In 1917 Baltimore journalist and editor H. L. Mencken was deterred from expressing his admiration for German culture because of wartime hysteria against Germany and anything of a German origin. To gain his sly revenge, Mencken decided to dramatize the gullibility of the average American and the average American journalist. On 28 December 1917 he published a column in the New York Evening Mail titled, "A Neglected Anniversary," which purported to be a: true history of the bathtub on the anniversary of its introduction to the United States seventy-five years before.

According to Mencken, the story of the bathtub in America began when a Cincinnati-based cotton trader, having seen the tub in England, built one in his new home in 1842. The bathtub required a pump operated by six "Negroes," measured seven feet by four feet, was lined in Nicaraguan mahogany, and weighed 1,750 pounds. Detractors, Mencken wrote...