Cleaning Fun Facts: 24 Checked Ones (and 3 Famous Myths)
If you’re like me, you’ll do almost anything to delay cleaning, including reading about cleaning instead.
So here’s a list that at least earns its procrastination.
I checked each fact against a real source, a museum, a patent, an encyclopedia or a published study, and I’ve said plainly where a popular “fact” turned out to be a magazine stunt or a myth.
Sources are named right in the sentence, because that’s the kind of person I’ve become.
History of Cleaning
Soap is older than most written laws. Clay cylinders excavated at Babylon and commonly dated to around 2800 BC describe fats boiled with ashes, which is the basic soap recipe we still use, according to the American Cleaning Institute’s history of soap.
The Romans used soap for hair, not for washing. Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, Book 28, calls soap an invention of the Gauls, made from tallow and ash and used to redden the hair.
Roman laundries ran on urine. Fullers cleaned woollen togas in stale urine because of its ammonia, and the emperor Vespasian taxed its collection, which is where the Latin saying “pecunia non olet,” money doesn’t smell, comes from, as told by the historian Suetonius.
The first mention of toilet paper is from 589 AD. The Chinese scholar Yan Zhitui wrote that he wouldn’t dare use paper with the names of sages on it for toilet purposes, which, per the historians Joseph Needham and Tsien Tsuen-hsuin, is the earliest known reference.
“Cleanliness is next to godliness” is from a sermon. John Wesley used the line in his sermon “On Dress,” written in the 1780s, and he already put it in quotation marks, so it was a saying before it was his.
The American broom started as a gift to a wife. In 1797 Levi Dickenson of Hadley, Massachusetts, made a broom from broomcorn, a type of sorghum, for his wife, and within a few years was selling hundreds, per local histories collected by the Bangor Daily News and the Journal of Antiques.
Handwashing was once a controversial idea. In 1847 Ignaz Semmelweis made doctors at Vienna General Hospital wash in chlorinated lime, and maternal deaths on his ward fell from roughly ten per cent to about two, according to a re-analysis of his data published in the US National Library of Medicine.
London built its sewers because Parliament couldn’t stand the smell. During the hot summer of 1858, the “Great Stink” of the Thames drove MPs from the chamber, and within weeks they passed the act that funded Joseph Bazalgette’s sewer system, as the historian Stephen Halliday documents in The Great Stink of London.
Inventions That Changed Chores
The dishwasher was invented by a woman tired of chipped china. Josephine Cochrane of Shelbyville, Illinois, was granted US patent 355,139 for her “Dish Washing Machine” on 28 December 1886, and she’s in the National Inventors Hall of Fame for it.
Lysol was born in a cholera outbreak. The German chemist Gustav Raupenstrauch patented it in 1889, and it was used against the 1892 cholera epidemic in Hamburg, according to the Neue Deutsche Biographie and the manufacturer Schülke’s company history.
The wringing mop has a patent date. Thomas W. Stewart of Detroit was granted US patent 499,402 for a mop with a clamp and lever on 13 June 1893, which meant nobody had to wring the thing out by hand.
The first vacuum cleaner was pulled by horses. Hubert Cecil Booth’s 1901 “Puffing Billy” was petrol powered, sat on a horse-drawn cart, and parked outside the house with hoses fed through the windows, and the Science Museum Group notes his company’s 1901 prospectus is the first use of the words “vacuum cleaner.”
Booth’s machine cleaned Westminster Abbey. It was used on the coronation carpet before Edward VII’s coronation in 1902, per the Science Museum Group and the EBSCO biography of Booth.
Clorox started with five men and five hundred dollars. The Electro-Alkaline Company was founded in Oakland on 3 May 1913 with each of five partners investing $100, and it was a grocer’s wife, Annie Murray, who gave away samples and turned an industrial bleach into a household one, according to the company’s own centennial fact sheet.
Microfiber is a Japanese invention. Toray scientist Miyoshi Okamoto produced the first ultra-microfiber in 1970, which became Ultrasuede, and it was only in the 1990s that microfiber cleaning cloths took off, starting in Sweden, per the textile history on Fibre2Fashion.
