you’ve probably been hanging toilet paper wrongall along. Finally, in 1857, Joseph Gayetty started to manufacture his own “medicated paper,” which he made out of hemp and aloe vera.

The sort of toilet paper we use today wasn’t commercially available until 1857. Gayett’s Medicated Paper for the Water Closet contained aloe and was marketed as being good for hemorrhoids ...

The paper is basically just, you know, spreading around stuff.” (Compare that, he says, to what he deems a radical innovation: bidets, which use water rather than paper to clean you up after the ...

While toilet paper use is ubiquitous in China ... Gayetty patented the first U.S. commercial “medicated paper” in the 1850s. Since then, demand has soared in many places, bolstered by rising ...