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Cleaning Hygiene Today October 2015

FEATURE HYGIENE Indeed some historians have suggested that the Roman Empire began to decline after the introduction of lead plumbing, leading to an unhealthy population. The fashion for bushy eyebrows would have put even Cara Delevigne to shame. However many women added to their natural hair by gluing mouse droppings to their faces. Seriously. All in all historians estimate that the life expectancy at this time in Europe was less than 30. Things were slightly better in the Middle East however, and across the Muslim world generally. Islamic commandments, invented several centuries later than their Christian counterparts, place a much larger emphasis on cleanliness. Pretty much the best advice the Bible gives is that ash and olive oil mixed together make a very good hair gel. CHT is not making this up. Muslims are commanded to be ritually clean before they pray every day. The Quran’s commandments around diet and removing shoes are fairly well known. INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE It wasn’t until the 19th and 20th centuries that hygiene really began to resemble what we now think of. Rampant disease outbreaks afflicted many cities across the world, Cholera killed millions (and still does), though the connection between contaminated water and the disease itself wasn’t made until 1854, when a 12 CLEANING HYGIENE TODAY cholera outbreak in London was traced and explained by a Yorkshireman called John Snow. Not the one from Game of Thrones. Dyptheria did much the same thing, carrying off one of Queen Victoria’s daughters before the cause was countered in the (very) late 19th century. As far as food is concerned it took until the mid 1700s before a man named Pringle (nothing to do with the crisps) decided that it would be a good idea to keep human excrement away from food. Before then no-one had considered the possibility that this might be unhealthy. Even then Pringle thought that it was bad smells that signalled the spread of disease, so he was right about faeces, but for the wrong reasons. CLEANING Now we are going to shoot all the way back to the beginning. We’ve talked a lot about hygiene, and in 21st century England the two are virtually synonymous, however what looks clean is not always healthy. The broom was invented thousands of years ago when that part of the harvest that wasn’t good enough to eat was tied to sticks and used as a broom. The Greeks, Romans and Egyptians made use of abundant slave labour to make sure streets and buildings were scrubbed clean. Even so epidemics were an annual event. Each summer one disease or other, sometimes more than one, would rip through the country and kill a large proportion of the population. The invention of the carpet in the 1800s just added to the work involved in keeping the house clean. There might not have been straw underfoot anymore but people, mainly women, would end up beating their carpets every week with something that resembled a ping pong bat. TECHNOLOGY Chores became easier in the 19th century when the modern iron (or at least a forbearer) was invented in 1882. The washing machine followed in 1907, though wasn’t widely available until years later. The vacuum cleaner was invented in 1900. The very first ones were fed with petrol and had to be pulled through the streets by a horse because they were so large. They would pull up outside the house and the hose would be fed in through the windows. The first portable, electric vacuum follows in 1908 and the device gradually grew in popularity until it became ubiquitous. James Dyson invented the cyclonic vacuum cleaner (meaning a bag wasn’t needed) in 1979, but it wasn’t available to the public for almost 15 years. All that might be the case, and there are definitely a myriad of things that aren’t mentioned in this article, but you can be sure about one thing, in a few hundred years people will look back at us and scoff at how unclean we were. OCTOBER 2015 “The fashion for bushy eyebrows would have put even Cara Delevigne to shame.”


Cleaning Hygiene Today October 2015
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