Meal
A meal is an eating occasion that takes place at a certain time and includes prepared food. The names used for specific meals in English vary depending on the speaker's culture, the time of day, or the size of the meal. Meals occur at homes and cafeterias, but may occur anywhere. Regular meals occur on a daily basis several times a day. Special meals are held in conjunction with such occasions as birthdays, anniversaries and holidays. A meal is different from a snack in that meals are larger, more varied, more filling than snacks; the type of meal served or eaten at any given time varies by location. In most modern cultures, three main meals are eaten: in the morning, early afternoon, evening. Further, the names of meals are interchangeable by custom as well; some serve dinner with supper as the late afternoon/early evening meal. Except for "breakfast", these names can vary from region to region or from family to family. A study in 2016 by Toluna found that 47% of parents in the United States share fewer meals with their families than when growing up, 58% wished they could do it more including 66% of dads.
Breakfast is the first meal of a day, most eaten in the early morning before undertaking the day's work. Some believe it to be the most important meal of the day; the word breakfast refers to breaking the fasting period of the prior night. Breakfast foods vary from place to place, but include a carbohydrate such as grains or cereals, vegetables, a protein food such as eggs, meat or fish, a beverage such as tea, milk, or fruit juice. Coffee, tea, breakfast cereals, waffles, French toast, sweetened breads, fresh fruits, eggs, baked beans, muffins and toast with butter, jam or marmalade are common examples of Western breakfast foods, though a large range of preparations and ingredients are associated with breakfast globally. A full breakfast is a breakfast meal including bacon, eggs, a variety of other cooked foods, with a beverage such as coffee or tea, it is popular in the UK and Ireland, to the extent that many cafés and pubs offer the meal at any time of day as an "all-day breakfast". It is popular in other English-speaking countries.
In England it is referred to as a'full English breakfast' or'fry-up'. Other regional names and variants include the'full Scottish','full Welsh','full Irish' and the'Ulster fry'; the full breakfast is among the most internationally recognised British dishes, along with such staples as bangers & mash, shepherd's pie and chips and the Christmas dinner. The full breakfast became popular in the British Isles during the Victorian era, appeared as one among many suggested breakfasts in the home economist Isabella Beeton's The Book of Household Management. A full breakfast is contrasted with the lighter alternative of a Continental breakfast, traditionally consisting of tea, milk or coffee and fruit juices with bread, croissants, or pastries. "Instant breakfast" refers to breakfast food products that are manufactured in a powdered form, which are prepared with the addition of milk and consumed as a beverage. Some instant breakfasts are marketed in liquid form, being pre-mixed; the target market for instant breakfast products includes consumers who tend to be busy, such as working adults.
A champagne breakfast is a breakfast served with sparkling wine. It is not typical of the role of a breakfast, it may be part of any day or outing considered luxurious or indulgent. The accompanying breakfast is sometimes of a high standard and include rich foods such as salmon, chocolate or pastries, which would not ordinarily be eaten at breakfast or more courses. Instead of as a formal meal the breakfast can hamper. Lunch, the abbreviation for luncheon, is a light meal eaten at midday; the origin of the words lunch and luncheon relate to a small snack eaten at any time of the day or night. During the 20th century the meaning narrowed to a small or mid-sized meal eaten at midday. Lunch is the second meal of the day after breakfast; the meal varies in size depending on the culture, significant variations exist in different areas of the world. A packed lunch is a lunch prepared at home and carried to be eaten somewhere else, such as school, a workplace, or at an outing; the food is wrapped in plastic, aluminum foil, or paper and can be carried in a lunch box, paper bag, or plastic bag.
