The bidet takes its name from a French pony you straddle
Bidet is French for pony, and Old French bider meant to trot. The name came from the way users sit astride the basin, as though riding. Invented by French furniture makers in the late seventeenth century, the fixture is mandatory in Italian bathrooms yet remains a rarity across much of northern Europe and North America.
The earliest written mention dates from France in 1710, and Italy's from 1726. Maria Carolina of Austria, Queen of Naples and Sicily, asked for one at the Royal Palace of Caserta in the later eighteenth century, but the bidet did not catch on in Italy until after the Second World War. It began in the bedroom beside the chamber pot; improved plumbing had moved it into the bathroom by 1900. Among its early uses was contraception, a role it lost entirely once modern methods such as the pill arrived.
Habits split sharply by region. Italy and Portugal have required a bidet in new bathrooms since 1975, and in France 95% of households had one in the 1970s before the share fell to 42% by 1993. They are common across the Arab world, where Islamic rules call for washing with water, often via a hand-held spray called a shattaf. Finland, unusually for the Nordic region, favours bidet showers.
Japan reinvented the idea. The INAX Sanitarina 61 of 1967 was the first commercial electronic toilet with warm-water spray and drying, and in 1980 Toto launched a paperless toilet; by 2015 around 76% of Japanese homes had combination units. Modern versions add heated seats, remote controls, night lights and adjustable spray. Add-on seats that attach to an ordinary toilet have undercut traditional fixtures, and American interest rose when the coronavirus pandemic caused toilet paper shortages.
An American push came earlier. In 1965 the American Bidet Company offered an adjustable warm-water model, but its cost and floor space doomed it. The environmental case is simple: Scientific American reported that a nationwide US switch could save 15 million trees a year, and a wash uses only about half a litre of water.
Source: Bidet
