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The vibrator dates initially from the days of Hippocrates of Cos II (ca. 460 BC – ca. 370 BC) who is noted as one of the leading figures in the history of medicine, and was used as a therapy for crazed patients. 19th century treatments for hysteria, fatigue, anxiety, headache, neuralgia and depression, became a common use, though was not really considered serious therapy, more a case of trial and error and something of a money grabber for medics. Women would struggle with hand operation and take up to an hour to achieve ‘orgasm’. A technique called hydro therapy – shooting water into the vagina was a progression to mechanising the process.
A British practitioner
created an electric vibrator, one of the first in the 1880’s. The huge
office consuming device saved time and labour and typical orgasms were
achieved in 10 to 15 minutes. The fact that doctors were responsible for
their development at the end of the Victorian era was the only
explanation of why they weren’t banned. The well-known naturalist of the
time John Muir patented his own vibrator in 1899. Should this have been
made illegal? After all they improve your circulation and relax your
muscles!
Ca. 1900, entrepreneurs were seeing the great benefit for hand-held vibrators in everyday home life. The development of the small electric motor was significantly influenced by this – Hamilton Beach of Racine, Wisconsin, United States, take-home vibrator number one, 1902. 1917 – more Americans own vibrators than toasters. 1900 – 1940 scores of patents. 12 or more sold on eBay at any given time so evidence is there that they were built to last.
Oddly enough the original research was on the history of needlework in the United States which doesn’t sound like a very promising way to start on the history of sexuality. But I kept seeing these vibrator ads in needlework magazines starting about 1899 in things like Modern Priscilla, and the Home Needlework Magazine. I thought this is awfully early to appear in a home, and decided I would trace it back into its origins, find out who invented it and why. The more I found out about it, the more I found out that this is something that doctors wanted originally.
There had been a steam-powered vibrator invented in the United States in 1869 by a George Taylor called "The Manipulator" that was again a response to doctors wanting some way of mechanising a treatment that was already around.
You’re picturing the steam engine as being in the vibrator, but
actually it was in another room. The doctors were shovelling coal into it and also they had to have somebody in the room with the steam engine, and then the power train had to go into another room where the patient was.
Dr Woog represents a vibrator manufacturer in Switzerland who manufactures the ’Erosilator’ which is the vibrator endorsed by Ruth Westheimer (aka Dr. Ruth). He told me he’s been having a terrible time buying advertising in the United States because they say it’s bad for women to have these things so that they can have sex by themselves. He said [to publishers] that you advertise Viagra, and they say, Yes, but Viagra is so that men can have sex with women, and vibrators are so women can have sex by themselves, and that’s immoral. I think that there’s a fear that if women have vibrators they won’t be interested in men, which is absurd.
Vibrators can’t talk to you, they can’t hug you, they can’t snuggle up to you and they’re not going to listen to your troubles at night. There is a joke in this country: When did God make man? When She found out that vibrators couldn’t dance. Obviously men are not going to become technologically obsolete, but I think there’s a fear of that in some people, including some women oddly enough.
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Starting in the 1920s, stag reels blew the vibrator’s cover, revealing it to be the sex toy that it was. The most famous of these flicks was The Nun’s Story (not to be confused with the 1959 Audrey Hepburn film of the same name). It starred the wife of bodybuilder Vic Tanney, who disrobes from her nun’s habit and then reclines luxuriantly with her electric vibrator until a virile but clean-cut Peeping Tom shows up. From the 1950s through the 1970s, the vibrator became what academics like to call a camouflaged technology. Mail-order cat’s full of household
knickknacks featured beautiful women with long, silky hair loosening their tight shoulder muscles with banana-shaped vibrators. Also popular were vibrators that doubled as nail-buffer kits, hair brushes, backscratchers, and some that were designed as attachments for vacuum cleaners. Most of them were cheesy, battery-operated devices that came in shag-carpet hues: avocado, gold, and burnt orange.
In 1973, Betty Dodson started masturbation groups for women to raise their sexual consciousness, and she introduced them to the wonders of the Hitachi Magic Wand, which she contended could wake the most somnambulant clitoris. Her book Sex for One was translated into eight languages. That same year, Eve’s Garden, a sex shop for women, opened in New York City.
Good Vibrations followed nearly five years later in San Francisco.
Vibrators came back into the mainstream in the 1990s, thanks not to radical feminists but to the Reagan administration. With the public health threat of AIDS looming, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop mailed out a list of safe-sex options to every household in the land in the late 1980s. Vibrators were on it. In 1999, Rachel Maines published The Technology of Orgasm, a provocative history of the vibrator that she spent 20 years researching. Maines started out studying needlework but was intrigued to discover that the backs of old sewing magazines were filled with vibrator advertisements. In addition to treating hysteria, these early vibrators were multipurpose: They ostensibly relaxed furrowed foreheads, cured sore throats, and restored plumpness to bony arms.
Fearing that her new line of academic inquiry might offend alumni, Clarkson University fired Maines. The Technology of Orgasm has become one of the best-selling histories of technology of all time. At a small and private teledildonics demonstration on June 1, 2005, sex writer Violet Blue, while in San Francisco, induced two orgasms in her partner, who was riding a custom-made mega-vibrator known as a Thrillhammer at the Museum of Sex in New York City.
The event included a few technical hitches: At one point the woman (shown here at a different demonstration) knocked an electrical cord out of the socket. It seems that teledildonics — remote-control vibrator sex via computer—has a long way to go.
Meanwhile, a week after Blue’s show, a retired oil-industry executive received a patent for a vibrator improvement that he contends will do for ordinary citizens what the orgasmatron
did for the characters in Woody Allen’s Sleeper: allow them to
achieve climax without any physical exertion whatsoever.
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