Industrial Age: American Use of Hot Tubs, Spas and Saunas

In the middle of the 19th-century, the home was organized according to its usefulness. Attitudes towards the role of bathrooms and hot tubs took another turn. Society was concerned with guarding against the spread of contagious diseases, and the most efficacious way to combat them was through commitment to personal hygiene. Mass showers were made available to the poorest classes. Around 1870, the prevailing practice was to disinfect kitchens and bathrooms, a consequence of new research attributing the cause of numerous diseases to germs, otherwise known as the germ theory of disease. Bathrooms became independent and isolated from the other rooms.

President Millard Fillmore installed the first bathtub in White House history in 1851— a move that was considered distinctly reprehensible, importing, as it did, ‘a monarchical luxury into the official residence of the Chief Executive of the Republic’. Even when running water became quite ubiquitous and its regular use accepted with equanimity it was seldom piped above the basement of a house, so that servants had to run up and downstairs with jugs of water, and baths and wash-basins were portable affairs in an astonishing number of shapes: slipper baths (preserving both warmth and decency as its name implies), sponge baths, lounge or full baths, sitting or sitz baths (strictly for the posterior), hip baths, fountain baths (like particularly forceful bidets), and traveling baths.

The revival of the Spa cult in the nineteenth century (its name is taken from the Belgian watering town of Spa), travelers’ tales of the Finnish Sauna, and the sun worshipping of the Swiss, began to popularize the idea of the home steam bath; which was sold in various portable and collapsible models. Perhaps, too, the Scandinavian ideal of full body exposure to freezing, tingling, cascading mountain streams was the precursor of that American love, the shower. Early shower arrangements began to appear towards the ratter half of the century, and were known initially as rain baths.By the 1880s, Americans were really beginning to show thier ascendancy in the hygienic stakes, which has earned them their reputation as the most scrubbed and tubbed nation in the world. Although the first actual bathrooms were far from ostentatious with their exposed pipes and scullery-like tiling, things were now beginning to change. During that prosperous period, not only did fixed plumbing begin to appear but also the bathroom became a status symbol. Although most bathrooms were still converted bedrooms, new houses were being designed with bathrooms of an equally extravagant size. They were full of stained glass, heavy curtains, paneled woodwork, rugs, chaises-lounges, and armchairs. Some people possessed hooded baths with shower cabinets encased in ebulliently carved mahogany, and all fittings were handsome and solid. The very rich, such as the Morgans, the Astors and the Vanderbilts, were building more and more luxuriously, with gold taps, nickel plated plumbing and baths carved out of solid blocks of marble. Mrs. Potter Falmer, that lady of splendid taste in Chicago, started a fashion for sunken, swan-shaped baths, oval basins and delicate flowery motifs on fixtures, and by 1900 even the patient and less-washed general public were being offered sunken hot tubs with ornamental tiles, followed by the more utilitarian enameled bath, making the old mahogany casing lined with lead sheeting, and iron, claw-footed, roll-rimmed hot tubs quite obsolete.

American hotels were a major influence in popularizing the smaller, functional hot tubs. As far back as 1829, the Tremont House Hotel in Boston opened with eight bathing rooms in its cellar, and inside water closets. In 1836, the Astor House opened in New York with 18 bathing rooms complete with piped hot water. In 1853, the Mount Vernon Hotel in Cape May, New Jersey, advertised a bath with hot and cold water for every bedroom. In 1906, the Ritz in Paris, better late than never, did the same. And in 1908, Ellsworth Statler opened his Buffalo Hotel with the slogan, “A room with a bath for a dollar and a half.” In the same year in England that great mansion of the Dukes of Devonshire, Chatsworth, still had only one bathroom.

Two world wars, the proliferation of skyscrapers and tall apartment houses, housing developments growth in population and increasing pressure on space, not to mention on decreasing staff, have all contributed in their way the functional improvement of the bathroom and the hot tub.