As humans, we can agree to disagree about certain things. Politics. Money. Whether business emails with emojis should be read or immediately consigned to the spam folder.

Then there are the really divisive topics that threaten to break up homes, tear apart friendships, and end meaningful relationships before they even start. We refer, of course, to the age-old debate about the correct way to hang toilet paper.

One side insists that the loose end must hang over the front of the roll, where it can be seen and easily grasped. The other believes it should hang underneath, pressed against the wall like a fugitive attempting to avoid identification.

Then there is a third group: people who tear off the last piece from the cardboard tube, leave it on the holder, and place the new roll on top of the toilet tank. These people do not get a vote in the debate since they have rejected civilization altogether.

At first glance, it would appear the debate was settled by the man who created one of civilization’s most important technological advancements. The drawing on the 1891 patent application seems to resolve the issue. We declared as much in this article back in 2016.

Case closed. Judgment entered. Those on the losing side of the debate should flush their pride and leave the bathroom.

Unfortunately, as tends to happen whenever lawyers examine something that everyone else considers obvious, the correct way to hang toilet paper is slightly more complicated.

Before Toilet Paper, Humanity Had a Backup Plan

The debate over toilet paper orientation could not begin until someone invented toilet paper. Before that, people faced a much more fundamental question: “What nearby object am I willing to sacrifice?”

Throughout history, the answer depended largely upon geography, wealth, social status, and how urgently a decision was needed. People used leaves, grass, straw, wool, rags, seashells, stones, pieces of pottery, and other materials that do not appear on the amenities list of even moderately reputable hotels. Even a goose’s neck served the purpose. The past is filled with useful lessons, the most important of which is that we should not go back there.

Ancient Romans sometimes used a sponge attached to a stick. Depending upon the setting, the sponge could be rinsed and shared, which is a sentence that no respectable person should ever have to write, let alone contemplate, but here we are.

In rural America, dried corncobs were a popular option. Newspapers and mail-order catalogs later became especially useful because they combined reading material with post-reading cleanup. This meant that even newspapers whose editorial decisions you found repugnant could still have redeeming value.

Paper intended specifically for personal hygiene appeared in China centuries before it became common in the West. By the 14th century, Chinese manufacturers were producing large quantities of it, including specially perfumed sheets for the imperial household. It would seem that pumpkin-spice-scented toilet paper was not nearly as cutting edge as we might have thought.

Western civilization, meanwhile, continued experimenting with whatever was cheap, available, and unlikely to cause permanent injury.

Joseph Gayetty Makes Toilet Paper Respectable

Modern commercial toilet paper began to appear in the United States in 1857, when New York entrepreneur Joseph Gayetty introduced “Medicated Paper for the Water-Closet.”

Gayetty sold his product in packages of 500 individual sheets for 50 cents—the equivalent of about $20 today. The paper was treated with aloe and marketed as a medical product that could help prevent or relieve hemorrhoids. Considering that Hippocrates recommended treating hemorrhoids with red-hot irons, paying the equivalent of $20 for medicated toilet paper suddenly sounds like an excellent bargain.

Each sheet was also watermarked with Gayetty’s name. Apparently, he believed there was no inappropriate time for brand recognition.

Gayetty’s paper faced an obvious marketing problem. He was asking people to pay for something they had traditionally obtained from old newspapers, catalogs, cornfields, or the general environment. It was the 19th-century equivalent of trying to sell bottled water to someone standing beside a well.

The product never completely took over the market, but Gayetty helped establish the revolutionary idea that bathroom paper could be manufactured, packaged, and sold specifically for that purpose.

There was still no roll, however. Consequently, there was no “over” or “under.” Families had to find other reasons to resent one another.

Seth Wheeler Puts Toilet Paper on a Roll

The man most closely associated with the modern perforated toilet paper roll was Seth Wheeler, an inventor and businessman from Albany, New York.

In 1871, Wheeler received a patent for an improvement in wrapping paper. His idea was simple but important: instead of cutting paper into separate sheets, manufacturers could leave it in a continuous roll and add perforations between the sheets so that each one could be torn away when needed.

Anyone who has ever attempted to tear a sheet from a modern roll, only to have the perforation fail and produce a ragged streamer six feet long, may question whether the problem was ever completely solved. Nevertheless, Wheeler was working in the right direction.

Wheeler became president of the Albany Perforated Wrapping Paper Company, later known as APW. Although the original patent concerned wrapping paper, the perforated-roll concept was readily adaptable to toilet paper, which eventually became the company’s principal product.

