Copper palace pipes were already bathing tech by 3300 BC
A bathtub holds water for human or animal washing; modern shells use acrylic, porcelain-enamelled steel or iron, or fibreglass-reinforced polyester. Documented early plumbing reaches toward 3300 BC with copper water pipes under a palace in ancient Europe.
Bathtubs come in two broad traditions: the shallow, long Western tub in which the bather lies back, and the short, deep Eastern tub, the Japanese furo, in which the bather sits upright. Modern tubs have overflow and waste drains on the right, left, centre or reversible, and may carry their own hot and cold valves. Most are now built in, though they have also been freestanding or sunken, and until acrylic thermoforming allowed new shapes most Western tubs resembled a stock tank shaped like a chaise longue.
The clawfoot design began in the Netherlands and reached England as hydrotherapy came into fashion, where early tubs were cast iron or tin and copper with paint that peeled over time. Around 1850, firms in Austria and Germany began coating iron and steel sheet with vitreous enamel on a commercial scale, and one early enamelled bathtub was a cast-iron horse trough given a porcelain coating. Clawfoot tubs, luxuries of the late 19th century, stayed popular from the 1880s to the 1930s until post-war influenza fears made the hard-to-clean space underneath look like a germ trap.
In 1912 the Taft administration broke up the porcelain trust, a price-fixing cartel that used patent licences to control the cost of toilets and bathroom fixtures. The Crane Company brought coloured bathroom fixtures to the American market in 1928, and in 1979 James R. Wheeler and his brother Richard adapted acrylic from outdoor spas, working with Spartech Plastics to develop the co-extruded acrylic bathtub.
Pedestal tubs, often seen as art deco, have antecedents on Crete around 1000 BC. Whirlpool tubs caught on in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, and the name jacuzzi comes from the plumbing firm Jacuzzi, which launched its Spa Whirlpool in 1968. Soft foam tubs, available since the 1970s, are aimed at children and the elderly to reduce injuries from falls.
Source: Bathtub