While packed lunches are taken from home by the people who are going to eat them, in Mumbai, tiffin boxes are most picked up from the home and brought to workplaces in the day by so-called dabbawallas. It is possible to buy packed lunches from stores in several countries. Lunch boxes made out of metal, plastic or vinyl are now popular with today's youth. Lunch boxes provide a way to take heavier lunches in bag, it is environmentally friendly. Dinner refers to the most significant and important meal of the day, which can be the noon or the evening meal. However, the term "dinner" can have many different meanings depending on the cultur
How It's Made
How It's Made is a documentary television series that premiered on January 6, 2001, on the Discovery Channel in Canada, Science in the United States. The program is produced in the Canadian province of Quebec by Productions MAJ, Inc. and Productions MAJ 2. The show is a documentary showing how everyday items are manufactured. How It's Made is filmed without explanatory text to simplify overdubbing in different languages. For example, the show avoids showing a narrator or onscreen host, does not have employees of featured companies speak on camera, keeps human interaction with the manufacturing process to a bare minimum. An off-screen narrator explains each process with humorous puns; each half-hour show has three or four main segments, with each product getting a demonstration of five minutes. Every show has at least one product with a historic background note preceding it, showing how and where the product originated, what people used before it. In April 2007, all episodes run in the United States had the individual season openings replaced with a new opening used for every episode.
Similar to most other Discovery Channel shows, the credits now run during the last segment, with only a blue screen and the request for feedback at the end. In September 2007, the ninth season began airing on Science, along with new openings and soundtracks, Zac Fine replaced Brooks T. Moore as the narrator. However, the eleventh season, which started airing in September 2008, reinstated Moore as the narrator and reverted to a previous title sequence and soundtrack. In June 2008, the Science Channel added How It's Made: Remix, which consists of previous segments arranged into theme installments like "Food", "Sporting Goods", such. In 2013, the Science Channel added How It's Made: Dream Cars, which focused on high-performance and exotic cars; these were shown on the Velocity channel. Canadian hosts have included Lynn Herzeg, June Wallack and Lynne Adams. A different voice-over track is recorded for US audiences by Zac Fine; the scripts are identical but the main difference in the US versions are that the units of measurement are given in United States customary units instead of metric units.
At one point in the US run, a subtitled conversion was shown on-screen over the original narration. In the United Kingdom, the rest of Europe, in some cases in Southeast Asia, the series is narrated by Tony Hirst. Common Sense Media gave the TV show a rating of 4/5 stars, writing "Curious kids and adults will learn from the show, some segments can broaden your perspective". On the show's success despite its formulaic nature, Rita Mullin, the general manager of the Science Channel, said "I think what is one of the great appeals of the show as a viewer myself is how little has changed over the years"; the Wall Street Journal deemed it "TV's quietest hit". The series was spoofed in an episode of Rick and Morty in a segment where a "Plumbus" was being made, again in a Captain Disillusion video showing how hoax UFO videos are made. HowStuffWorks Cool Stuff: How It Works How Do They Do It? Modern Marvels Some Assembly Required Die Sendung mit der Maus "How It's Made - Watch Online". Discovery. "How It's Made".
Discovery Science. December 10, 2013. "How It's Made | Facebook". Www.facebook.com. How It's Made at TV.com
Wood
Wood is a porous and fibrous structural tissue found in the stems and roots of trees and other woody plants. It is an organic material, a natural composite of cellulose fibers that are strong in tension and embedded in a matrix of lignin that resists compression. Wood is sometimes defined as only the secondary xylem in the stems of trees, or it is defined more broadly to include the same type of tissue elsewhere such as in the roots of trees or shrubs. In a living tree it performs a support function, enabling woody plants to grow large or to stand up by themselves, it conveys water and nutrients between the leaves, other growing tissues, the roots. Wood may refer to other plant materials with comparable properties, to material engineered from wood, or wood chips or fiber. Wood has been used for thousands of years for fuel, as a construction material, for making tools and weapons and paper. More it emerged as a feedstock for the production of purified cellulose and its derivatives, such as cellophane and cellulose acetate.
As of 2005, the growing stock of forests worldwide was about 434 billion cubic meters, 47% of, commercial. As an abundant, carbon-neutral renewable resource, woody materials have been of intense interest as a source of renewable energy. In 1991 3.5 billion cubic meters of wood were harvested. Dominant uses were for building construction. A 2011 discovery in the Canadian province of New Brunswick yielded the earliest known plants to have grown wood 395 to 400 million years ago. Wood can be dated by carbon dating and in some species by dendrochronology to determine when a wooden object was created. People have used wood for thousands of years for many purposes, including as a fuel or as a construction material for making houses, weapons, packaging and paper. Known constructions using wood date back ten thousand years. Buildings like the European Neolithic long house were made of wood. Recent use of wood has been enhanced by the addition of bronze into construction; the year-to-year variation in tree-ring widths and isotopic abundances gives clues to the prevailing climate at the time a tree was cut.