Over the following decades, Wheeler patented numerous improvements involving toilet paper, paper rolls, holders, cutting mechanisms, perforations, cores, and fixtures. The man devoted more thought to the engineering of bathroom paper than most people devote to retirement planning.

His work addressed genuine problems. A roll had to unwind smoothly without releasing too much paper. Individual sheets had to remain attached during manufacturing but separate easily when used. The holder had to permit replacement without requiring the mechanical aptitude of a railroad engineer.

In short, Wheeler was attempting to make toilet paper convenient, economical, and simple to use. More than a century later, many households still contain people who cannot figure out how to place a new roll on the holder, but an inventor cannot be expected to overcome every limitation of human behavior.

Exhibits A and B: Seth Wheeler’s 1891 Toilet-Paper Patents

Seth Wheeler received two closely related patents for toilet-paper rolls in 1891. Both dealt with the same basic problem: how to let the user remove one sheet without tearing the next one, pulling several feet of paper from the roll, or producing a handful of useless scraps.

The first, U.S. Patent No. 459,516, was filed on June 10, 1891, and granted on September 15. Titled “Wrapping or Toilet Paper Roll,” it used attachment points placed in alternating or offset positions. When the user pulled on a sheet, the uneven arrangement created a sideways strain that helped separate it cleanly from the roll.

Two days earlier, on June 8, Wheeler had filed the application that became U.S. Patent No. 465,588, titled simply “Toilet-Paper Roll.” That patent was granted on December 22, 1891. Instead of relying upon offset attachment points, Wheeler proposed curved incisions extending inward from both sides of the paper and leaving a small V-shaped tongue near the center.

The purpose was the same: to control the precise moment when one sheet ceased being part of the roll and began its brief but important independent career. Wheeler was not merely putting paper on a tube. He was engineering a clean and orderly separation at a moment when disorder was particularly unwelcome.

For present purposes, however, the most important feature appears in the drawings accompanying both patents. In the drawings accompanying both of these patents, Wheeler depicted the loose sheet hanging over the front of the roll.

It is not tucked behind the roll. It is not pressed against the wall. It is not hiding underneath like someone who has just heard a process server at the door.

It hangs over.

For supporters of that orientation, the drawings are the bathroom equivalent of finding the original Constitution with the word “OVER” written in the margin by James Madison.

Every few years, Patent No. 465,588 resurfaces online beneath headlines announcing that the debate has finally been settled. Over-supporters circulate the image triumphantly. Under-supporters ignore it, challenge its authority, or produce photographs of cats unrolling entire rolls onto the floor.

The drawings certainly show how Wheeler expected the rolls to be displayed and used. What they do not establish is a legally binding rule. Neither patent claimed the orientation of the roll as part of the invention. Wheeler was trying to control how the paper tore, not how married couples argued about it.

What the Toilet Paper Patent Actually Patented

A patent contains drawings and a detailed description, but the legal boundaries of the invention are established primarily by its claims. The claims identify what the inventor asserts as the protected invention.

Wheeler’s claim in Patent No. 465,588 concerns a roll partially divided into sheets by lateral incisions extending inward from the sides, with each sheet connected to the next by a small tongue of paper.

It says nothing about whether the loose end should hang over or under.

The orientation was not the invention. Wheeler could have drawn the roll from another angle without changing the substance of what he was claiming. The picture is excellent evidence that he considered “over” a perfectly natural way to display and use the roll, but it is not a command carrying the force of federal patent law.

Under-hangers, therefore, are not infringing the patent.

They may be defying history, good judgment, and the will of aggrieved spouses, but their intellectual-property exposure is minimal.

The Inventor Was Not Entirely Consistent

There is an additional complication for anyone hoping Wheeler will serve as the final authority.

The famous 1891 drawing shows the paper hanging over, but Wheeler obtained numerous patents involving different rolls and dispensing fixtures. His patent drawings collectively include examples of paper displayed in both over-the-roll and under-the-roll orientations.

Wheeler was apparently less interested in ending future marital disputes than in demonstrating how his various mechanisms worked.

This does not erase the evidence contained in Patent No. 465,588. In that particular drawing, the paper clearly hangs over. It does, however, prevent us from claiming Wheeler regarded the alternative as an offense against nature.

The inventor of the modern perforated roll turns out to have been orientation-flexible.

History has betrayed us again.

