Saturday, August 24, 2024

"Mustache cups" should make a comeback

Victorian England had special teacups for men with mustaches.

World History

M ustaches were a fashionable choice during Britain's Victorian era, but life with a bushy upper lip wasn't without its challenges, especially when it came to enjoying a hot cup of tea. Englishmen often used mustache wax to style their facial hair, which melted straight off their upper lip into the warm drink. In response to this predicament, an inventor named Harvey Adams developed an ingenious workaround in the 1870s: the "mustache cup." The cup featured a traditional shape, with an added built-in ceramic ledge for men to rest their mustaches against, as well as a tiny hole for liquid to pass through. Effectively, it was an adult sippy cup. The mustache cups came in a wide variety of sizes, including larger "farmers' cups" for pints of tea and tiny porcelain cups embossed with the owner's name. These teacups were popular not just in the U.K., but also in the U.S., where they were sold at stores such as Sears and Marshall Field's.

Believe it or not, the mustache cup wasn't the only 19th-century kitchen invention inspired by facial hair. In 1868, a New York engineer named Solon Farrer created the mustache spoon, which was essentially a spoon with a lid that lifted up. In 1873, inventor Ellen B. A. Mitcheson tweaked Farrer's idea and submitted a patent of her own. Mitcheson's version added a piece of holed-out metal to the side of the spoon that rested against the lip, thus keeping the mustache from coming into direct contact while slurping down soup. The concept was largely similar in design to the mustache cup, allowing hot liquids to travel through a tiny hole in the spoon while maintaining those perfectly waxed whiskers.

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By the Numbers

Year Salvador Dalí published the absurdist book Dali's Mustache

1954

Date of the first known artifact depicting a mustachioed subject

300 BCE

Age at which Victoria became queen of England

Bonus given to any Oakland Athletics player who grew a mustache in 1972

$300

Did you know?

French waiters went on strike in 1907 for the right to grow mustaches.

Facial hair was strictly regulated in France around the turn of the 20th century, as French elites attempted to co-opt the mustache as a class symbol. This meant that people who weren't members of the upper class, including waiters, domestic workers, and even priests, were forbidden from growing mustaches, which led to widespread pushback. Tensions came to a head in April 1907, when a group of French waiters participated in a strike to demand the freedom to grow facial hair, as well as benefits such as higher pay. The waiters were fed up with forced shaving, and the decision to strike left high-end Parisian restaurants losing roughly 25,000 francs per day in revenue. A bill was introduced to outlaw mustache bans across France, though it initially failed. Despite this bureaucratic shortcoming, many waiters at individual restaurants across the country successfully earned the right to wear mustaches, though their wages remained stagnant.

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