Wood, in the strict sense, is yielded by trees, which increase in diameter by the formation, between the existing wood and the inner bark, of new woody layers which envelop the entire stem, living branches, roots. This process is known as secondary growth; these cells go on to form thickened secondary cell walls, composed of cellulose and lignin. Where the differences between the four seasons are distinct, e.g. New Zealand, growth can occur in a discrete annual or seasonal pattern, leading to growth rings. If the distinctiveness between seasons is annual, these growth rings are referred to as annual rings. Where there is little seasonal difference growth rings are to be indistinct or absent. If the bark of the tree has been removed in a particular area, the rings will be deformed as the plant overgrows the scar. If there are differences within a growth ring the part of a growth ring nearest the center of the tree, formed early in the growing season when growth is rapid, is composed of wider elements.
It is lighter in color than that near the outer portion of the ring, is known as earlywood or springwood. The outer portion formed in the season is known as the latewood or summerwood. However, there are major differences, depending on the kind of wood; as a tree grows, lower branches die, their bases may become overgrown and enclosed by subsequent layers of trunk wood, forming a type of imperfection known as a knot. The dead branch may not be attached to the trunk wood except at its base, can drop out after the tree has been sawn into boards. Knots affect the technical properties of the wood reducing the local strength and increasing the tendency for splitting along the wood grain, but may be exploited for visual effect. In a longitudinally sawn plank, a knot will appear as a circular "solid" piece of wood around which the grain of the rest of the wood "flows". Within a knot, the direction of the wood is up to 90 degrees different from the grain direction of the regular wood. In the tree a knot is either the base of a dormant bud.
A knot is conical in shape with the inner tip at the point in stem diameter at which the plant's vascular cambium was located when the branch formed as a bud. In grading lumber and structural timber, knots are classified according to their form, size and the firmness with which they are held in place; this firmness is affected by, among other factors, the length of time for which the branch was dead while the attaching stem continued to grow. Knots materially affect cracking and warping, ease in working, cleavability of timber, they are defects which weaken timber and lower its value for structural purposes where strength is an important consideration. The weakening effect is much more serious when timber is subjected to forces perpendicular to the grain and/or tension than when under load along the grain and/or compression; the extent to which knots affect the strength of a beam depends upon their position, size and condition. A knot on the upper side is compressed. If there is a season check
Olive
The olive, known by the botanical name Olea europaea, meaning "European olive", is a species of small tree in the family Oleaceae, found in the Mediterranean Basin from Portugal to the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, southern Asia as far east as China, as well as the Canary Islands and Réunion. The species is cultivated in many places and considered naturalized in all the countries of the Mediterranean coast, as well as in Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Norfolk Island and Bermuda. Olea europaea is the type species for the genus Olea; the olive's fruit called the olive, is of major agricultural importance in the Mediterranean region as the source of olive oil. The tree and its fruit give their name to the plant family, which includes species such as lilacs, jasmine and the true ash trees; the word "olive" derives from Latin ŏlīva through Etruscan from the archaic Proto-Greek form *ἐλαίϝα. The word "oil" meant "olive oil", from ŏlĕum, ἔλαιον. In multiple other languages the word for "oil" derives from the name of this tree and its fruit.
The oldest attested forms of the Greek words are the Mycenaean, e-ra-wa, and, e-ra-wo or, e-rai-wo, written in the Linear B syllabic script. The olive tree, Olea europaea, is an evergreen tree or shrub native to the Mediterranean and Africa, it is short and squat, exceeds 8–15 m in height.'Pisciottana', a unique variety comprising 40,000 trees found only in the area around Pisciotta in the Campania region of southern Italy exceeds this, with correspondingly large trunk diameters. The silvery green leaves are oblong, measuring 4 -- 1 -- 3 cm wide; the trunk is gnarled and twisted. The small, feathery flowers, with ten-cleft calyx and corolla, two stamens, bifid stigma, are borne on the previous year's wood, in racemes springing from the axils of the leaves; the fruit is a small drupe 1–2.5 cm long, thinner-fleshed and smaller in wild plants than in orchard cultivars. Olives are harvested in the green to purple stage. Canned black olives have been artificially blackened and may contain the chemical ferrous gluconate to improve the appearance.
