The philosopher's underpants, and more

I just posted about circumcision, then philosophy, so it seems apt that we now move on to philosopher's underpants.

I was unaware until watching a recent episode of Horrible Histories (I think its writing is not as good as last season, by the way) that English philosopher Jeremy Bentham is credited by some as having "invented" underpants.

That seems a big claim, but there is some support for it from this 2005 article in Times Higher Education:

The creator of the "greatest happiness of the greatest number" principle naturally believed that the dead should be made useful to the living. He would have loved to have carried a donor card. As it was, he left careful instructions about the fate of his body. His medical disciple, Thomas Southwood Smith, was to dissect his body while lecturing on its parts, and an auto-icon was to be created afterward. 

In recent years, the auto-icon has enjoyed much attention and has been a source of many surprises. One of the more unusual emerged when, some 20 years ago, his clothes were taken to the Textile Conservation Centre, then an outpost of the Courtauld Institute at Hampton Court, where they were conserved and left a good deal cleaner than they would have been when he first put them on. 

Bentham was found to be wearing knitted underpants. These later became common male underwear, but he was clearly way ahead of his time - most of his contemporaries just tucked the tails of their shirts between their legs. It is not widely known that the great philosopher of jurisprudence and ground-breaking social scientist was also a pioneer of pants. 

And so, in the 1980s, Bentham's knitted underpants were photographed from every possible angle by a keen young researcher to accompany an article for the journal Textile History , with which I was then involved. Months later, I noted that the piece had not appeared. When I asked why, I was told that the woman in question had left the centre to get married. "Surely marriage and writing an article about Jeremy Bentham's underpants are not incompatible," I found myself saying. Yet the piece has still not been written. I do not know if the young woman is still married.

But, as I expected, the history of underwear is a lot more complicated than that, and the Wikipedia article on undergarments seems a pretty good summary.  I note the "modern era" or mens underwear seems to date for the 1930's:

Modern men's underwear was largely an invention of the 1930s. On 19 January 1935, Coopers Inc. sold the world's first briefs in Chicago. Designed by an "apparel engineer" named Arthur Kneibler, briefs dispensed with leg sections and had a Y-shaped overlapping fly.^[5] The company dubbed the design the "Jockey" since it offered a degree of support that had previously only been available from the jockstrap. Jockey briefs proved so popular that over 30,000 pairs were sold within three months of their introduction. Coopers, having renamed the company Jockey, sent its "Mascul-line" plane to make special deliveries of "masculine support" briefs to retailers across the US. In 1938, when Jockeys were introduced in the UK, they sold at the rate of 3,000 a week.^[5]

In this decade, companies also began selling buttonless drawers fitted with an elastic waistband. These were the first true boxer shorts, which were named for their resemblance to the shorts worn by professional fighters. Scovil Manufacturing introduced the snap fastener at this time, which became a popular addition to various kinds of undergarments.

The article talks about earlier forms of men's underpants, though, and links to an entire article on the "union suit", popular from the mid 1860's, which I suppose you could say was an undergarment "onesie". (If I had seen this picture, I would have thought they were "long johns", but they apparently are the two piece version.) As far as the way union suits were worn, Wikipedia claims:

It was not uncommon until the mid-20th century for rural men to wear the same union suit continuously all week, or even all winter.

However, there is no citation for that claim.

And finally, Googling for the history of  washing underwear has led me to this rather esoteric article:  A History of War Time Laundry and The U.S. Army.

It's contains some rather interesting information:

World War I marked the first real attempt to provide front line soldiers with clean clothes through laundering and sanitation. The risk of massive non-battle disease, coupled with the advent of chemical warfare, kicked slow moving sanitation plans into high gear. The first American military portable laundry unit was completed in October 1917 by the Broadbent Portable Laundry Corporation. It consisted of four trailers carrying the laundry equipment, two trailers carrying supplies and a steam tractor as prime mover and power source. 

Laundry companies were organized to operate the systems led by one second lieutenant and 37 enlisted soldiers. These companies were attached to units who could provide hardstands, good roads and considerable maneuver space. Unfortunately WWI front line soldiers never received adequate laundry service as most of the units were operated primarily in the rear. More than 90 percent of the soldiers on the front line had disease-carrying lice. 

In the years before World War II, the mobile laundry and sanitation units were redesigned into smaller units with a washing machine, an extractor and two steam-heated tumblers for drying clothes. Contracts were let for 1,331 systems and by October 1942, several hundred had been shipped to mobile laundry companies for training. 

Technological changes and innovations continued throughout World War II. An airborne laundry system with two self-contained skid-mounted units needing only fuel, water, and oil to operate. It could be mounted in either a C-47 or a CG-4A glider. The system was designed to service soldiers at isolated sites far from fixed facilities, primarily on the islands of the South Pacific.

 Perhaps unsurprisingly, General Patton had a laundry platoon following him around, but they apparently could still acquit themselves well:

With the new units capable of reaching the front lines, the "laundry men" had to pull patrol duty, fight snipers and survive many bombings. One laundry platoon followed Lieutenant General Patton across France and set up on a river bank. In the midst of a battle between American tanks and German Infantry, Technical Sergeant Rufus Pressley, the platoon sergeant, and his men "joined in the fight, captured eight Germans, killed a few, and chased off the remainder." (Quartermaster Training Service Journal, 10 November 1944, page 24.) 

 Gee.  Why haven't I heard about the glorious fighting laundry platoons of World War 2 before?  (Slight snigger.)

Anyway, there's another gap in my knowledge filled.