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A roll of toilet paper.

Toilet paper is a soft paper product (tissue paper) used to maintain personal hygiene after human defecation or urination. However, it can also be used for other purposes such as blowing one's nose when one has a cold or absorbing common spills around the house, although paper towels are more used for the latter. It differs in composition somewhat from facial tissue: most modern toilet paper in the developed world is designed to decompose in septic tanks, whereas some other bathroom and facial tissues are not. Most septic tank manufacturers advise against using paper products that are non-septic tank safe. Different names, euphemisms and slang terms are used for toilet paper in countries around the world, including "bum wad", "loo roll/paper," "bog roll," "toilet roll," "dunny roll/paper," "bathroom/toilet tissue," "4 inch" "TP", "arsewipe", or just "tissue." Toilet paper can be one-, two- or three-ply, or even thicker, meaning that it is either a single sheet or two, three sheets placed back-to-back to make it thicker, softer, stronger and more absorbent. Color, scents, and embossing may also be added, but fragrances sometimes cause problems for consumers who are allergic to perfumes. The biggest difference between toilet papers is the distinction between virgin paper products, which are formed directly from chipped wood, and those made from recycled paper. Most toilet paper, however, whether virgin or recycled, is wrapped around cardboard cylinders.

History[link]

Anal cleansing intruments known as Chuugi from the Nara period (710 to 784) in Japan. The modern rolls in the background are for size comparison.

Although paper had been known as a wrapping and padding material in China since the 2nd century BC,^[1] the first documented use of toilet paper in human history dates back to the 6th century AD, in early medieval China.^[2] In 589 AD the scholar-official Yan Zhitui (531–591) wrote about the use of toilet paper:

"Paper on which there are quotations or commentaries from the Five Classics or the names of sages, I dare not use for toilet purposes".^[2]

During the later Tang Dynasty (618–907 AD), an Arab traveler to China in the year 851 AD remarked:

"They [the Chinese] are not careful about cleanliness, and they do not wash themselves with water when they have done their necessities; but they only wipe themselves with paper."^[2]

During the early 14th century, it was recorded that in modern-day Zhejiang province alone there was an annual manufacturing of toilet paper amounting in ten million packages of 1,000 to 10,000 sheets of toilet paper each.^[2] During the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644 AD), it was recorded in 1393 that an annual supply of 720,000 sheets of toilet paper (two by three feet in size) were produced for the general use of the imperial court at the capital of Nanjing.^[2] From the records of the Imperial Bureau of Supplies of that same year, it was also recorded that for Emperor Hongwu's imperial family alone, there were 15,000 sheets of special soft-fabric toilet paper made, and each sheet of toilet paper was even perfumed.^[2]

Elsewhere, wealthy people wiped themselves with wool, lace or hemp, while less wealthy people used their hand when defecating into rivers, or cleaned themselves with various materials such as rags, wood shavings, leaves, grass, hay, stone, sand, moss, water, snow, maize, ferns, may apple plant husks, fruit skins, or seashells, and corncobs, depending upon the country and weather conditions or social customs. In Ancient Rome, a sponge on a stick was commonly used, and, after usage, placed back in a bucket of saltwater. Several talmudic sources indicating ancient Jewish practice refer to the use of small pebbles, often carried in a special bag, and also to the use of dry grass and of the smooth edges of broken pottery jugs (e.g., Shabbat 81a, 82a, Yevamot 59b). These are all cited in the classic Biblical and Talmudic Medicine by the German physician Julius Preuss (Eng. trans. Sanhedrin Press, 1978).

A print by William Hogarth entitled A Just View of the British Stage from 1724 depicting Robert Wilks, Colley Cibber, and Barton Booth rehearsing a pantomime play with puppets enacting a prison break down a privy. The "play" is composed of nothing but toilet paper, and the scripts for Hamlet, inter al., are toilet paper.

The 16th century French satirical writer François Rabelais, in Chapter XIII of Book 1 of his novel-sequence Gargantua and Pantagruel, has his character Gargantua investigate a great number of ways of cleansing oneself after defecating. Gargantua dismisses the use of paper as ineffective, rhyming that: "Who his foul tail with paper wipes, Shall at his ballocks leave some chips." (Sir Thomas Urquhart's 1653 English translation). He concludes that "the neck of a goose, that is well downed" provides an optimum cleansing medium.^[3]

In many parts of the world, especially where toilet paper or the necessary plumbing for disposal may be unavailable or unaffordable, toilet paper is not used. Also, in many parts of the world such as India, people consider using water a much cleaner and more sanitary practice than using paper.^[4] Cleansing is then performed with other methods or materials, such as water, for example using a bidet, a Lota, rags, sand, leaves (including seaweed), corn cobs, animal furs, sticks or hands, afterwards hands are washed with soap.