Olea europaea contains a seed referred to in American English as a pit or a rock, in British English as a stone. The six natural subspecies of Olea europaea are distributed over a wide range: Olea europaea subsp. Europaea Olea europaea subsp. Europaea var. sylvestris, considered the "wild" olive of the Mediterranean, is a variety characterized by a smaller tree bearing noticeably smaller fruit. O. e. subsp. Cuspidata O. e. subsp. Guanchica O. e. subsp. Cerasiformis O. e. subsp. Maroccana O. e. subsp. Laperrinei The subspecies O. e. maroccana and O. e. cerasiformis are hexaploid and tetraploid. Wild growing forms of the olive are sometimes treated as the species Olea oleaster; the trees referred to as white and black olives in Southeast Asia are not olives, but species of Canarium. Hundreds of cultivars of the olive tree are known. An olive's cultivar has a significant impact on its colour, size and growth characteristics, as well as the qualities of olive oil. Olive cultivars may be used for oil, eating, or both.
Olives cultivated for consumption are referred to as table olives. Since many olive cultivars are self-sterile or nearly so, they are planted in pairs with a single primary cultivar and a secondary cultivar selected for its ability to fertilize the primary one. In recent times, efforts have been directed at producing hybrid cultivars with qualities useful to farmers, such as resistance to disease, quick growth, larger or more consistent crops. Fossil evidence indicates the olive tree had its origins some 20–40 million years ago in the Oligocene, in what is now corresponding to Italy and the eastern Mediterranean Basin; the olive plant was first cultivated some 7,000 years ago in Mediterranean regions. The edible olive seems to have coexisted with humans for about 5,000 to 6,000 years, going back to the early Bronze Age, its origin can be traced to the Levant based on written tablets, olive pits, wood fragments found in ancient tombs. The immediate ancestry of the cultivated olive is unknown. Fossil Olea pollen has been found in Macedonia and other places around the Mediterranean, indicating that this genus is an original element of the Mediterranean flora.
Fossilized leaves of Olea were found in the palaeosols of the volcanic Greek island of Santorini and were dated about 37,000 BP. Imprints of larvae of olive whitefly Aleurolobus olivinus were found on the leaves; the same insect is found today on olive leaves, showing that the plant-animal co-evolutionary relations have not changed since that time. Other leaves found on the same island are dated back to 60,000 BP, making them the oldest known olives from the Mediterranean; as far back as 3000 BC, olives were grown commercially in Crete. Olives are not native to the Americas. Spanish colonists brought the olive to the New World, where its cultivation prospered in present-day Peru and Chile; the first seedlings from Spain were planted in Lima by Antonio de Rivera in 1560. Olive tree cultivation spread along the valleys of South America's dry Pacific coast where the climate was
Bamboo
The bamboos are evergreen perennial flowering plants in the subfamily Bambusoideae of the grass family Poaceae. The word "bamboo" comes from the Kannada term bambu, introduced to English through Indonesian and Malay. In bamboo, as in other grasses, the internodal regions of the stem are hollow and the vascular bundles in the cross-section are scattered throughout the stem instead of in a cylindrical arrangement; the dicotyledonous woody xylem is absent. The absence of secondary growth wood causes the stems of monocots, including the palms and large bamboos, to be columnar rather than tapering. Bamboos include some of the fastest-growing plants in the world, due to a unique rhizome-dependent system. Certain species of bamboo can grow 91 cm within a 24-hour period, at a rate of 4 cm an hour. Giant bamboos are the largest members of the grass family. Bamboos are of notable economic and cultural significance in South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia, being used for building materials, as a food source, as a versatile raw product.
