Who Was The First To Advocate For Water-Saving Showers?

One of the most eternal bathroom debates is whether it is better to have a bath or a shower, and whilst with the right fittings and the right tub you can comfortably have both, most people tend to have a preference for one or the other.

Whilst the pendulum has shifted towards showers in recent years given that energy-saving power showers use less water and are typically more hygienic, this is far from a new opinion.

In fact, a century after the invention of the modern shower, an inventor and doctor strongly advocated for showers and in doing so changed how we clean ourselves ever since.

Cheaper And Cleaner

Because of the nature of how showers work, giving a precise date of invention depends largely on your definition of a shower, with a date either at the end of the 19th century or the beginning of Earth itself.

Waterfalls became quickly used as natural showers by early humans, and the concept was replicated with rudimentary wet rooms in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia where servants would pour jugs of water over their rich employers.

These would be replaced by communal shower rooms used by the Ancient Greeks and Romans, powered by the elaborate aqueduct systems used to provide drinking water and sewage systems.

Whilst the Romans did not invent the shower by any stretch of the imagination, they were the ones to spread it far and wide, through the length and breadth of the Roman Empire, building the architecture and infrastructure to make running showers possible and enjoyable for people from all parts of society at the time.

After the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 AD, these shower systems were quickly dismantled or broken down, and the knowledge and apparatus to maintain them were lost when Rome fell. 

By the time of the fall of Constantinople and the end of the last vestiges of the Roman Empire, the shower was a long-distant memory and ended up as one of many pieces of lost technology that disappeared for over a thousand years.

However, whilst a lot of technologies would re-emerge during the Renaissance, the shower would take a lot longer, in no small part because it would take until the 19th century for plumbing systems to reach a greater level of sophistication than the aqueducts.

The first showers, such as William Feetham’s 1767 design and the mysterious English Regency shower of 1810 would take quite a long time to get popular because they needed to be manually filled up each time it was used.

This would eventually be rectified starting in the mid-19th century as indoor plumbing would become treated as a necessity to help prevent the spread of water-borne diseases, and as a consequence ensure that millions of people had access to running water for the first time.

Running water meant that showers no longer needed buckets of water to fill it up by hand, and as a result started to get popular, although not initially to the point that they supplanted the popularity or ease of access of baths.

This started to change in an unlikely place due to a rather unlikely innovator.

Born in Saint-Saire, France in 1836, Francois Merry Delabost was a surgeon-general at Bonne Nouvelle prison when he advocated for the replacement of individual tin baths, with a set of communal showers for prisoners to use, under the logic that it saved water and was more hygienic than baths could be.

Eventually, word of this invention spread to the French Army, and they asked him to supervise the installation of hot showers in army barracks and garrisons starting in the 1870s.

The system was highly efficient; a steam engine could provide hot water in just five minutes, and up to eight people could simultaneously wash themselves with just twenty litres of water.

By comparison, according to the Environment Agency, a bath uses 80 litres of water on average, whilst a modern power shower (that does not use a water-saving system such as aeration) uses 15 litres every minute for a single person.

This system was very quickly adopted, first by the Prussian Army (now part of Germany) in 1879, before spreading throughout Europe, both in barracks and prisons.

The scope of this influence did not stop there, however. Dr Delabost’s innovation was then installed in a public bathhouse in Vienna (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) in 1887, before spreading throughout France and later the rest of the world.

Ultimately, whilst the shower is so ancient an invention it is more an adaptation of a natural phenomenon, it took a French doctor to make the case for why it should be in every home.