As a commodity[link]

"Le Troubadour" (French) - 1960s package of toilet paper

Joseph Gayetty is widely credited with being the inventor of modern commercially available toilet paper in the United States. Gayetty's paper, first introduced in 1857, was available as late as the 1920s. Gayetty's Medicated Paper was sold in packages of flat sheets, watermarked with the inventor's name. Original advertisements for the product used the tagline "The greatest necessity of the age! Gayetty's medicated paper for the water-closet."

Seth Wheeler of Albany, New York, obtained the earliest United States patents for toilet paper and dispensers, the types of which eventually were in common usage in that country, in 1883.^[5]

Moist toilet paper was first introduced in the United Kingdom by Andrex in the 1990s, and in the United States by Kimberly-Clark in 2001 (in lieu of bidets which are rare in those countries.) It is designed to clean better than dry toilet paper after defecation, and may be useful for women during menstruation.

Twenty-six billion rolls of toilet paper, worth about US$2.4 billion, are sold yearly in America alone. Americans use an average of 23.6 rolls per capita a year.^[6]

Description[link]

Toilet paper is available in several types of paper, a variety of patterns, decorations, and textures and may be moistened or perfumed. The average measures of a modern roll of toilet paper is ~10 cm (3 15/16 in.) wide, ø 12 cm (4 23/32 in.) and weighs about 227 grams (8 oz.).^[7]

Materials[link]

Toilet paper products vary greatly in the distinguishing technical factors: sizes, weights, roughness, softness, chemical residues, "finger-breakthrough" resistance, water-absorption, etc. The larger companies have very detailed, scientific market surveys to determine which marketing sectors require/demand which of the many technical qualities. Modern toilet paper may have a light coating of aloe or lotion or wax worked into the paper to reduce roughness.

Quality is usually determined by the number of plies (stacked sheets), coarseness, and durability. Low grade institutional toilet paper is typically of the lowest grade of paper, has only one or two plies, is very coarse and sometimes contains small amounts of embedded unbleached/unpulped paper. Mid-grade two ply is somewhat textured to provide some softness and is somewhat stronger. Premium toilet paper may have lotion and wax and has two to four plies of very finely pulped paper. If it is marketed as "luxury", it may be quilted or rippled (embossed), perfumed, colored or patterned, medicated (with anti-bacterial chemicals), or treated with aloe, etc.

In order to advance decomposition of the paper in septic tanks or drainage, the paper used has shorter fibres than facial tissue or writing paper. The manufacturer tries to reach an optimal balance between rapid decomposition (which requires shorter fibres) and sturdiness (which requires longer fibres).

A German quip says that the toilet paper of Nazi Germany was so rough and scratchy that it was almost unusable, so many people used old issues of the Völkischer Beobachter instead because the paper was softer.^[8]

Color and design[link]

Colored toilet paper in colors such as pink, lavender, light blue, light green, purple, green, and light yellow (so that one could choose a color of toilet paper that matched or complemented the color of one's bathroom) was commonly sold in the United States in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Today, plain unpatterned colored toilet paper has been mostly replaced by patterned toilet paper, normally white, with decorative patterns or designs in various colors and different sizes depending on the brand.

Installation[link]

Dispensers[link]

A toilet roll holder, also known as a toilet paper dispenser, is an item that holds a roll of toilet paper. There are at least seven types of holders:

1. A horizontal piece of wire mounted on a hinge, hanging from a door or wall.
2. A horizontal axle recessed in the wall.
3. A vertical axle recessed in the wall
4. A horizontal axle mounted on a freestanding frame.
5. A freestanding vertical pole on a base.
6. A wall mounted dispensing unit, usually containing more than one roll. This is used in the commercial / away from home marketplace.
7. A wall mounted dispensing unit with tissue interfolded in a "S" type leave so the user can extract the tissue one sheet at a time.

Orientation[link]

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2011)

There are two choices of orientation when using a holder with a horizontal axle parallel to the wall: the toilet paper may hang over or under the roll. The choice is largely a matter of personal preference, dictated by habit. In surveys of American consumers and of bath and kitchen specialists, 60-70% of respondents prefer over.

Decoration[link]

Toilegami refers to toilet paper origami. Like table napkins, some fancy Japanese hotels fold the first squares of toilet paper on its dispenser to be presented in a fashionable way.^[9]

Mechanics[link]

This section requires expansion.

