When was the first vibrator created?

It is the case with some inventions that initially it is not fully understood how to use their potential, how diverse their applications can be and what social change they bring. This was also the case with the vibrator.

Vibrator in medicine

“You are suffering from hysteria” was the diagnosis given to every tenth client visiting a therapist’s office in the 19th century. At that time, hysteria was considered a common disease, although its definition was very vague and general. Symptoms of the disorder included headache , nervousness , excessive extroversion , emotionality , and a broadly understood “tendency to cause trouble . ”

But what does a vibrator have to do with them?

Well, this disease was mainly attributed to women and was often associated with improper functioning of the uterus ... Here you can already guess what happened next ;) But we'll get to that together. And I'd rather warn you: uncensored history! You'll see that it has been hanging over erotic gadgets since forever (and to some extent it still does).

Initially, the vibrator was really used for medical purposes. The supposedly beneficial effects of massages caused this practice to become a separate medical specialty.

In the late 1880s, Joseph Mortimer Granville invented the electric vibrator as a device to relieve muscle pain and treat indigestion and constipation in men . That's right! The first vibrators weren't for sexual pleasure at all.

What they were later used for, the whole world learned in 1998 thanks to the book Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction written by the American researcher Rachel Maines, proclaimed an expert in the history of vibrators. The author informed that the machine, commonly called "Granville's hammer", was sold to Anglo-Saxon doctors, many of whom used it to treat women with the aforementioned hysteria. The alleged therapy was to bring the patient to a liberating orgasm by stimulating the clitoris using vibrations. I can only guess whether at this moment your mouth forms a capital "O", whether you have a smile on your face, or perhaps a slight disgust. In any case, Granville supposedly wanted nothing to do with it. He assumed that hysterical symptoms were just whims provoking doctors to use the device he had patented incorrectly.

And here is where it is appropriate to cool down this story a bit. Renowned researcher Hallie Lieberman found no evidence that doctors ever masturbated their patients as part of the treatment for hysteria. This was also disputed by many other researchers, after which Maines herself justified herself by saying that the orgasmic treatment method was just her hypothesis. However, this narrative is maintained by various media to this day, and it is possible that the film adaptation of Maines's book Hysteria: The Romantic Story of the Vibrator from 2011 contributed to the popularization of this myth .

Also read our article on female orgasm .

The facts may be less romantic, but they are just as interesting. We have no basis for believing that women were ever treated with masturbation, but there is evidence that Granville, like many other doctors, began to treat vibrator massage as a key part of their medical practice in treating male sexual dysfunction . One of them, the leading gynecologist Robert Latou Dickinson, even noted autoerotic vibrator use by one of his patients. Dickinson shrugged it off, but many of his colleagues began to worry seriously about the hidden purpose of vibrator use, which was sensual pleasure.

Whatever happened in the therapy rooms at the turn of the century, the fact is that the vibrator quickly became a consumer product . Marketing materials are a pretty good clue to figuring out what vibrators meant 100 years ago. So let's use them. I consider the investigation underway!

Legal vibrators for everyone

How was it possible for vibrator ads to become so ubiquitous in the early 20th century?

After all, these were times when masturbation was seen as something shameful. In addition, the draconian Comstock Act , passed in 1873 by the United States Congress, was still in force, criminalizing and combating the trade in articles of "immoral use". Well, vibrator manufacturers knew how to elegantly get out of this. They emphasized the non-erotic uses of these devices, while at the same time suggesting them with their phallic attachments, euphemistic language, or the ambiguous gestures of the women presenting them. In addition, the offer was directed to everyone - healthy and sick, young and old, men and women, which further reduced the risk of suspicion.

Exciting Electricity

In the first three decades of the 20th century, vibrators were placed in two consumer categories: an energy-saving household appliance and an electrotherapeutic device. They were like a magic wand that made wrinkles disappear, backaches in adults and colic in children, silhouettes became more beautiful, and the time spent doing housework was shortened. Some of them were supposed to cure various diseases located in the genitals or anus. And of course, they were supposed to provide great pleasure... although most vibrator manufacturers did not specify what kind ;)

Although the motor base was usually sold with separate phallic-shaped parts, to most American housewives the vibrator looked like any other household appliance that was supposed to run on the same motor as the washing machine, food mixer, or vacuum cleaner. At the time, new inventions powered by electricity inspired fear and excitement at the same time—and so it was with vibrators. They gleamed in store windows, appeared on brochures, and appeared in all sorts of popular magazines. The vibrator was seen as just another bizarre new technological invention that promised to improve the quality of life in exchange for trust.

We encourage you to read the article about female masturbation .

