George Washington's false teeth were never wooden, but Japan's really were
George Washington lost his first adult tooth at 22 and had one left when he became president. Contrary to legend, none of his false teeth contained wood; his presidential set was carved from hippopotamus and elephant ivory held with gold springs. Genuinely wooden dentures did exist, though, carved by Japanese craftsmen from the early 16th century.
The Japanese method was remarkably advanced. A dentist pressed softened beeswax into the mouth for an impression, filled it with harder wax to make a model, and carved a wooden plate to match. Later versions fitted human teeth or teeth sculpted from ivory, horn or a soft stone called pagodite. Their broad bases stayed put by adhesion, a principle Western dentistry did not match until the late 18th century, and the Japanese kept using them until the country opened to the West in the 19th century.
Replacement teeth are far older still. Around the 7th century BC the Etruscans of northern Italy bound human or animal teeth together with gold bands, and the Romans probably picked up the idea. In 1728 Pierre Fauchard described sets on metal frames with teeth cut from animal bone. Alexis Duchâteau made the first porcelain dentures around 1770, and his former assistant Nicholas Dubois de Chemant won a British patent in 1791, buying most of his porcelain paste from Wedgwood.
Washington's own history carries a darker detail. Before his ivory set, he had one made with real human teeth, probably bought in 1784 from enslaved people at Mount Vernon. Four of his sets came from a dentist named John Greenwood.
Materials kept changing. Samuel Stockton, a goldsmith, mounted porcelain teeth on 18-carat gold plates from 1820; hardened rubber called Vulcanite took over from the 1850s; and in the 20th century acrylic arrived. Most dentures today are acrylic, tinted to look like gums, with synthetic fibres added to mimic tiny blood vessels. The need has shrunk dramatically: in Britain, 79 percent of people aged 65 to 74 had no natural teeth in 1968, but only 36 percent by 1998.
Source: Dentures
