scrubbacious

My fascination with low tech is still sailing forward. The latest object of admiration for me is the wash cloth. Yes, a simple household wash cloth, frequently stored on a bathroom shelf. Now there's an object that didn't have to wait for the advent of electricity to get invented.

Which leaves me to wonder, who did invent it and when did they do it? Must've been many millenia ago, perhaps even before we humans first ventured Out of Africa.

So assuming that humans have been around for at least 50,000 years, it is only natural that one of the first ones had an impulse to free themselves of weeks of grime and mud for some special occasion. So what did they use? A leaf (maybe even a fig leaf?)? A squirrel pelt? Or, if they lived near the beach, a freshly scavenged sponge?

Since we don't have any good records of those early years, maybe I should just zoom ahead to somewhere in Egypt around 5000 B.C. Given how inventive those folks were, I'm sure at least one of them must have devoted him- or herself to devising the perfect wash cloth for some finicky and fussy pharoah or pharoah's wife. And I assume that the cloth was made either out of papyrus or cotton or crocodile skin since there was an abundance of all of them down at the river.

Well, whoever first got the patent on wash cloths, I can only thank them. They are such useful things. And not only in the bathtub. They are also perfect for a lot of other tasks. Cleaning the window, wiping the dust off the TV, cleaning up the jar of jelly dropped on the floor, substituting as a handkerchief to blow your nose in, wet and cool to place on your forehead during a spat of nausea, stuffing closed the mice hole in the pantry wall, and so on and so on, the list is virtually endless. Just think what life would be like without them.