You’ve heard the expression “the greatest thing since sliced bread.” But what makes sliced bread so special? To understand the importance of the humble bread slicer, we have to travel back to 1927 when the first bread slicer was created by amateur inventor Otto Rohwedder. After hearing families complain about the amount of time they spent slicing bread Rohwedder designed a machine that would do the job for them.

At the time most bakers refused to slice bread in advance because it would go stale. Rohwedder’s machine not only cut bread into perfectly even slices but wrapped them in wax paper to preserve freshness.

The first loaf of machine sliced bread was sold in 1928. According to Priceonomics just five years later, 80% of commercially sold bread in America was sliced. To homemakers, sliced bread was more than a small convenience.

In a New York Times editorial, one woman wrote: For [family] lunches I must cut by hand at least twenty slices, for two sandwiches apiece. I should like to let you know how important sliced bread is to the morale and saneness of a household. At a time when bread made up close to a third of the average American’s diet access to pre-packed sliced bread meant hours of saved food preparation time. Sliced bread meant freedom. 

source: Mentalfloss 

Since the dawn of time, people have found nifty ways to clean up after the bathroom act. The most common solution was simply to grab what was at hand: coconuts, shells, snow, moss, hay, leaves, grass, corncobs, sheep’s wool—and, later, thanks to the printing press – newspapers, magazines, and pages of books. The ancient Greeks used clay and stone. The Romans, sponges and salt water. But the idea of a commercial product designed solely to wipe one’s bum? That started about 150 years ago, right here in the U.S.A. In less than a century, Uncle Sam’s marketing genius turned something disposable into something indispensable.

HOW TOILET PAPER GOT ON A ROLL

The first products designed specifically to wipe one’s nethers were aloe-infused sheets of manila hemp dispensed from Kleenex-like boxes. They were invented in 1857 by a New York entrepreneur named Joseph Gayetty, who claimed his sheets prevented hemorrhoids. Gayetty was so proud of his therapeutic bathroom paper that he had his name printed on each sheet. But his success was limited. Americans soon grew accustomed to wiping with the Sears Roebuck catalog, and they saw no need to spend money on something that came in the mail for free.

Toilet paper took its next leap forward in 1890, when two brothers named Clarence and E. Irvin Scott popularized the concept of toilet paper on a roll. The Scotts’ brand became more successful than Gayetty’s medicated wipes, in part because they built a steady trade selling toilet paper to hotels and drugstores. But it was still an uphill battle to get the public to openly buy the product, largely because Americans remained embarrassed by bodily functions. In fact, the Scott brothers were so ashamed of the nature of their work that they didn’t take proper credit for their innovation until 1902.

“No one wanted to ask for it by name,” says Dave Praeger, author of Poop Culture: How America Is Shaped by Its Grossest National Product. “It was so taboo that you couldn’t even talk about the product.” By 1930, the German paper company Hakle began using the tag line, “Ask for a roll of Hakle and you won’t have to say toilet paper!”

As time passed, toilet tissues slowly became an American staple. But widespread acceptance of the product didn’t officially occur until a new technology demanded it.

At the end of the 19th century, more and more homes were being built with sit-down flush toilets tied to indoor plumbing systems. And because people required a product that could be flushed away with minimal damage to the pipes, corncobs and moss no longer cut it. In no time, toilet paper ads boasted that the product was recommended by both doctors and plumbers.

THE STRENGTH OF GOING SOFT

In the early 1900s, toilet paper was still being marketed as a medicinal item. But in 1928, the Hoberg Paper Company tried a different tack. On the advice of its ad men, the company introduced a brand called Charmin and fitted the product with a feminine logo that depicted a beautiful woman. The genius of the campaign was that by evincing softness and femininity, the company could avoid talking about toilet paper’s actual purpose. Charmin was enormously successful, and the tactic helped the brand survive the Great Depression. (It also helped that, in 1932, Charmin began marketing economy-size packs of four rolls.) Decades later, the dainty ladies were replaced with babies and bear cubs—advertising vehicles that still stock the aisles today.

By the 1970s, America could no longer conceive of life without toilet paper. Case in point: In December 1973, Tonight Show host Johnny Carson joked about a toilet paper shortage during his opening monologue. But America didn’t laugh. Instead, TV watchers across the country ran out to their local grocery stores and bought up as much of the stuff as they could. In 1978, a TV Guide poll named Mr. Whipple—the affable grocer who implored customers, “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin”—the third best-known man in America, behind former President Richard Nixon and the Rev. Billy Graham.

Currently, the United States spends more than $6 billion a year on toilet tissue – more than any other nation in the world. Americans, on average, use 57 squares a day and 50 lbs. a year.

Even still, the toilet paper market in the United States has largely plateaued. The real growth in the industry is happening in developing countries. There, it’s booming. Toilet paper revenues in Brazil alone have more than doubled since 2004. The radical upswing in sales is believed to be driven by a combination of changing demographics, social expectations, and disposable income.

“The spread of globalization can kind of be measured by the spread of Western bathroom practices,” says Praeger. When average citizens in a country start buying toilet paper, wealth and consumerism have arrived. It signifies that people not only have extra cash to spend, but they’ve also come under the influence of Western marketing.

AMERICA WITHOUT TOILET PAPER

Even as the markets boom in developing nations, toilet paper manufacturers find themselves needing to charge more per roll to make a profit. That’s because production costs are rising. During the past few years, pulp has become more expensive, energy costs are rising, and even water is becoming scarce. Toilet paper companies may need to keep hiking up their prices. The question is, if toilet paper becomes a luxury item, can Americans live without it?