Ann Landers Learns What Americans Really Care About

The disagreement might have remained a private domestic irritation if advice columnist Ann Landers had not invited the public to discuss it.

Landers spent decades answering letters about troubled marriages, difficult children, alcoholism, illness, infidelity, grief, loneliness, and nearly every other form of human misery.

Then she wrote about toilet paper.

The issue appeared in her column in the 1970s and returned repeatedly. In a 1986 speech, Landers said the question had generated approximately 15,000 letters, making it the most popular or controversial subject she had encountered.

Thousands of people who had remained silent on war, taxes, and the decline of Western civilization suddenly located stationery and stamps because someone had suggested hanging the roll backward.

Landers initially gave considerable support to the under position, reportedly based on the argument that it looked neater. Readers responded with the restraint and civility ordinarily associated with a dispute over parking spaces.

The controversy returned in later columns, and Landers eventually sided with the over position. By the end of her career, she included a postscript declaring that the toilet paper should hang over the top.

Whether this represented a genuine reconsideration or the surrender of a woman exhausted by decades of angry correspondence is impossible to know.

The People Have Spoken

Modern polling has generally favored the over position.

In 2010, Cottonelle conducted a national “Roll Poll” in which 72 percent of participants selected over, while 28 percent chose under.

Admittedly, this was a promotional campaign conducted by a toilet paper company rather than a solemn act of representative democracy. No independent observers were stationed in bathrooms, no recount was requested, and no one knows how many rolls were improperly registered in two households.

Still, the result was decisive. Over won by a margin that most presidential candidates can only dream about.

Under remains a substantial minority, however. Twenty-eight percent is far too large a group to dismiss. It is roughly equivalent to discovering that more than one-quarter of the country pours milk into the bowl before adding cereal.

The Practical Case for Over

The over position offers several practical advantages.

First, the loose end is easier to see and grasp. It hangs freely in front of the roll rather than lying against the wall, requiring the user to grope around for it at a moment when unnecessary challenges are unwelcome.

Second, the hand is less likely to touch the wall. This is frequently offered as a hygiene argument, although its importance depends heavily upon what has been happening on the bathroom wall.

Third, decorative embossing and printed patterns are generally more visible when the paper hangs over. This is vital for anyone who insists that a product destined to meet a most inglorious end with your inglorious end should make a strong visual impression first.

Hotels also favor over because the exposed end can be folded into a point or decorative shape. The fold serves no practical purpose, but it reassures guests that the bathroom has been cleaned and that a member of the staff possesses rudimentary origami skills.

Finally, the over position is consistent with the famous Wheeler patent drawing, the preference of most poll respondents, and the final judgment of Ann Landers.

That is a formidable coalition.

The Defense Presents Its Case for Under

Under-hangers are not entirely without arguments.

The most persuasive involves cats and small children. When the paper hangs over, a downward swipe can set the roll spinning and release a cascading white ribbon across the floor. The animal or toddler experiences several minutes of intense satisfaction. The adult, not so much.

When the paper hangs under, striking the roll may simply cause it to rotate without unwinding. This is not guaranteed—cats have built an impressive historical record of overcoming human defenses—but it can reduce the risk.

Some people also believe the under position looks tidier because the loose end remains close to the wall. In moving vehicles, campers, and recreational vehicles, it may be somewhat less likely to unroll by itself.

There is also the argument from tradition: “That is how my family always did it.” This is not logically compelling, but it is the foundation of many customs, recipes, institutional policies, and ongoing feuds.

Under, therefore, has a legitimate cat-and-toddler defense. Beyond that, the case becomes increasingly circumstantial.

The Final Answer: What Is the Correct Way to Hang Toilet Paper?

The original 1891 patent does not legally settle the toilet paper orientation debate. That was not the question before the Patent Office, and orientation was not part of Wheeler’s claim.

Nevertheless, the most famous drawing shows over. Most people surveyed prefer over. Hotels use over. The loose end is easier to locate when it hangs over. Ann Landers eventually chose over.

The evidence may not be legally binding, but it is more than sufficient for ordinary household use.

If you are the only person who uses the bathroom, you are free to hang the roll however you please. No one—not even history—will judge you.

In a shared household, however, you may present the patent, cite the polling, discuss hygiene, and deliver a stirring closing argument on behalf of the over position. At the end of the day, there remains only one binding authority: whatever Mom or your wife says.

Patent law may be silent on the issue, but the queen of the castle has final jurisdiction.

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