Now You See It, Now You Don't!
TellzAll's subject for April is the Hot Water Bottle
Until the twentieth century, most people's homes did not have furnaces to keep them warm. They usually relied upon fireplaces and stoves to keep their houses warm. While people slept at night, the fires would die down, making the homes very cold. Americans, as well as citizens of other countries, developed numerous solutions to this problem. Usually, they focused their attention on ways to make the bed warmer so that they could sleep comfortably at night.
One early solution was known as a bed warmer. Bed warmers were usually made out of metal. They had long handles. At the end of the handle, there was a covered pan. In order to warm up the bed, you would scoop hot coals out of the fireplace and put them into the covered pan. Then, holding the long handle, you would insert the bed warmer between the sheets and blankets and move it around to warm up the bed. While a bed warmer was a possible solution to the problem of a cold bed, it was a lot of work. In addition, it could be messy—or even dangerous—because of handling the hot coals.
As a result of the bed warmer's drawbacks, people looked for other solutions. One option was a bottle made out of pottery. The user would fill the bottle with hot water and place a cork in the opening to keep the water in. This stoneware version of the bed warmer could be left within the bed to keep it warm. It was especially good down at the foot of the bed, as cold feet could keep you from being able to sleep. This version of the bed warmer was made out of numerous materials, including various metals, pottery, glass, and even wood. While this version did help to keep beds warmer than they would have been otherwise, there were still some drawbacks. A bed warmer might leak water into the bed, and you had to worry about dropping and breaking one made of pottery or glass.
Eventually, manufacturers began to use rubber to make hot water bottles. The rubber was able to withstand much more wear than many of the earlier options, and it was not breakable.
Although most hot water bottles were flat and somewhat rectangular, over time companies produced novelty hot water bottles shaped like stars, hearts, and other fun shapes as well. Soon, consumers began to use hot water bottles to soothe muscle aches and to make them feel warmer when they were sick. In the 1930s, some manufacturers introduced electrical versions of the hot water bottle that were able to heat the water to a specific temperature while it was in the bottle, but these styles did not gain popularity with most users.
By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, hot water bottles were not nearly as popular as they had been in the past. There were many newer items that competed with hot water bottles by this time, such as electric blankets, electric heating pads, and adhesive-backed heat therapy pads that become hot when exposed to the air and could be placed wherever someone had pain.
