From "The Marshall (Texas) News-Messenger", November 18, 1935
Over the years, Cincinnati has found itself tangled in some unique and curious bathtub mythology. Since so much of our city’s history involved the manufacture of soap, that may not be surprising at all. Here are some of the Queen City’s more iconic bathtub tales.
The Great Cincinnati Bathtub Hoax
Cincinnati’s most famous bathtub never existed at all. It was created out of thin air on December 28, 1917, when a satirical essay by H. L. Mencken, titled “A Neglected Anniversary,” was published in the New York Evening Mail. In this essay, Mencken claimed that the very first bathtub in the United States was installed in a Cincinnati home by one Adam Thompson in 1842. Further, Mencken claimed, “Some papers designated it as an epicurean luxury, others called it undemocratic, as it lacked simplicity in its surroundings. Medical authorities attacked it as dangerous to health.” Although this was totally “fake news,” and although Mencken himself was eventually compelled to expose his own hoax, the Great Cincinnati Bathtub Hoax was repeated as truth many times over the next century and still pops up as “fact” online today. Cincinnati, of course, puffed with pride on learning of the city’s pioneering role in American hygiene, to the extent that John Behle, manager of Cincinnati’s 1935 Municipal and Industrial Exposition, attempted to procure the antique vessel from Henry Ford for display! Ford, according to a rumor based on a rumor, had allegedly acquired Mr. Thompson’s non-existent tub for his own collection.
Cincinnati’s First Real Bathtubs
It is very likely that the earliest residents of Cincinnati bathed in the Ohio River. As late as 1837, the revised City Ordinances of Cincinnati attempted to prohibit bathing in the river and even later, it was said that famed journalist Lafcadio Hearn only consented to indoor bathing when it was too cold to splash around our riverfront. Private citizens, when the urge struck them, performed their ablutions in the same washtub in which they did their laundry, but they could have used actual bathtubs as early as 1826 when Peter Gibson, a pioneer plumber, advertised his ability to install baths in Cincinnati homes. That was a good 16 years before Mencken’s imaginary tub.
Although Cincinnatians had access to bona fide bathtubs as early as the 1820s, such laving basins were not often found in private homes but at Archibald Woodruff’s bathhouse. Woodruff led a colorful life. He was once arrested on orders from Napoleon himself, and he created Cincinnati’s first pleasure gardens. While engaged in various other business ventures, he maintained Woodruff’s Bath House on Sycamore Street across from the National Theater. There he offered warm, cold, shower, and salt-water baths. Woodruff advertised the availability of spare bathtubs for the benefit of invalids, to be delivered anywhere in the city.
Florentine Hotel Stakes A Claim
Legend has it that no Cincinnati hotels offered in-house bathing until the Florentine Hotel—a short-lived establishment whose building was later occupied by a dime museum—installed a hefty bathtub in one of its upstairs rooms around 1860. To get this monstrosity, described as “large as a canal boat,” into the hotel a derrick was constructed on Vine Street. According to the Cincinnati Times-Star [December 14, 1920], “Thousands of Cincinnatians viewed the tub as a great curiosity, as the thought of lying down while ‘taking a wash’ appealed to their sense of humor.”
From "The Agitator", January 1, 1860
Doctor Karshner’s Electro-Therapeutic Baths
In 1858, Cincinnatians were invited to visit the Electric Infirmary of Doctor William Karshner on Barr Street in the West End to immerse themselves in the patented “Electro-Therapeutic” tubs available there. Inquiring patients found two metal tubs connected to galvanic batteries, one allegedly “negative” to “strengthen the system,” and the other “positive” to eliminate impurities. The patient reclined on an array of gutta percha straps, while scrubbing themselves with an electrified sponge. Doctor Karshner claimed his electrically charged tubs could cure syphilis, scrofula, delirium tremens, hysteria, consumption, asthma and a variety of mental conditions. He received a U.S. patent in 1859 for his “electrical bath,” and licensed his system to doctors up and down the Ohio River. After a couple of somewhat vague lawsuits against him and his wife, Doctor Karshner disappears from the historical record. He was the first, but far from the last, Cincinnati purveyor of electrical cures.
Floating Bath House
The Floating Bath House, opened in the 1870s by brothers Robert and Rudolph Schmidt, was a sight to behold, 200 feet long and 50 feet wide and rising 15 feet out of the water. The center of the vessel had no floor, allowing swimmers to plunge into Ohio River water through an opening 65 feet long and 20 feet wide. Aligned with the river currents, fresh water flowed through the Bath House continually. The swimming area was surrounded by 68 dressing rooms supplied with a couple of towels, soap, a mirror and a bathing hose. Fore and aft of the main bathing area was an array of 24 private bathing areas—essentially, bath tubs filled with circulating river water. Naturally, the Floating Bath House raised protests from Cincinnatians. A letter, signed only “August” appearing in the Cincinnati Enquirer [May 30, 1874], complained, “It is a well enough institution for private baths; but oh, for the public baths. At times there are at least sixty-five together in one tub. Is this not outrageous? Where do a great many young men go to spend their Sunday instead of going to church? They go to the river.” That complaint was confined to men because, before 1880, only men were allowed onto the Floating Bath House. Women gained access after years of complaint and enjoyed the joys of river-bathing two days a week, though always on the lookout for Peeping Toms.
