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What’s the history of walk-in tubs? Who invented them? How has the technology evolved?

If you’re interested in these questions, you probably won’t mind starting with the history of bathtubs in general. But let’s not start with the ancient Greeks, Persians, or Chinese. Let’s skip ahead to the Western-style “lie-down” tub in the Nineteenth Century. That’s when indoor plumbing became affordable and common among a substantial number of people in Europe and North America.

The so-called “clawfoot” tub, literally standing on four ornate claw-shaped feet, was typically made of cast iron and painted, though the paint was not durable. Some tubs were also made of copper. Of course there was no hot running water. An unfortunate solution was devised in Victorian England: a tub with a built-in gas flame underneath. — essentially an open water heater. This tidbit will probably not surprise you: quite a few Victorian ladies and gents left the gas on while bathing and were severely or fatally scalded. Another Victorian invention (patented, but not known to have been mass-produced) was what we might describe as a “Murphy tub” that folded up onto the bedroom wall. While this might seem silly to us now, many upper class homes were older and built without a dedicated bathroom. The clawfoot tub saw some improvement in the 1880s with the discovery of a process to bond a procelain enamel surface. (At the time, Kohler marketed enamel-coated cast-iron tubs for “hog scalding”. Indoor plumbing was a distant dream for nearly all American. Hog butchering wasn’t.)

The clawfoot tub began to be replaced by rectangular built-in tubs as the Twentieth Century progress, but still generally of enameled cast iron. Owens-Corning and DuPont developed functioning Fiberglass in the period 1933-1936. In that year, Fiberglass was even used for an autobody for the radically designed Stout Scarab. After World War II, fiberglass bathtubs took over the market and were standard by the 1960s.

What about the walk-in tubs? The engineering challenge here is, of course, the door seal — it definitely can’t leak, since water on the floor is, among other things, a hazard for the bather when exiting the tub. In 1946, Arthur E Fowler and Albert Dressler filed the first patent application for a walk-in tub and were granted US Patent US2570053A..  Their tub had an inward-swinging door — advantageous because the water in the tub pushed the door closed and compressed the seal. The honor of the first US patent for an outward-swinging door appears to belong to Zhi Gang Luo, US20100156120A1. Fowler and Dressler’s technology belonged to Safety Tubs, and until 1968 when the patent expired, their fiberglass tubs had a lock on the market. Dozens of patents have been filed for walk-in bathrubs, continuing to the present day. As noted elsewhere on this site, there are many manufacturers, large and small, working in a market that is estimated to be growing at a 6% annual rate.

Clawfoot tubs have become a bit trendy again, though now in fiberglass form, but they still don’t have doors! Bethesda Accessible Baths can help you install the accessible bath you need!