Dental Information » False Teeth
False Teeth
Replacements for decayed or lost teeth have been produced for millennia. The Etruscans made skillfully designed false teeth out of ivory and bone, secured by gold bridgework, as early as 700 B.C. Unfortunately, this level of sophistication for false teeth was not regained until the 1800s.
During medieval times, the practice of dentistry was largely confined to tooth extraction; replacement was seldom considered. Gaps between teeth were expected, even among the rich and powerful. Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) filled the holes in her mouth with cloth to improve her appearance in public.
When false teeth were installed, they were hand-carved and tied in place with silk threads. If not enough natural teeth remained, anchoring false ones was difficult. People who wore full sets of dentures had to remove them when they wanted to eat. Upper and lower plates fit poorly and were held together with steel springs; disconcertingly, the set of teeth could spring suddenly out of the wearer's mouth. Even George Washington (1732-1799) suffered terribly from tooth loss and ill-fitting dentures. The major obstacles to progress were finding suitable materials for false teeth, making accurate measurements of patient's mouth, and getting the teeth to stay in place. These problems began to be solved during the 1700s.
Since antiquity, the most common material for false teeth was animal bone or ivory, especially from elephants or hippopotami. Human teeth were also used, pulled from the dead or sold by poor people from their own mouths. These kinds of false teeth soon rotted, turning brown and rancid. Rich people preferred teeth of silver, gold, mother of pearl, or agate.
In 1774 the French pharmacist Duchateau enlisted the help of the prominent dentist Dubois de Chemant to design hard-baked, rot-proof porcelain dentures. De Chemant patented his improved version of these "Mineral Paste Teeth" in 1789 and took them with him when he emigrated to England shortly afterward. The single porcelain tooth held in place by an imbedded platinum pin was invented in 1808 by the Italian dentist Giuseppangelo Fonzi. Inspired by his dislike of handling dead people's teeth, Claudius Ash of London, England, invented an improved porcelain tooth around 1837.
Porcelain teeth came to the United States in 1817 via the French dentist A. A. Planteau. The famous artist Charles Peale (1741-1847) began baking mineral teeth in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1822. Commercial manufacture of porcelain teeth in the United States was begun, also in Philadelphia, around 1825 by Samuel Stockton. In 1844 Stockton's nephew founded the S.S. White Company, which greatly improved the design of artificial teeth and marketed them on a large scale.
Fit and comfort, too, gradually improved. The German Philip Pfaff (1715-1767) introduced plaster of pairs impressions of the patient's mouth in 1756. Daniel Evans of Philadelphia also devised a method of accurate mouth measurement in 1836. The real breakthrough came with Charles Goodyear's discovery of vulcanized rubber in 1839. This cheap, easy-to-work material could be molded to fit the mouth and made a good base to hold false teeth. Well-mounted dentures could now be made cheaply. The timing was fortuitous. Horace Wells (1815-1848) had just introduced painless tooth extraction using nitrous oxide. The number of people having teeth removed skyrocketed, creating a great demand for good, affordable dentures, which Goodyear's invention made possible.
After 1870, another cheap base, celluloid, was tried in place of rubber, but it too had drawbacks. Today dentures are either plastic or ceramic .
Source: Travers, B., ed., World of Invention, Gale, (1994) pp. 238-239.