Bathtub Reglazing in New York City
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A History of the Bathtub
A bathtub is more than a place to wash — it’s a 4,500-year story of hygiene, comfort, and craftsmanship. From stone basins carved before 2500 BCE to the cast iron and steel tubs we restore today, the tub has always sat at the heart of personal care. Here’s how it got here.
Bathing before the bathtub
People have built places to bathe for thousands of years. One of the oldest is the Great Bath of Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley, a large watertight brick pool built around 2500 BCE — roughly 4,500 years ago.
By about 1500 BC, the Minoan palace of Knossos on Crete had remarkably modern plumbing, including a personal alabaster bathtub fed and drained by clay pipes — one of the earliest tubs you could actually step into and recognize today.
Bathing reached its grand peak in ancient Greece and Rome. Roman public baths, or thermae, were enormous social centers with heated pools, steam rooms, and saunas, warmed from below by a hypocaust system. Romans famously came to soak, talk, and linger for hours.
After Rome, the shared bathing culture faded across much of Europe for centuries. For a long time, a “bath” meant washing in a basin or a simple freestanding tub that was filled by hand and emptied after each use. The real turning point came in the 1800s, when indoor plumbing finally made a permanent, plumbed bathtub practical.
The cast iron bathtub
In New York City, the J.L. Mott Iron Works — founded by Jordan L. Mott around 1828 in the area now called Mott Haven — was an early maker of cast iron goods like stoves and grates. Its 1843 catalog advertised a cast iron bathtub as a “new article,” praised as better than tubs of tin, lead, or marble.
You’ll often read that the “first bathtub” appeared in Cincinnati in 1842. That story is a well-known hoax — a satirical article written decades later that took on a life of its own. The honest version is messier: cast iron tubs were emerging in the 1840s, but they were rare and expensive.
The real breakthrough came in the 1880s. David Dunbar Buick — yes, the same name behind the car company — developed a way to bond porcelain enamel firmly to cast iron. Around 1883, Kohler famously sold an enameled cast iron horse trough that became a bathtub “by adding four legs.” That enamel-on-iron process made tubs durable, cleanable, and affordable enough to spread into ordinary homes, and it’s still essentially how cast iron tubs are finished today.
Earlier tubs had been made of stone or wood — neither as strong or long-lasting as cast iron. The cast iron tub set the template, and it opened the door to the enameled-steel and, later, plastic tubs that followed.
Lighter materials, more homes
Through the early 20th century, mass production and new materials made tubs cheaper and far more common. Porcelain-enameled steel offered a lighter, less expensive alternative to heavy cast iron. In the 1960s, fiberglass tubs took off because they were light, cheap, and easy to install.
Then in 1979, James R. Wheeler and his brother adapted acrylic — originally used for outdoor spas — to make the modern acrylic bathtub. Acrylic could be molded into new shapes and colors, which is a big part of why bathrooms today come in so many styles. Even so, the cast iron and steel tubs from earlier generations are still in millions of homes, prized for how solid they feel.
The story of the Jacuzzi
The word “Jacuzzi” comes from a real family — seven Italian-immigrant brothers who founded Jacuzzi Brothers in Berkeley, California, in 1915. Before bathtubs, they made their name in aviation, including a laminated wooden aircraft propeller used in World War I, and later built water pumps for farms.
In 1948, Candido Jacuzzi developed a portable hydrotherapy pump to ease the pain of his young son Kenneth, who had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. The pump turned any ordinary tub into a spa, and the family began marketing it as the J-300 around 1955–56. Repeated appearances on the TV show Queen for a Day helped make “Jacuzzi” a household word.
The leap to the tub everyone pictures came in 1968, when Roy Jacuzzi — a third-generation family member, just 21 at the time — launched “the Roman,” the first self-contained whirlpool bath with jets built into the sides. It was a hit, and it kicked off the modern hot-tub era.
Bathtub timeline
From a brick pool in the Indus Valley to a jetted tub in a California showroom, the bathtub went from a rare privilege of the wealthy to a fixture in nearly every home on earth. Whether it’s a plain, functional model or an elaborate spa, there’s a tub for every need — and the heavy cast iron and steel tubs that started it all are still going strong.
Still have one of those classic tubs?
The cast iron and steel tubs from this history are exactly what we restore. If yours is worn, chipped, or stained, we can bring it back with the pour-on method — across New York City, in 3–4 hours, with a 5-year warranty.