Alexander Balankin and coauthors have studied the behavior of toilet paper under tensile stress^[10][11] and during wetting and burning.^[12]

Toilet paper has been used in physics education to demonstrate the concepts of torque, moment of inertia, and angular momentum;^[13][14][15] and the conservation of momentum and energy.^[16]

Usage[link]

This section requires expansion.

Environmental considerations[link]

One tree produces about 100 pounds (45 kg) of toilet paper and about 83 million rolls are produced per day.^[7] However, global toilet paper production consumes just 27,000 trees daily.^[17]

The average American uses 50 pounds (23 kg) of tissue paper per year which is 50% more than the average of Western countries or Japan.^[18] The higher usage in America may be explained by the fact that in many non-American countries people utilize bidets or spray hoses to clean themselves.^[19] Millions of trees are harvested in North America and in Latin American countries leaving ecological footprint concerns.^[20] Americans also use "toilet paper" for industrial purposes such as oil filters,^[21] which may distort the usage statistics.

As of 2009, between 25% and 50% of the toilet paper used in the United States comes from tree farms in the U.S. and South America, with most of the rest coming from second growth forests, and only a small percentage coming from virgin forests.^[6]

According to a news report by The Epoch Times in 2004, 37.5% of toilet paper tested from Guangdong and Jiangsu provinces showed high levels of bacteria commonly found in human waste. A manager from one of the agencies involved in testing, Guangdong Consumer Associates, blamed "unsanitary raw materials used in production" for the high bacteria counts. Chinese hospital experts have warned that use of contaminated toilet paper can result in skin and gynecological infections.^[22][23][24]

See also[link]

	Book: Toilet Paper
Wikipedia books are collections of articles that can be downloaded or ordered in print.

• Faeces
• Handle-o-Meter
• Hygiene
• Paper
• Toilet
• Toilet paper in the United States
• Toilet paper orientation

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Balankin, Alexander S.; Matamoros, Daniel Morales (2002), "Some new features of interface roughness dynamics in paper wetting, burning and rupturing experiments", in Miroslav Michal Novak, Emergent Nature: Patterns, Growth and Scaling in the Sciences, pp. 345–356, DOI:10.1142/9789812777720_0031, http://www.mfractal.esimez.ipn.mx/integrantes/ab/publicaciones/2002_1.pdf, retrieved 27 July 2010 
• Balankin, Alexander S.; Susarrey Huerta, Orlando; Bravo, Armando (27 November 2001), "Self-affine nature of the stress-strain behavior of thin fiber networks", Phys. Rev. E (American Physical Society) 64 (6), Bibcode 2001PhRvE..64f6131B, DOI:10.1103/PhysRevE.64.066131, http://www.mfractal.esimez.ipn.mx/integrantes/ab/publicaciones/2001_1.pdf, retrieved 27 July 2010 
• Balankin, Alexander S.; Susarrey Huerta, Orlando; Urriolagoitia Calderón, Guillermo; Hernández, Luis H. (20 May 2002), "Self-affine nature of the stress-strain behavior of an elastic fractal network", Physics Letters A (Elsevier) 297 (5–6): 376–386, DOI:10.1016/S0375-9601(02)00427-9, http://www.mfractal.esimez.ipn.mx/integrantes/ab/publicaciones/2002_2.pdf, retrieved 27 July 2010 
• Ehrlich, Robert (1997), "5.9 Dropping two rolls of toilet paper", Why Toast Lands Jelly-Side Down: Zen and the Art of Physics Demonstrations, Princeton University Press, pp. 97–98, ISBN 0-691-02891-5 
• Goodwin, Peter (1985), Physics can be fun: a sourcebook of practical problems, J. Weston Walch, pp. 64–69, ISBN 978-0-8251-0418-3 
• Harkay, J. Russell (2006), "Roll Out: Toilet Paper Physics", Phenomenal Physics: A Guided Inquiry Approach (3rd ed.), Lulu.com, pp. 135–140, ISBN 978-1-4116-8882-7 
• Needham, Joseph (1986). Science and Civilization in China: Volume 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 1, Paper and Printing. Taipei: Caves Books, Ltd.
• Walker, Jearl (1975), The Flying Circus of Physics: With Answers (1st ed.), Wiley, pp. 32, 235, ISBN 978-0-471-76273-7 

Further reading[link]

• De Beaumont, Sally; Amoret Tanner, Maurice Rickards (2000), Encyclopedia of Ephemera, UK: Routledge, pp. 190–191, ISBN 0-415-92648-3 
• Knuth, Donald E. (October 1984), "The Toilet Paper Problem", The American Mathematical Monthly 91 (8): 465–470, DOI:10.2307/2322567, JSTOR 2322567 

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Toilet paper

• Answers.com Information
• The Whole World Toilet Paper Museum