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Benjamin Franklin invented the electric toothbrush. Yes, it’s true. I read it on the internet.

One dreary day when he was messing around with his electric thoughts the clouds boiled up and it began to rain.

He said “Aha” and attached a metal wire to this toothbrush and when the lightning struck it his toothbrush vibrated and cleaned his teeth.

No, of course not. I was just funnin’ with you.

My electrical engineering colleagues of the past would have said “Jim. That’s impossible. How could he brush on a sunshiny day?”

What brought electric toothbrushes to my mind today? The CEO and I just “invested” in a pair of matching electric toothbrushes. Apparently they only sell them in pairs, encouraging you to find a friend with similar dental hygiene needs if you’re single.

After three generations of dentists had recommended it to me I succumbed to the suggestion.

I’ve had more crowns than the kingdom of England so I thought perhaps it was worth the investment — you can buy a lifetime of plastic Oral-Bs for the cost of just one set. And then you still have to replace the brush heads.

The instructions tell you advice you should know, “Don’t use in the shower” (or it could be more exciting than you’d like).

It also suggests brushing your teeth for two minutes each time. Do they think I have nothing better to do (don’t answer that).

Well, I guess it’s better than chewing Denta Bones; even the chlorophyll ones don’t taste good.

There is more to electric toothbrushes than meets the eye (or the tooth).

I didn’t know this when we made what was apparently the down payment, but they are classified according to the frequency of their movements as power, sonic or ultrasonic. Their classification depends (another product for perhaps a later discussion) on whether they make movements below, in or above the audible range (20-20,000 Hertz or 2400-2,400,000 movements per minute).

I honestly don’t know how fast ours are; I haven’t been able to time them while brushing.

Skipping the Ben Franklin misinformation (as most stuff from the web should be), we come upon the first recorded example of an electric toothbrush.

In 1937, Tomlinson Moseley filed a patent for the Motodent; I’d have chosen a different name. This one sounds like something that happened to your car in a parking lot.

His device had a cord attached and appears as if it would have to be held with both hands because of the size. It was not displayed when we bought ours.

Moseley must have cornered the market with the Motodent (except for areas that didn’t have electricity) because the next electric toothbrush didn’t appear until 1954.

It was invented in Switzerland by Dr. Phillippe Guy Woog. He like the “dent” connotation so he named his the Broxodent — if there had been a Swiss language it might have meant something but it’s just a little used surname. I don’t know why he didn’t call it Woogodent or maybe Dentowoog.

His device plugged into a standard wall socket and ran on line voltage.

After six years practicing on the Swiss and other Europeans, the Broxo Electric Toothbrush was moved to the U.S. by E.R. Squibb and Sons Pharmaceuticals. Lacking a better name, Squibb and Kids kept Broxodent and marketed it under that name.

Somewhere in the dark corners of my VelCro mind I seem to remember it advertised on early television.

General Electric, which specialized in things that were generally electric, decided to take a bite (yes, I said that) out of the market share in the early 1960s. It introduced a cordless model with rechargeable NiCad (Nickel Cadmium, which cost less than Dime Cadmium) batteries.

It was portable if you’d been doing arm exercises. It was bulky, about the size of a two-D-cell flashlight handle.

This model came with a charging stand (also portable if you have access to electricity).

Most units sat in the charger, which is not the best approach to achieve maximum service life from a NiCad battery.

And the early ones had a short lifespan. This was an issue if you outlived the battery because the batteries were sealed inside the device and could not be swapped out. The device had to be discarded when the batteries failed — after eating garlic pasta would be a bad time for failure.

Time passed and the safety folks were struggling with certification of Broxo’s original design; this was the 1990s and five decades after the product introduction (lawyers must have been salivating).

Competitors were gnashing their teeth (yes, another) to gain market share so better battery-operated toothbrushes were available and recommended by dentists.

This led to the product the CEO and I are purchasing (financial assistance is available). It is called Sonicare (which means it may help with my hearing issues) and is supposedly very effective.

I have discovered that it takes longer and is messier than my manual toothbrushes (gold in the day, blue in the night). However, I’ll stick with it: Straight teeth, crooked smile.

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