
the best available mouthwash at the time was human urine
imported from Portugal.
The Chinese invented the modern toothbrush but it never
reached Europe, so the reinvention is credited to William
Addis who, in 1780, inserted horsehair into a pig bone. But
even Addis didn’t recommend brushing twice a day – that
advice came from US army hygiene experiments in World
War Two.
Greg Jenner is a historian who spent many years as the
historical consultant to CBBC’s multi-award-winning
Horrible Histories.