Triggering vibrations

In contrast to the advertisements for household vibrators, which portrayed women in traditional roles, the faces of medical vibrators were young, attractive women with exposed cleavage and full satisfaction on their faces. They were a symbol of the Modern Girl , a girl in charge of her sexuality, who, instead of fulfilling expectations as the ideal wife and housekeeper, reveled in independence.

“Every woman can have a flawless complexion and a youthful, perfectly proportioned figure,” proclaimed a 1908 Arnold Vibrator ad, recommending its use for, among other things, “breast development.” Vibrator ads also reflected changes in male gender roles. They were supposed to cure impotence and strengthen muscles, a response to the crisis in masculinity that came with the shift from manual labor to office and factory work.

You probably want to ask: did people really use vibrators of that time for masturbation ? Some probably noticed and used their erotic potential, while others did not notice the erotic subtexts and read the content of the offers completely literally. Until the mid-20th century, the topic of masturbation was hardly mentioned, even in the most private writings. The answers to this question remained in their homes, kitchens or bedrooms.

Vibrators and double standards

When the birth control pill became widely available in the 1960s and attitudes toward premarital sex softened, some began to speak more positively about masturbation. In the 1970s, the renowned sex educator Betty Dodson wrote about masturbation as a way for women to regain sexual self-knowledge. She highly recommended the Hitachi Magic Wand, which became one of the most popular vibrators of all time. In 1983, Vibratex was the first company in the United States to introduce vibrators with additional elements for external stimulation. The toys were shaped like animals to circumvent obscenity laws in Japan, where they were made. The Rabbit vibrator became most famous, in part because of an episode of Sex and the City in which Charlotte unwittingly becomes addicted to it.

On the other hand, masturbation was still stigmatized in the U.S. A 1974 study found that 61 percent of women surveyed masturbated, but 25 percent felt guilty about it or feared going crazy. Vibrators were illegal in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, the Maldives, Malaysia, and Vietnam at the time, and that remains the case today.

In 2010, MTV refused to air an advert for the Trojan Vibrating Triphoria massager because the word "vibrator" was not removed at its request. And in more recent and domestic examples, this year's Herstories for Women's Day film festival was cancelled due to the inclusion of a short documentary Vibrant Village by Weronika Jurkiewicz, which tells the story of a Hungarian village famous for producing vibrators.

To choose from, to color (and just move forward)

Vibrators made of silicone imitating human skin, those in pink or turquoise, decorated with beads, controlled by the movement of a finger on a smartphone screen, those with a knob that allows you to adjust the frequency and amplitude of vibrations... This is the market for sexual gadgets today (in a nutshell).

Thanks to the Internet, we can buy vibrators discreetly, without leaving home, and their advertisements are no longer subject to censorship. In the digital space, we will meet people who talk about erotic gadgets without taboos, emphasizing the health-promoting effects of masturbation, which can diversify intercourse and help us get to know our own bodies. On the other hand, we know perfectly well that the Internet is a place of slightly different matter than the space of public speeches, official festivals or legal records.

The history of vibrators has not been a straight line from camouflage to openness, and attitudes towards them are constantly changing. Although this is an incredibly interesting story, let's hope it won't repeat itself and that we will eventually reach a point where instead of talking about pleasure in codes, we will do it openly, without shame and safely.

K. Adams, Vibrators had a long history as medical quackery before feminists rebranded them as sex toys , https://theconversation.com/vibrators-had-a-long-history-as-medical-quackery-before-feminists-rebranded-them-as-sex-toys-132577 [accessed on 5/08/2021].
H. Lieberman, Selling Sex Toys: Marketing and the Meaning of Vibrators in Early Twentieth-Century America , "Enterprise & Society" 2016, vol. 17, i. 2, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/enterprise-and-society/article/selling-sex-toys-marketing-and-the-meaning-of-vibrators-in-early-twentiethcentury-america/22E463A1B220B723BEFE776F605DB64B [accessed on 4/08/2021].
H. Lieberman, E. Schatzberg, A Failure of Academic Quality Control: The Technology of Orgasm , "Journal of Positive Sexuality" 2018, vol. 4, no. 2, https://journalofpositivesexuality.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Failure-of-Academic-Quality-Control-Technology-of-Orgasm-Lieberman-Schatzberg.pdf [accessed on 4/08/2021].
R. P. Maines, The Technology of Orgasm. "Hysteria", the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction , Baltimore–London 1999, https://monoskop.org/images/9/93/Maines_Rachel_P_The_Technology_of_Orgasm_Hysteria_the_Vibrator_and_Womens_Sexual_Satisfaction.pdf [accessed on 4/08/2021].
C. Ross, "Getting to Know Me" in Ms. Magazine , https://dodsonandross.com/articles/getting-know-me-ms-magazine [accessed on 4/08/2021].