AFTER MANY MONTHS OF AVOIDING THE MATTER, I finally buckled down and upgraded my bath with a shower head. It was inevitable – one more morning of facing a hot bath was just too much. Fortunately it was a simple operation involving a trip to a large hardware store, simplified much by avoiding the shower curtain issue. I'm just happy to have a shower. Baths makes you sluggish and lazy. It's like drinking a beer in the morning. A shower is like coffee: fresh and invigorating.
Bath lovers do exist, but it is safe to assume they are stuck on some past-life hiccup, an unfortunate by-product of reincarnation perhaps. Mere science, in my opinion, cannot explain why someone would prefer a bath over a shower, other than for a good soak or something involving jets of water. So it might seem peculiar that showers are a fairly recent appendage to the comforts of civilization. James Bond's creator, Ian Fleming, counted among the trendsetting people to have a modern shower installed in their abode – quite a big deal in the early Fifties. This was the start of the shower's boom, fueled by a regiment of indoctrination through military barracks during the two great wars. Soldiers got the locker-style shower experience, but it soon became apparent that even this was better than an abysmal (pun indented) Victorian tub.
Another tangent of history suggests that the adoption of the shower in Q3 of the 20th century had a lot to do with humanity's increasing awareness of hygiene. Apparently most of the past 2000 years had been spent in utter filth. After the core of Roman civilisation started falling over in the few hundred years after Christ, their love for cleanliness was shunned by the rising order of the Church as being sinful, a situation worsened by the disappearance of plumbing. Cleanliness is not next to godliness, it seems. We would have to wait for the stuffy Victorians and the start of the 19th century before the shower peaked its head out again.
LIKE ALGEBRA AND AND GRAHAM HANCOCK'S NEXT BOOK, lead-pipe plumbing is a technology that was lost to us for ages, but it was popular amongst the ancient Greeks, seemingly the fathers of the modern shower. The Romans, being the stoic hard-working type of people who hardly had time to develop a culture of their own, happily copied the idea from the Greeks. Some histories on the shower claim the Romans killed the practice, because Europe adopted the bath from them. But the citizens of that plucky city state loved to shower – sometimes as often as once a day.
What the Greeks and Romans used somewhat resembled our idea of a shower, thanks to plumbing. Ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians used the power of humans to have water dumped on them from above, but this is going by architecture dug up. It's reasonable to assume some rich guy draped the top with leather, poked holes in it and had the slaves fill it up. An indoor rain room, if you will. Our habit of standing under water goes back even further if you add in waterfalls. Sadly we lost the habit for 1,800 years (give or take a century), only to emerge a couple of hundred years ago.
While modern mathematics had someone as illustrious as Newton to bring it back into the fold, the shower's arrival was a tad more mysterious. The accepted first shower to appear was the English Regency Shower, a pump-controlled contraption that sounds, suitably for the Victorians, vaguely like a torture device. It also recycled its water and didn't offer the option of hot water, but it made a mark. The mystery comes from its origins, lost in time, because nobody knows who made it. But soon many other takes on the shower started to appear. Once indoor plumbing became more accessible in the 1850s, the indulgence of hot water made bathing very popular. Showers were shunned, but this is understandable: for the first time in human history it didn't take half a day to organise a lukewarm bath.
But the old nozzles held on, many designed to be used in a Victorian bath. As the 20th century was peeking over the ridge, the first modern showers appeared. From here on its back to the Wars and the inevitable rise of the shower.
TODAY MORE PEOPLE IN THE WEST SHOWER THAN BATH. It is faster and more convenient (both in speed and for small bathrooms). If our modern culture was to be studied by future archeologists, the impact of the shower would be hard to miss. Movies like Psycho (1960) and Carrie (1976) serve as chronicles to how much and how quickly the shower had infiltrated the modern world. By the 1980s it was everywhere, including countless cases of toilets being intentionally flushed while someone was showering.
The shower's finest cultural conquest, at least for me, was that it got not one but two episodes in Seinfeld – one involving illegal shower heads and another where Kramer decides to live in his shower. A showerhead that falls foul of the law is not that absurd – most countries have regulations on how much water-per-minute can be spewed at you. In the U.S. the upper limit is 9.5 litres a minute, something that would hardly impress the Navy. A Navy Shower involves two shower stages: first for getting wet and lathered, the second for washing it all off. The shower is turned off while you scrub down.
It's very efficient and, although it sucks the joy out of showering, it's a lot better than the Scottish Shower: blasting yourself with hot water, then switching to very cold. Said to be good for circulation. Navy lingo also has a word for going too far: the Hollywood Shower, often seen in movies, tends to take forever and use lots of water. You can even go for a Luxury Shower, a commercial system that shifts a humble 40 litres each minute...
Today it is not even absurd to forgo a bath in order to invest more in your shower. While Kramer doggedly stayed (and took calls and cooked dinner) in a regular shower for an episode, true aficionados will jump for a wet room, where it is hard to see the room and and shower begin. Different nozzle technologies also give all kinds of advancements in spray types and pressure. You can even get blasted from every angle, as if you were going through a human-friendly car wash.
But such things are the domain of those who can afford it, not such a bitter pill when you consider a century ago simply having a shower was a very big deal. So most shower fans are reduced to the cheap thrills of hotel showers and staying at someone else's place. Every shower is slightly different, some majestic and quite a few terminal. Most, though fall in the middle. The winner, for me, is one I never used. It was in a show house and involved a square room divided in th3 middle by a glass wall. On the one side – basin and mirror (and a doorway to the dressing room). The other, a shower that took up its entire vertical stretch, with a waterproof television on the wall.
There have even been some interesting leaps in shower technology. Rather disappointingly, the electric shower and sun shower are not all that interesting – they just heat water using electricity or solar. And nothing frankly can save you from a cheap flat with low water pressure. But that's still better than splashing around in a bath like a seal stuck in a tidal pool.
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