The truth is that we did live without it, for a very long time. And even now, a lot of people do. In Japan, the Washlet—a toilet that comes equipped with a bidet and an air-blower—is growing increasingly popular. And all over the world, water remains one of the most common methods of self-cleaning. Many places in India, the Middle East, and Asia, for instance, still depend on a bucket and a spigot. But as our economy continues to circle the drain, will Americans part with their beloved toilet paper in order to adopt more money-saving measures? Or will we keep flushing our cash away? Praeger, for one, believes a toilet-paper apocalypse is hardly likely. After all, the American marketing machine is a powerful thing.

source: mentalfloss

Go through the text again and check whether you have understood the main points with the help of these questions.

1. What was printed on the first toilet paper?

2. Why wasn’t it very successful?

3. Why was toilet paper on a roll more successful?

4. Why didn’t the public like it first?

5. How did it become more popular at the end of the 19th century?

6. What helped a company to sell more toilet paper at the time of the Great Depression?

7. What was the result of a joke about toilet paper shortage on TV?

8. What is the market for toilet paper like in the US and elsewhere.

9. What does it show if people start buying toilet paper in a country?

10. What problems is the toilet paper industry facing?

Key:

1. The name of the inventor.

2. Because people didn’t want to spend money and used free catalogs instead.

3. Because it was sold to hotels and drugstores regularly.

4. Because they were embarrassed by bodily functions and didn’t want to ask for it by name.

5. As more and more flush toilets were being built.

6. Alogo with a beautiful woman and economy-size packs of four rolls.

7. People ran to the stores to buy as much toilet paper as they could.

8. Inthe US it’s stagnating but in developing countries it’s growing.

9. They have extra money to spend and they are under the influence of Western marketing.

10. Production costs are rising and they have to charge more for their products.

There are many regional British and American accents, so the terms “British accent” and “American accent” are gross oversimplifications. What a lot of Americans think of as the typical “British accent” is what’s called standardized Received Pronunciation (RP), also known as Public School English or BBC English. What most people think of as an “American accent,” is the General American (GenAm) accent, sometimes called a “newscaster accent” or “Network English.”

When English colonists established their first permanent settlement in the New World at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, they were sounding very much like their countrymen back home. By the time we had recordings of both Americans and Brits some three centuries later (the first audio recording of a human voice was made in 1860), the sounds of English as spoken in the Old World and New World were very different. We’re looking at a silent gap of some 300 years, so we can’t say exactly when Americans first started to sound noticeably different from the British.

As for the “why,” though, one big factor in the divergence of the accents is rhotacism. The General American accent is rhotic and speakers pronounce the r in words such as hard. The BBC-type British accent is non-rhotic, and speakers don’t pronounce the r, leaving hard sounding more like hahd. Before and during the American Revolution, the English, both in England and in the colonies, mostly spoke with a rhotic accent.  

Around the turn of 19th century, not long after the revolution, non-rhotic speech took off in southern England, especially among the upper and upper-middle classes. It was a signifier of class and status. This posh accent was standardized as Received Pronunciation and taught widely by pronunciation tutors to people who wanted to learn to speak fashionably. Because the Received Pronunciation accent was regionally “neutral” and easy to understand, it spread across England and the empire through the armed forces, the civil service and, later, the BBC.

Across the pond, many former colonists also adopted and imitated Received Pronunciation to show off their status. This happened especially in the port cities that still had close trading ties with England — Boston, Richmond, Charleston, and Savannah. From the Southeastern coast, the RP sound spread through much of the South along with plantation culture and wealth.

After industrialization and the Civil War and well into the 20th century, political and economic power largely passed from the port cities and cotton regions — New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, etc. The British elite had much less cultural and linguistic influence in these places, which were mostly populated by the Scots-Irish and other settlers from Northern Britain, and rhotic English was still spoken there. As industrialists in these cities became the self-made economic and political elites of the Industrial Era, Received Pronunciation lost its status and fizzled out in the U.S.  

Of course, with the speed that language changes, a General American accent is now hard to find in much of this region, with New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Chicago developing their own unique accents, and GenAm now considered generally confined to a small section of the Midwest.

As mentioned above, there are regional exceptions to both these general American and British sounds. Some of the accents of southeastern England, plus the accents of Scotland and Ireland, are rhotic. Some areas of the American Southeast, plus Boston, are non-rhotic.

source: Mentalfloss

Let’s go through the main points of the story again but now you have to provide the missing words from the original text.

The language the first British …………… (1) spoke in America was not really different from the English spoken in the Old World. After 300 years, when the first audio recordings were made, however, American English was …………… (2) different from British English. One of the main differences is that Americans …………… (3) the r in words like hard while British people don’t. This …………… (4) accent was used mainly by the upper classes and it soon …………… (5) across England. It was also …………… (6) by Americans to …………… their status (7) but later as the British elite had less cultural and linguistic …………… (8) on America and with the rise of the new …………… (9) American elite it lost its status and fizzled out. There is a wide variety of American accents as well and General American accent is only spoken in a small …………… (10) of the Midwest.

Key:

1. colonists

2. noticeably

3. pronounce

4. posh

5. spread

6. adopted / imitated

7. show off

8. influence

9. self-made

10. section