Sex at Dawn

Here’s a hint: These are the first five electrical appliances sold directly to American consumers. Give up? The Hamilton Beach Company of Racine, Wisconsin, patented the first home-use vibrator in 1902, thereby making it just the fifth electrical appliance approved for domestic use. By 1917, there were more vibrators than toasters in American homes. But before it became an instrument for self-treatment (“All the pleasures of youth . will throb within you,” one suggestive ad promised), vibrators had already been in use for decades in the offices of physicians who’d grown weary of “rubbing their stomachs and patting their heads at the same time.”

Motivated by the wonders of industrialization, many doctors had sought a way to mechanize the delivery of their treatment. American ingenuity would mass-produce orgasms for women who were denied them in their “properly chaste,” sexually deprived lives: the first vibrators were invented by these enterprising physicians.

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medical tinkerers designed all sorts of devices to provoke the necessary nervous paroxysms in their patients. Some were diesel powered; others ran on steam, like little locomotives that could. Some were huge contraptions hanging from the rafters on chains and pulleys, like engine blocks at an auto shop. Others sported pistons thrusting dildos through holes in tables or involved high-pressure water directed at the patient’s genitalia like a fire brigade called in to douse the consuming flames of female passion. And all the while, the good doctors never publicly admitted that what they were doing was more sex than medicine.

But perhaps even more dumbfounding than their silence on being paid to provoke nervous paroxysms like so many Chippendale’s studs is the fact that these same medical authorities managed to maintain the conviction that female sexuality was a weak and reluctant thing.