No matter who you are or where you’re from, I’m sure you certainly appreciate and use the toilet (probably on a daily basis). Along with this, we also have toilet paper which is important too, perhaps equally so. Both of these inventions definitely serve a purpose to put it one way.

Paper had been around for a while, but it took a little longer for proper toilet paper to be introduced. In the meantime, people would typically use a few different materials to wipe themselves with including straw, sticks of wood, leaves, moss, newspapers, food waste, seashells, sponges, grass, hay, stones, water, kitchen utensils, fabric, magazines, wood shavings, and animal fur/hide. The first non-_____1_____ toilet paper goes back to 1393 and was used solely by the upper classes of _____2_____ society.

American inventor and entrepreneur _____3_____ Gayetty manufactured what he called “_____4_____ paper for the water closet” in 1857. This product went on sale for $0.50 each in New York and came in a pack of _____5_____ sheets. Gayetty even told the public that his new fangled toilet paper would stop _____6_____. Rather than being on loose sheets, you could buy toilet paper fitted on a roll in 1879 thanks to British entrepreneur _____7_____ Alcock who came up with this idea. For the first few decades, toilet paper was quite _____8_____ to the touch. Things changed around 1930 when “______9_____-free toilet paper” was marketed and eventually sold.

The toilet and toilet paper are essential innovations as I’m sure you might agree. These inventions have made our bathroom routines far easier and less messy too. If one day the toilet paper was suddenly taken away from us, I would be willing to bet we would all notice its absence and miss it at least to some extent.