Bamboo has a higher specific compressive strength than wood, brick or concrete, a specific tensile strength that rivals steel. Bamboos have long been considered the most primitive grasses because of the presence of bracteate, indeterminate inflorescences, "pseudospikelets", flowers with three lodicules, six stamens, three stigmata. Following more recent molecular phylogenetic research, many tribes and genera of grasses included in the Bambusoideae are now classified in other subfamilies, e.g. the Anomochlooideae, the Puelioideae, the Ehrhartoideae. The subfamily in its current sense belongs to the BOP clade of grasses, where it is sister to the Pooideae; the bamboos comprise three clades classified as tribes, these correspond with geographic divisions representing the New World herbaceous species, tropical woody bamboos, temperate woody bamboos. The woody bamboos do not form a monophyletic group. Altogether, more than 1,400 species are placed in 115 genera. Most bamboo species are native to moist tropical and warm temperate climates.
However, many species are found in diverse climates, ranging from hot tropical regions to cool mountainous regions and highland cloud forests. In the Asia-Pacific region they occur across East Asia, from north to 50 °N latitude in Sakhalin, to south to northern Australia, west to India and the Himalayas. China, Korea and Australia, all have several endemic populations, they occur in small numbers in sub-Saharan Africa, confined to tropical areas, from southern Senegal in the north to southern Mozambique and Madagascar in the south. In the Americas, bamboo has a native range from 47 °S in southern Argentina and the beech forests of central Chile, through the South American tropical rainforests, to the Andes in Ecuador near 4,300 m. Bamboo is native through Central America and Mexico, northward into the Southeastern United States. Canada and continental Europe are not known to have any native species of bamboo; as garden plants, many species grow outside these ranges, including most of Europe and the United States.
Some attempts have been made to grow bamboo on a commercial basis in the Great Lakes region of east-central Africa in Rwanda. In the United States, several companies are growing and distributing species such as Phyllostachys nigra and Phyllostachys edulis; the two general patterns for the growth of bamboo are "clumping" and "running". Clumping bamboo species tend to spread as the growth pattern of the rhizomes is to expand the root mass similar to ornamental grasses. "Running" bamboos, need to be controlled during cultivation because of their potential for aggressive behavior. They spread through their rhizomes, which can spread underground and send up new culms to break through the surface. Running bamboo species are variable in their tendency to spread; some can send out runners of several metres a year, while others can stay in the same general area for long periods. If neglected, over time, they can cause problems by moving into adjacent areas. Bamboos include some of the fastest-growing plants on Earth, with reported growth rates up to 91 cm in 24 hours.
However, the growth rate is dependent on local soil and climatic conditions, as well as species, a more typical growth rate for many cultivated bamboos in temperate climates is in the range of 3–10 cm per day during the growing period. Growing in regions of warmer climates during the late Cretaceous period, vast fields existed in what is now Asia; some of the largest timber bamboo can grow over 30 m tall, be as large as 25–30 cm in diameter. However, the size range for mature bamboo is species-dependent, with the smallest bamboos reaching only several inches high at maturity. A typical height range that would cover many of the common bamboos grown in the United States is 4.5–12 m, depending on species. Anji County of China, known as the "Town of Bamboo", provides the optimal climate and soil conditions to grow and process some of the most valued bamboo poles available worldwide. Unlike all trees, individual bamboo culms emerge from the ground at their full diameter and grow to their full height in a single growing season of three to four months.
During this time, each new shoot grows
Classical antiquity
Classical antiquity is the period of cultural history between the 8th century BC and the 5th or 6th century AD centered on the Mediterranean Sea, comprising the interlocking civilizations of ancient Greece and ancient Rome known as the Greco-Roman world. It is the period in which Greek and Roman society flourished and wielded great influence throughout Europe, North Africa and Western Asia. Conventionally, it is taken to begin with the earliest-recorded Epic Greek poetry of Homer, continues through the emergence of Christianity and the fall of the Western Roman Empire, it ends with the dissolution of classical culture at the close of Late Antiquity, blending into the Early Middle Ages. Such a wide sampling of history and territory covers many disparate periods. Classical antiquity may refer to an idealised vision among people of what was, in Edgar Allan Poe's words, "the glory, Greece, the grandeur, Rome"; the culture of the ancient Greeks, together with some influences from the ancient Near East, was the basis of art, philosophy and educational ideals, until the Roman imperial period.
