[GH85Carrera]

One of my wife's nephews (my nephew in law?) in in college. He went to the store for more TP and discovered the shortage due to hoarding. Like most 20 something kids he went online to research why, and found a link about the history of toilet paper.

He was stunnned to discover it did not come into common use until the early 1950s. He called his great grandmother, my MIL and asked what people did before then. She told his that they all used the pages from a catalog. Sears catalogs were the most common. Of course he asked how that would flush. She laughed and said they went to the back yard to the "two holer" and explained what an outhouse was, a stinky hole in the ground with a shed around it. He was flabbergasted. He was more stunned to learn she did not have running water in the house until she got married and moved into the city where her husband had a job.

The Chinese and the French claim to have invented almost everything.

Joseph Gayetty is widely credited with being the inventor of modern commercially available toilet paper in the United States. Gayetty's paper, first introduced in 1857, was available as late as the 1920s. Gayetty's Medicated Paper was sold in packages of flat sheets, watermarked with the inventor's name.

For the big cities it might have been available. For the majority of the country before 1950 was rural farm land and rather rare I suspect. Many farms did not get electricity and phone service until the 1950s.