Clawfoot Tubs and the History of Bathing

The story of bathing and how it came to be what it is today is quite remarkable. The idea of constant bathing took an enormous amount of time to come to fruition at all, then bathing was thought to be the cause of many diseases, and it nearly disappeared in the blink of an eye. The concept returned again, and took generations to adapt, and the improvements moved slowly. The bath as we know it, nearly never came to be.

There is evidence that plumbing existed in 3300 BC, where they found copper piping under what is believed to have been an old palace in India, but it wasn't until the Roman Empire that bathing truly became an expected attribute of the people. They were expected to bathe daily, but they did so in public baths outside. There were some private baths, but they were sporadic and more closely resembled what we know as pools. They were also much larger than for a single person, they were about the size of our swimming pools. They did use marble for the bath structures, and lead and bronze for their pipes, which was the beginning of the creations that we know today. They also had a complex sanitation system. They clearly set the bar for personal hygiene, but unfortunately, with the collapse of the Roman Empire, went a lot of those standards.

Though soap-making emerged in the Middle Ages, it was not widely adapted. It did hang around briefly, and didn't fully disappear until after the Renaissance. It remained a mulled idea until the 18th and 19th Centuries. Finally though, in the early 1800's cast iron production started. It was originally used mostly for plumbing and pipes, but a few decades later they started producing cast iron baths. Though, they weren't actually called that. They were advertised as horse troughs that had 4 legs and could also be used as a bath. It took a while but the idea caught on, especially with the outbreak of many diseases that doctors realized could be prevented by bathing.

Far from the time when they found what resembled a bath on the island of Crete, which was made of hardened pottery and believed now to be the forefather of the modern Clawfoot Tubs, we have the wide array of bathtub choices that are sure to melt away the worries of today's harried world.