Tevun-Krus #42 - Oh, and ANOTHER Thing...

Towels... - An Article by @elveloy

Towels. Their place in Life, the Universe, and Everything

What is a towel?

According to the Oxford Dictionary, a towel is: "A piece of thick absorbent cloth or paper used for drying oneself or wiping things dry."

When I decided to write an article about towels, I thought I'd start with a brief history of the towel. Surely, I thought, towels have been around for thousands of years. Didn't I see some painted on the pyramids or carved on the Parthenon? But no. Apparently towels (ie something used for wiping or drying, not a piece of clothing) were invented in Turkey, in the 17th century.

Invented for use in Turkish baths, these towels were flat, woven pieces of cotton or linen, narrow but long enough to be wrapped around one's body. Absorbent, but still light when wet, these towels or pestamel as they were called, were soon in demand. People sought more elaborate designs and the looped towels that we know today were developed in the 18th century. Frequently hand embroidered, towels would have been expensive and perhaps a luxury item until mass production took over due to industrialisation in the 19th century. Paper towels were invented by Arthur Scott in 1907.

And who hasn't used, or at least heard of the expression, "to throw in the towel" meaning to quit or give up? The phrase originated from boxing, where throwing a towel into the ring signified that fighter was conceding.

Today, towels come in all shapes and sizes, not to mention hundreds of different colours. From small flannels to wash your face, tea-towels to dry your dishes, bath sheets to dry your body and beach towels to lie around on, towels serve a multitude of purposes.

Attempting to discover famous towels through the ages, I was surprised to discover how seldom they appear worthy of mention. Especially when you stop to consider how many times a day you would use one!

The first historical record of a towel that I could find, was in connection to a particularly grisly crime. In 1551, one was used in an attempt to strangle wealthy land owner Thomas Arden. Failing in this dastardly attempt, Arden was then hit on the head by his wife's lover several times and then stabbed by Alice (his wife) to make certain. When confronted with the deed, Alice confessed, pressing the blood soaked towel to her face and moaning "Oh, the blood of God, help for this blood that I shed!" Her lover was hanged and Alice was burned at the stake.

At the other end of the spectrum, towels are celebrated in one of my favourite paintings, After the bath, woman drying herself, 1890 – 95, by Edgar Degas. In modern times, towels feature in many romantic scenes on film and television, from Cary Grant in the 1962 film, That Touch of Mink, to present day examples too numerous to mention!

And so we come to the most famous towel yet, and possibly ever. That crucial moment in The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy when Ford Prefect rescues Arthur Dent from the imminent destruction of Earth and insists he bring a towel with him. That towel became so famous in fact, that it has a Day named after it. May 25th is Towel Day, when fans carry towels about with them all day. Have you got yours ready?

Finishing off, this article would not be complete without a quote from Douglas Adams himself.

"A towel, [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough."

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in the possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit, etc etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker may accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still know where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
Hence a phrase which has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in "Hey you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is." (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)