At Least it Didn’t Take Eighty Years

In 1872, Dr. François Merry Delebost was serving as the chief physician for the Bonne Nouvelle prison in Rouen, France when he had a pretty great idea. Every day about nine hundred prisoners engaged in hard, often messy, labor that left them each in desperate need of a bath. Unfortunately, the prison didn’t have very many tubs and the water was changed infrequently, so most prisoners came out just as dirty as they went in. 

I forgot to take a before picture, but trust me, it didn’t look much better than this.

Concerned about the risk for the spread of disease in these conditions, Delebost devised a series of individual cubicles in which a prisoner would have warm, clean water to be pumped and sprinkled over his head to wash away the grime of the day.

This wasn’t the first time anyone had taken a shower of course. Presumably clever people have pretty much always stood under waterfalls to get clean, Egyptians used jugs to pour water over their heads, Greeks and Romans may have even had rudimentary showers as a part of some public baths. 

In 1767, an English stovemanker by the name of William Feetham invented contraption that pumped water up from a basin to dump it on a bather’s head over and over again as the water got dirtier and dirtier. An anonymous invention, known simply as the English Regency Shower improved on this somewhat in the early 1800s, and even Charles Dickens got in the action in 1849 when he commissioned an outdoor shower making use of a waterfall on his family’s vacation home on the Isle of Wight. 

But the true hero in bringing the modern shower to the masses was most likely Dr. Delebost, whose prison shower system caught on, finding its way into gymnasiums, army barracks, and insane asylums. It did, however, take a while for the shower to make a splash in private homes.

As nice as the new shower is, my favorite part of the renovation is the hand towel fixture securely attached to the non-poop-colored wall.

Having recently almost completed a bathroom renovation, I kind of understand that. As I’ve previously mentioned, we are in the process of moving from the suburbs into the country, to a house that will make a much easier commute for my husband. The new old house that we bought needs a lot of work, but we also needed to do a project in our other house, because nearly thirteen years ago now, we moved in saying that while the house is extremely nice, something had to be done about the lackluster master bathroom.

I mean the cramped and stained shower was usable and I think we may have soaked in the over-sized Jacuzzi tub once or twice. I definitely didn’t love the dark brown walls, convenient, I suppose, for hiding any additional bathroom staining that might come up, and the screw that held the peacock themed hand towel fixture was literally pulling from a gaping hole in the poop-colored wall. For twelve years. 

Of course, as one does when they are about to sell a house, we decided we finally ought to take on the project of making it nice—for someone else, who very well could appreciate our design choices as much as we have enjoyed the gold-trimmed shower door that’s almost impossible to clean.

Just ignore the plastic wrap on the bathtub. The project is almost finished.

Still, in the hopes that a prospective buyer who might otherwise say, “Well, this has to be completely redone,” and offers us ten grand less than our asking price, will instead say, “Ooh, this is nice. We should probably offer above asking just to be safe,” we decided to take on the renovation. Oh, also because we’ve got some skills and a professional bid came in at about thirty grand more than we were willing to spend, we decided to do it ourselves.

In early February, we figured out a way to cram all of our bathroom belongings into the much smaller bathroom we would have to learn to share with our son, and destruction began. This week, at the beginning of September, I finally got to take a shower in the almost complete, newly renovated bathroom. 

I admit it was a longer process than I had hoped, but we’re busy, and juggling two houses, and I can be awfully patient when it comes to saving thirty thousand dollars. Also, it’s worth the wait because whether a new homeowner loves it or not, we will get to enjoy it for a few more months. At least it didn’t take quite the seventy or eighty years it did for Dr. Delebost’s genius innovation to arrive in most homes.