Origins: Who Actually Invented the Toothbrush

Most people, if asked who invented the toothbrush, would guess someone European, probably someone Victorian, possibly someone with a patent. The popular version of the story involves William Addis, an English entrepreneur who supposedly fashioned the first bristle toothbrush in Newgate Prison around 1770 and went on to found a manufacturing dynasty. It is an excellent story. It is also roughly a thousand years late and set on the wrong continent.

The bristle toothbrush was invented in China during the Tang dynasty, around the 7th or 8th century AD. By the time Addis was allegedly scrounging pig bristles from a prison guard, Chinese and Japanese monks had been using bristle brushes for centuries, the design had already reached Europe via trade routes, and the only thing genuinely new about Addis's enterprise was the scale of the manufacturing operation he built around it.

The real history of the toothbrush is older, stranger, and considerably more global than the company mythology suggests.

The chewing stick and the first three thousand years

Before the bristle brush, there was the chewing stick. Before the chewing stick, there were fingers and frayed plant fibers and a general understanding that something needed to be done about the matter.

The chewing stick, known in Arabic as miswak or siwak, is made from the twig or root of the Salvadora persica tree, a plant native to the Middle East and northeastern Africa whose wood contains natural antimicrobial compounds including fluoride, silica, and tannins. You fray one end of a short piece of twig by chewing it until it forms a soft brush, then scrub your teeth with it. Replace it when it wears out, which takes a few days. Repeat indefinitely.

Evidence for chewing sticks reaches back to Babylon around 3500 BC, where clay tablets record their use. Egyptian tomb finds include wooden chew sticks. Ancient Greek and Roman physicians recommended frayed twigs alongside tooth powders made from pumice, ground oyster shells, or charcoal mixed with honey and vinegar. The Roman poet Ovid had opinions about dental hygiene. The Prophet Muhammad recommended the miswak in multiple hadith, which is why its use has remained continuous across the Islamic world for fourteen centuries and why the World Health Organization, in a 2000 review, concluded that miswak use was as effective as toothbrushing when performed correctly.

The chewing stick is not a quaint antique. It is still used by an estimated 700 million people worldwide, still demonstrably effective, and older than every other oral hygiene tool by at least two thousand years.

China and the bristle brush

The jump from frayed twig to manufactured bristle brush happened in China. The Tang dynasty, which ruled from 618 to 907 AD, produced the earliest documented references to a brush with set bristles. The design used coarse hair from the neck of Siberian or northern Chinese pigs - cold-climate animals grew stiffer, coarser hair than their temperate-zone counterparts, which proved better for scrubbing - inserted into drilled holes in a handle of bamboo or bone.

The precise date of origin is debated, and primary sources from this period require careful handling. What is clear is that by the 10th and 11th centuries the bristle brush was an established and fairly widespread object in Tang and early Song dynasty China, and that the design reached Japan through Zen Buddhist monks in the 13th century. Japanese records from around 1223 describe a tooth-cleaning brush that matches the Chinese pattern.

The bristle brush arrived in Europe by the 17th century at the latest, carried through trade and diplomatic contact with China and Japan. A number of European travelers to China in the 16th and 17th centuries mention bristle brushes in their accounts. European craftsmen began producing their own versions using local materials: bone handles and horse or badger hair rather than the pig bristles of the Chinese originals.

By the mid-17th century, bristle toothbrushes were available in England, France, and Germany to anyone who could afford them. They were not common objects. They were luxuries, and the wealthy who owned them did not necessarily use them daily. Dental hygiene as a routine practice was not yet what it would later become.

William Addis and what he actually did

William Addis was a real person. He operated a toothbrush manufacturing business in Whitechapel, London from roughly the 1780s, selling brushes made with animal-hair bristles set into bone handles. His business passed through several generations of the family and eventually became the Wisdom Toothbrushes company, which is still manufacturing brushes today.

The prison story - Newgate, circa 1770, the riot, the bone saved from a meal, the bristles from a sympathetic guard - cannot be confirmed from any contemporary source. The earliest versions of the story that have been traced appear in 19th-century company promotional material. It is the kind of origin myth that commercial enterprises generate when they have survived long enough to need one: tidy, memorable, flattering to the founder, and unverifiable.

What Addis actually contributed was industrial scale. He understood that a product most English people did not own could become one most English people did own if the price was low enough and the distribution was organized. He built a manufacturing operation that could produce brushes cheaply and consistently. This is a genuine business achievement and a real contribution to the spread of dental hygiene in England. It is not an invention.

The animal-hair toothbrush that Addis manufactured had been in use for at least a century before him in Europe, and for at least seven or eight centuries before him in China.

Toothpaste and the advertising age

Owning a toothbrush did not, in the 19th century, automatically lead to using it daily. Most people who owned brushes used them sporadically. Dental disease was endemic. Tooth loss was expected at middle age. The connection between daily oral hygiene and dental health was understood by physicians but had not reached the general population in a form that changed behavior.

The transformation happened through advertising. Colgate, founded in 1806 as a soap and candle company and not selling toothpaste until 1873, was an early participant in the campaign to establish tooth brushing as a daily necessity. But the most powerful driver was a 1910s advertising campaign for a competing product, Pepsodent, created by the copywriter Claude Hopkins, who deployed the concept of the "film" on teeth - a sticky coating visible if you ran your tongue across your teeth - as a trigger for disgust and therefore for purchase. The campaign was spectacularly successful, and daily brushing rates in the United States rose substantially over the following decade.

Behavioral economics would later describe what Hopkins had done: he connected the product to a cue (the tongue-feel of the film), embedded a routine (brushing), and created a reward (the clean feeling after). The dental evidence for the campaign's claims was partly manufactured. The behavioral mechanism was completely real.

Nylon and the second transformation

Animal-hair toothbrush bristles had two persistent problems. They retained moisture, which encouraged bacterial growth in the bristles themselves. And they were expensive, because they required sourcing, cleaning, and processing animal material at scale.

DuPont's development of nylon in the late 1930s solved both problems. Nylon bristles dried quickly, resisted bacterial growth better than animal hair, could be produced synthetically at consistent quality, and were cheaper. The first nylon-bristle toothbrush, produced in 1938 under the name "Dr. West's Miracle Tuft Toothbrush" by the Prophylactic Brush Company, replaced animal hair immediately in the American market.

What completed the transition was the Second World War. The U.S. military issued nylon toothbrushes to soldiers and required daily brushing as a hygiene standard. When those soldiers came home in 1945 and 1946, they brought the daily brushing habit with them. The habit diffused through American households across the late 1940s and 1950s and became the norm.

From Babylonian clay tablets to military hygiene regulations, the toothbrush's history took roughly four thousand five hundred years and passed through at least four civilizations before it arrived at the object you keep next to your sink. The Tang dynasty monks who used pig-bristle brushes on bamboo handles in the 8th century would recognize the form if not the materials. William Addis, who made a business out of selling the design in quantity, was a capable entrepreneur working twelve hundred years after the hard part had been done.

The next time someone repeats the story about Newgate Prison, you can answer that the toothbrush was already old when England was young, and that the man who kept his teeth cleanest in the ancient world was probably doing it with a Salvadora persica twig in the shadow of a Babylonian ziggurat.