The Romans preserved and spread over Europe these ideals until they were able to competitively rival the Greek culture, as the Latin language became widespread and the classical world became bilingual and Latin. This Greco-Roman cultural foundation has been immensely influential on the language, law, educational systems, science, poetry, ethics, rhetoric and architecture of the modern world. From the surviving fragments of classical antiquity, a revival movement was formed from the 14th century onwards which came to be known in Europe as the Renaissance, again resurgent during various neo-classical revivals in the 18th and 19th centuries; the earliest period of classical antiquity takes place before the background of gradual re-appearance of historical sources following the Bronze Age collapse. The 8th and 7th centuries BC are still proto-historical, with the earliest Greek alphabetic inscriptions appearing in the first half of the 8th century. Homer is assumed to have lived in the 8th or 7th century BC, his lifetime is taken as marking the beginning of classical antiquity.
In the same period falls the traditional date for the establishment of the Ancient Olympic Games, in 776 BC. The Phoenicians expanded from Canaan ports, by the 8th century dominating trade in the Mediterranean. Carthage was founded in 814 BC, the Carthaginians by 700 BC had established strongholds in Sicily and Sardinia, which created conflicts of interest with Etruria. A stela found in Kition, Cyprus commemorates the victory of king Sargon II in 709 BC over the seven kings of the island, marking an important step in the emancipation of Cyprus from Tyrian rule by the Assyrian military; the Archaic period followed the Greek Dark Ages, saw significant advancements in political theory, the rise of democracy, theatre, poetry, as well as the revitalisation of the written language. In pottery, the Archaic period sees the development of the Orientalizing style, which signals a shift from the Geometric style of the Dark Ages and the accumulation of influences derived from Egypt and Syria. Pottery styles associated with the part of the Archaic age are the black-figure pottery, which originated in Corinth during the 7th century BC and its successor, the red-figure style, developed by the Andokides Painter in about 530 BC.
The Etruscans had established political control in the region by the late 7th century BC, forming the aristocratic and monarchial elite. The Etruscans lost power in the area by the late 6th century BC, at this point, the Italic tribes reinvented their government by creating a republic, with much greater restraints on the ability of rulers to exercise power. According to legend, Rome was founded on April 21, 753 BC by twin descendants of the Trojan prince Aeneas and Remus; as the city was bereft of women, legend says that the Latins invited the Sabines to a festival and stole their unmarried maidens, leading to the integration of the Latins and the Sabines. Archaeological evidence indeed shows first traces of settlement at the Roman Forum in the mid-8th century BC, though settlements on the Palatine Hill may date back to the 10th century BC; the seventh and final king of Rome was Tarquinius Superbus. As the son of Tarquinius Priscus and the son-in-law of Servius Tullius, Superbus was of Etruscan birth.
It was during his reign. Superbus removed and destroyed all the Sabine shrines and altars from the Tarpeian Rock, enraging the people of Rome; the people came to object to his rule when he failed to recognize the rape of Lucretia, a patrician Roman, at the hands of his own son. Lucretia's kinsman, Lucius Junius Brutus, summoned the Senate and had Superbus and the monarchy expelled from Rome in 510 BC. After Superbus' expulsion, the Senate voted to never again allow the rule of a king and reformed Rome into a republican government in 509 BC. In fact the Latin word "Rex" meaning King became a dirty and hated word throughout the Republic and on the Empire; the classical period of Ancient Greece corresponds to most of the 5th and 4th centuries BC, in particular, from the fall of the Athenian tyranny in 510 BC to the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC. In 510, Spartan troops helped the Athenians overthrow son of Peisistratos. Cleomenes I, king of Sparta, put in place a pro-Spartan oligarchy conducted by Isagoras
Toothbrush
The toothbrush is an oral hygiene instrument used to clean the teeth and tongue. It consists of a head of clustered bristle, atop of which toothpaste can be applied, mounted on a handle which facilitates the cleaning of hard-to-reach areas of the mouth. Toothbrushes are available with different bristle textures and forms. Most dentists recommend using a soft toothbrush since hard bristled toothbrushes can damage tooth enamel and irritate the gums. Although first made as an oral hygiene instrument, the toothbrush has seen other use as a precise cleaning tool as well, most in the military; this is because of the many small strands that allow it to clean in small places many conventional cleaning tools cannot reach. Before the invention of the toothbrush, a variety of oral hygiene measures had been used; this has been verified by excavations during which chew sticks, tree twigs, bird feathers, animal bones and porcupine quills were recovered. The predecessor of the toothbrush is the chew stick. Chew sticks were twigs with frayed ends used to brush the teeth while the other end was used as a toothpick.
