Paper Towel History

Paper towels have always been handy to have around. Most of us use it every day. However, for how long people used paper towels? What is the history of paper towels?

A paper towel is a disposable product made of paper. Paper towels are used to avoid germ contaminations. As conventional towels, paper towels also serve to drying hands, dusting, wiping, etc.

Paper towels are made to eliminate dispensing problems. With paper towels we can clean up any water spills. It often used in kitchen. Many paper towels are designed for softness, absorbency and performance.

The paper towels history dating back to the early part of the 20th century and it was invented by accident.

In 1907, Philadelphia was suffering from bouts of an epidemic. A local school teacher that observed this epidemic came to the idea of cutting out square bits of notebook paper which were of the softer variety and distributing it among the children. He started handing out soft paper to his students suffering from colds. He instructed children to use those scrape of paper only once, without using it twice or leaving it lying about.

This was a substitute to the cloth towels that were used in the community wash rooms and the usage of which would only spread the disease around. On this way soft paper was used only once and disposed off. In other words, a Philadelphia teacher prevented the transmitting of the germs from one sick kid to other.

Scot Paper Company, the leading toilet paper company in the world and Arthur Scott heard about a teacher who had developed a novel idea to help fight colds in school. Arthur Scott loved the idea so much that he was convinced that he could use the discarded paper for that purpose. He made fist paper towels from a cartload of rejected toilet paper. These small sheets of paper were sold as disposable paper towels. Product name was “Sani-Towels" with the tagline "For use once by one user" (an individual sheet towel was thirteen inches wide and eighteen inches long).

Over the years paper towel has found many other uses that what it was created for.

A great idea of Philadelphia's schoolteacher and Arthur Scott experimentation led to the revolutionary discovery of paper towels.