A variety of oral hygiene measures have been used since before recorded history.

This has been verified by various excavations done all over the world, in which toothpicks, chewsticks, tree twigs, strips of linen, bird feathers, animal bones and porcupine quills were recovered.

The first modern idea of a toothbrush is believed to have been invented in China around 1600.

Toothpaste

Toothpaste was used as long ago as 500 BC in both China and India; however, modern toothpastes were developed in the 1800s. In 1824, a dentist named Peabody was the first person to add soap to toothpaste. John Harris first added chalk as an ingredient to toothpaste in the 1850s. In 1873, Colgate mass-produced the first toothpaste in a jar. In 1892, Dr. Washington Sheffield of Connecticut manufactured toothpaste into a collapsible tube.

Toothbrush

Natural bristle brushes were invented by the ancient Chinese who made toothbrushes with bristles from the necks of cold climate pigs. French dentists were the first Europeans to promote the use of toothbrushes in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. William Addis of Clerkenwald, England, created the first mass-produced toothbrush.

Hard to believe, but most Americans did not brush their teeth until Army soldiers brought their enforced habits of tooth brushing back home after World War II.