The History of Baths

From hand-pumps to Power Showers

Together, household plumbing and electricity produced the conditions in which the shower could become an everyday appliance. Yet despite these, it was the availability of the electric wall mounted shower in the seventies that made the big difference in working class homes.

During the 1980’s and 1990’s separate, stand-alone shower cubicles were included as a regular fixture in new homes. Bathrooms often en suite had a shower cubicle but no bath. Within these spaces, the power-shower, incorporating a pump to increase the force of the water on the body has become popular.

The shower has been domesticated because of technological innovation from the communal arrangements of ancient Greece, to the bathing structure in quasi clinics normal in early industrial society, to the private domestic arrangements of today. It has become normal in the twenty first Century to look on the body as something which requires care to regenerate in bathing and protection against disease.

The en-suite bathroom was associated a particular kind of luxury in British homes late in the twentieth Century though it was a common feature of American hotels during the early part of the 20th Century. They contained a many jetted fibreglass shower as did the earliest hydrotherapeutic models to be found in luxury houses as early as the 1880’s. Changes in government policy as well as social history have been agents of change in how we view therapy, hygiene and health. Shower and bathing products have become highly visible and they embody an element of personal care, comfort, and domestic convenience.

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