From "Harper’s Weekly," August 20, 1870
Lily Langtry’s Apollinaris Water Bath
In February 1883, legendary British beauty Lillie Langtry arrived in Cincinnati for an engagement at Robinson’s Opera House and took rooms at the Grand Hotel. Inevitably, her maid drew a bath, but after one glance at the murky, coffee-colored fluid Lily refused to subject her beauty to such treatment. It would be 25 years before Cincinnati filtered the water it pumped directly from the Ohio River. Miss Langtry dressed and hurried down to see the hotel manager. Struck by inspiration, he ordered enough Apollinaris water delivered to her suite to suffice for her bath. She was immediately satisfied, and the manager continued to send up bottles of the sparkling water throughout her stay at the hotel. An enterprising marketer for the Apollinaris water company, on learning of this creative use of his product, had a gold plate engraved to designate Room 100 of the Grand Hotel as the “Apollinaris Suite” and that plate hung on the door for the next 50 years. Generations of young men, inspired by visions of Lillie Langtry, sans clothing, immersing her voluptuous body into a tub of sparkling water, kept that room occupied for decades.
The Demon Bathtub of Cincinnati
The Alta Flats, a respectable apartment building on the southwest corner of Sycamore and Fourth Streets, held a ghastly Gay Nineties secret. Two people, five years apart, died mysteriously in the same bathtub. Frank Cabell was the first to die, on a cold November day in 1893. He was 27, a clerk for a railroad and a dedicated student of Theosophy. One evening, Frank agitatedly told his brother, who roomed with him, that a “White Mahatma” had accused him of an unpardonable sin. Frank was found next morning with his throat slashed in the tub. Almost exactly five years later, on Nov 6, 1898, the coroner arrived at the very same apartment to find a dead, nude woman in the very same bathtub. Edith Garfield, aged 23, had drowned after what was described as a “debauch,” a “merry night,” and an “orgy” in the rooms then occupied by a well-known stationer. The dead woman was a prostitute “kept” by yet another man who worked as a cashier in his father’s bank. Also involved in the “debauch” was a married woman, who fled the flat after the body was discovered. No one was ever charged. Were the two deaths just a coincidence? Not according to the Enquirer, which opined: “Does the spirit of the great white Mahatma lure unfortunates on to death in the Alta apartment house?”
From “Cincinnatians As We See ‘Em” 1905
Procter & Gamble’s Imputed Bathtub
It was just 20 years ago that a Procter & Gamble archivist disclosed evidence that the company had spent the previous 125 years pushing a thoroughly bogus explanation for the origins of Ivory Soap. According to the “official” story, a machine tender in 1879 left his stirring kettle run through his lunch break, whipping too much air into a batch of P&G white soap. The batch shipped, and the company began getting requests for more of that “floating soap.” P&G discovered the cause of the errant batch, branded it Ivory after a verse in the Bible, and the rest was history. Until, that is, the archivist found this line in James N. Gamble’s 1863 research notebook: “I made floating soap today. I think we’ll make all of our stock that way.” The founder’s son, in other words, created floating soap 15 years before the company went to market with it. Lost in this legend – whichever version you want to believe—is a simple question. How did they know the soap floated? Presumably, someone put it in a tub of water. Was that tub at Jimmy Gamble’s laboratory in Brighton? Or was it at home with Mrs. Gamble? Or was it an apocryphal customer’s tub? Somewhere, there is an unsung bathtub that revealed the magic of Ivory Soap.
Big Bill’s Bathtubs
Cincinnati’s bathtub infatuation extends even to the White House. That proud son of the Queen City, William Howard Taft, finds himself inextricably linked to two bathtubs. The more famous bathtub never existed at all and the bathtub that did exist is hardly mentioned these days. Despite a century of denials, there are folks who still believe that Big Bill got stuck in a bathtub at the White House and required the assistance of four men to extract him. Easily believable because Taft topped six feet in height and weighed somewhere north of 300 pounds, but it never happened. The first mention of Taft’s indelicate predicament didn’t appear until a White House usher named Irwin “Ike” Hoover’s posthumous memoirs appeared in 1934. In reality, soon after his election, Taft sailed south on the battleship North Carolina to inspect the Panama Canal. On board was an immense bathtub, manufactured by the Jordan Mott Company of New York, capable of holding four normal sized men. A photo of this gargantuan fixture appeared in the February 1909 Engineering Review and similar tubs were installed at the White House, the Presidential Yacht, and Taft’s brother’s home in Texas to ensure our hefty chief executive remained unstuck.
Arnold’s Legendary Bathtub
Although it’s a fixture at the annual Bockfest parade, the famous bathtub of Arnold’s Bar & Grill owes its reputation more to the silver tongues of Elmer Arnold and Jim Tarbell than to the Eighteenth Amendment. Both men were exceptionally prolific raconteurs, and Elmer, the last of the Arnold family to manage the establishment, deftly avoided fact-checking when he put his family’s saloon on the market in 1959. Official records confirm that Arnold’s totally shut down throughout Prohibition while the Arnold family decamped from Eighth Street to Mount Lookout. Elmer reluctantly reopened the restaurant in 1933 only because his chosen career – selling horseshoe nails – had dried up. While it is true that Elmer’s father, Hugo, was convicted on bootlegging charges in 1922, Dad was caught with quarts of bonded whiskey, not bathtub gin, suggesting that George Remus, rather than upstairs plumbing, was the source. Elmer was smart enough to know that a good rumor would pique the interest of buyers. When Tarbell took over Arnold’s in 1976, he was not about to let a good legend fade away. With customers clamoring to dine in the bathtub room, he knew he had marketing gold and launched the motorized bathtub that enlivens so many parades today.
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