The Roomba wasn’t the first robot vacuum. iRobot launched it in September 2002, but Electrolux’s Trilobite was on sale a year earlier, as iRobot’s own history and the Robots Guide both note.
Germs and Your Home
The germiest thing in your house is probably the sponge. In a 2011 study, NSF International had 22 families swab 30 household surfaces, and the kitchen sponge or dish rag came top, with 77 per cent testing positive for coliform bacteria.
The kitchen beats the bathroom. The same NSF study found most families assumed the bathroom was worst, but the kitchen had the higher levels of contamination.
Microwaving your sponge doesn’t rescue it. A 2017 study in Scientific Reports analysed 14 used kitchen sponges and found hundreds of bacterial types, and the authors concluded that cleaning doesn’t sterilise a sponge and recommended simply replacing it weekly.
Most house dust comes from outside. A 2009 study in Environmental Science & Technology modelled where floor dust comes from and found that the biggest share is tracked in on shoes or blown in through the air, not shed from skin.
Washing your hands cuts stomach bugs by roughly a third. The US Centers for Disease Control’s “Show Me the Science” page puts the reduction in diarrhoeal illness at about 30 per cent, and larger reviews put it as high as 40.
Cleaning Around the World
Spring cleaning may come from Iran. Before Nowruz, the Persian new year on the first day of spring, families do “khaneh tekani,” which literally means “shaking the house,” and it’s one of the oldest documented spring cleaning traditions, per National Geographic.
Japanese schoolchildren clean their own classrooms. “O-soji” takes about twenty minutes after lunch most days, and sixth graders often help the first graders, as NPR reported in 2015, though the schools do still employ maintenance staff despite the viral claim that they have no janitors.
Sweden has a word for decluttering before you die. “Döstädning” was introduced to English readers by Margareta Magnusson’s 2017 book The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, and she suggests starting around 65, so most of us have time.
Three Famous Facts That Aren’t
“Your keyboard is dirtier than a toilet seat.” This comes from a 2008 stunt by the British magazine Which? Computing, which swabbed 33 keyboards in one London office, and one of them was dirtier than the seat they tested, which is not quite the same as yours being.
“Your mattress doubles in weight after ten years.” Snopes and the Straight Dope traced this to a 2000 Wall Street Journal article, and the mattress industry itself told the writer the figure was wrong.
“Dust is mostly dead skin.” See the 2009 study above, which found most of it comes in from outdoors on shoes, pets and air.
I had repeated two of these three at dinner parties, so consider this my public correction.
And Remember
The thread through all of this is that every tool we take for granted was once somebody’s small revolt against a chore.
A tired wife, a woman with chipped plates, a man wringing out a mop by hand.
The one thing none of them invented is a way to make it stay done, which is why I keep a minimalist cleaning schedule instead of waiting for a mood.
And if you want a gentler thought, it’s this: the tidiest people I know aren’t minimalists, they just have fewer surfaces to lose a battle on.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the dirtiest item in a typical home? The kitchen sponge or dish rag, according to NSF International’s 2011 germ study, with 77 per cent of sponges testing positive for coliform bacteria.
Who invented the dishwasher? Josephine Cochrane of Shelbyville, Illinois, who received a US patent for her dish washing machine on 28 December 1886.
When was the vacuum cleaner invented? Hubert Cecil Booth patented his in 1901, and the first one was a petrol-powered machine on a horse-drawn cart with hoses run in through the windows.
Is it true that a keyboard is dirtier than a toilet seat? Only in a 2008 magazine test of 33 keyboards in one office, where one keyboard beat the toilet seat. It’s a headline, not a rule about your desk.
Does microwaving a sponge kill the bacteria? It reduces them but doesn’t sterilise the sponge, and a 2017 study in Scientific Reports found the survivors regrow quickly. The authors recommend replacing sponges weekly instead.
Where does spring cleaning come from? The most commonly cited origin is the Persian custom of khaneh tekani, “shaking the house,” before Nowruz, though Passover cleaning is often mentioned as a parallel tradition.