![]() Smithsonian They’re lighter than they look. ![]() Students bought dedicated “laundry cases” for these trips - not hampers but metal or fiber containers durable enough for repeated cross-country trips: ![]() This was economical back then because the postal service was still trying to figure out how much to charge for parcels (this was also the era of mailing buildings piece-by-piece and mailing live babies). So, starting in the 1910s and lasting half a century, college students would send their dirty clothes back home by post. Back home, though, the family had a dedicated washing day, perhaps assisted by hired help. We don’t know how accurate that is - dorms stocked with washing machines make laundry quite convenient for a college student, more so than for most people worldwide - but it was true in the past, only more ridiculous.Īt the start of the 20th century, colleges had no washing machines, and laundromats didn’t exist. If sitcoms have educated us well about what college life is like, kids keep popping back home with a garbage bag of dirty clothes so mom can do their laundry. Thirteenth-century Europe isn’t terribly famous for its hygiene, compared to eras after that or before that, so if he considered this worth noting, it must have left quite an impression on him.Ĥ Mailing Clothes Home So Mom Could Wash Them He also observed that they didn’t wash themselves very often. He noted that Mongols drank alcoholic horse milk and burned dung for warmth (nothing wrong with either of those things some people do both of them even today). Some of our early records of how the ancient Mongols lived come from Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, an explorer from the 1200s. 5 Not Washing at All, For Fearing of Angering Water Dragons But did you know about the people who tried. You may have heard, for example, of the several cultures who’d collect everyone’s urine to use as laundry detergent. Between those two points stretches a long timeline in which we’ve found increasingly elaborate ways of making shirts less smelly. Eventually, we will again never wash clothes, once we outlaw clothes once and for all. Originally, of course, we never had to wash clothes because we hadn’t invented clothes yet. All of human progress can be tracked by the history of laundry. ![]()
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