The earliest chew sticks were discovered in Sumer Mesopotamia in 3500 BC, an Egyptian tomb dating from 3000 BC, mentioned in Chinese records dating from 1600 BC. The Greeks and Romans used toothpicks to clean their teeth, toothpick-like twigs have been excavated in Qin Dynasty tombs. Chew sticks remain common in Africa, the rural Southern United States, in the Islamic world the use of chewing stick Miswak is considered a pious action and has been prescribed to be used before every prayer five times a day. Miswaks have been used by Muslims since 7th century; the first bristle toothbrush resembling the modern one was found in China. Used during the Tang Dynasty, it consisted of hog bristles; the bristles were sourced from hogs living in Siberia and northern China because the colder temperatures provided firmer bristles. They were attached to a handle manufactured from bone, forming a toothbrush. In 1223, Japanese Zen master Dōgen Kigen recorded on Shōbōgenzō that he saw monks in China clean their teeth with brushes made of horsetail hairs attached to an oxbone handle.
The bristle toothbrush spread to Europe, brought from China to Europe by travellers. It was adopted in Europe during the 17th century; the earliest identified use of the word toothbrush in English was in the autobiography of Anthony Wood who wrote in 1690 that he had bought a toothbrush from J. Barret. Europeans found the hog bristle toothbrushes imported from China too firm and preferred softer bristle toothbrushes made from horsehair. Mass-produced toothbrushes made with horse or boar bristle continued to be imported to England from China until the mid 20th century. In Europe, William Addis of England is believed to have produced the first mass-produced toothbrush in 1780. In 1770, he had been jailed for causing a riot. While in prison he decided that using a rag with soot and salt on the teeth was ineffective and could be improved. After saving a small bone from a meal, he drilled small holes into the bone and tied into the bone tufts of bristles that he had obtained from one of the guards, passed the tufts of bristle through the holes in the bone and sealed the holes with glue.
After his release, he became wealthy after starting a business manufacturing toothbrushes. He died in 1808, it remained within family ownership until 1996. Under the name Wisdom Toothbrushes, the company now manufactures 70 million toothbrushes per year in the UK. By 1840 toothbrushes were being mass-produced in England, France and Japan. Pig bristles were used for cheaper badger hair for the more expensive ones; the first patent for a toothbrush was granted to H. N. Wadsworth in 1857 in the United States, but mass production in the United States did not start until 1885; the improved design had a bone handle with holes bored into it. Animal bristle was not an ideal material as it retained bacteria, did not dry efficiently and the bristles fell out. In addition to bone, handles were made of ivory. In the United States, brushing teeth did not become routine until after World War II, when American soldiers had to clean their teeth daily. During the 1900s, celluloid replaced bone handles. Natural animal bristles were replaced by synthetic fibers nylon, by DuPont in 1938.
The first nylon bristle toothbrush made with nylon yarn went on sale on February 24, 1938. The first electric toothbrush, the Broxodent, was invented in Switzerland in 1954. By the turn of the 21st century nylon had come to be used for the bristles and the handles were molded from thermoplastic materials. Johnson & Johnson, a leading medical supplies firm, introduced the "Reach" toothbrush in 1977, it differed from previous toothbrushes in three ways: it had an angled head, similar to dental instruments, to reach back teeth. Other manufacturers soon followed with other designs aimed at improving effectiveness. In spite of the changes with the number of tufts and the spacing, the handle form and design, the bristles were still straight and difficult to maneuver. In 1978 Dr. George C. Collis developed the Collis Curve toothbrush, the first toothbrush to have curved bristles; the curved bristles follow the curvature of the teeth and safely reach in between the teeth and into the sulcular areas. In January 2003, the toothbrush was selected as the number one invention Americans could not live without according to the Lemelson-MI
