Seymour Spitz: Our forgotten toothbrush titan

SIMON APFEL

Ah, the bristles. You can’t wait to give this baby a spin, and who could blame you?

Using the classic elliptical motion, you shudder with pleasure as the bristles caress your gums and tickle your teeth, with just enough abrasion to remove the stuff you don’t want there. It’s easy to take it for granted, to believe that something this indispensable, this obvious, has always existed. But you know that it hasn’t. So whose bright idea was it?

Seymour Spitz is in South Africa as a guest of Hi-Fi Corporation for its annual teambuilding conference in Pilgrim’s Rest. A friend in sales told me about the guy, and I’ve got a half hour to ask him anything I want. The only subjects off limits, his publicist tells me, are his acne, his pigeon toes, and the seven children he has fathered with four different women.

Not too many people know it – not too many people know him – but the shy, unassuming, gnome-like man standing before me is the inventor of the soft-bristle toothbrush.

The first thing I notice about Spitz isn’t his diminutive stature or his long white beard. It’s his teeth. He has none. Apparently, he never has. “It’s a genetic disorder,” he explains, seeing the puzzled look on my face as he presents the pinkest smile I’ve ever seen. Not even a speck of white. (Dentures? He says he only uses them for eating. Evidently, he’s made peace with his lack of teeth.)

Beethoven’s most admired works were composed during the last decade of his life when he was almost completely deaf. Stevie Wonder was born blind and went on to create some of the most vivid pop music ever recorded. And Spitz, gummy as a Haribo sour snake, toothless as the day he was born, invented the soft-bristle toothbrush.

Spitz was born in Bethlehem in the Free State on the cusp of World War II, a mere 25 years after the discovery of antibiotics, to a family of super achievers. Seymour’s father, Cokey Spitz, a successful importer, was responsible for bringing felt-tip pens to South Africa (hence the uniquely South African nomenclature “Koki”).

Later, he says, his brother George Spitz, alongside a trio of fellow football lovers, co-founded the famous football club Moroka Swallows (as in “spits or swallows” – the late George apparently shared his brother’s bawdy humour and the club’s nickname, “the birds”, is a total misnomer). Is he joking about this? I don’t know. But what I did manage to confirm is that the great US Olympian swimmer Mark Spitz is a distant cousin.

The younger Spitz sibling, like many a maverick inventor, absorbed many years of abject failure before hitting his target. In the 1960s, he built a prototype of a car not powered by fossil fuel, but the hydrogen engine would explode at the slightest impact. Ever the obsessive, Spitz was adamant that the occasional block-wide conflagration was simply the price of progress. Investors thought otherwise.

A few years later, Spitz’s first foray into oral hygiene saw him pioneer a prototype for electric dental floss. He again ran into obstacles, but not before catching the attention of industry giant Oral-B. Try as it might, Oral-B couldn’t replicate Spitz’s prototype, so it bought the patent then sat on it for five decades.

(Spitz claims he has developed a ready-to-launch product in the meantime, but at the age of 79 he will be in his 90s by the time the patent expires, and it’s become a race against his own mortality.)

But back in the 1970s, Spitz used the proceeds of the patent sale to develop what would become his signature achievement. After a number of iterations – an initial variant, Seymour says, “tickled the teeth but didn’t do any scouring… a pleasant sensation but without much functional benefit…” – he arrived at the soft-bristle toothbrush we know and love today.

It’s difficult to exaggerate just how much difference he has made.

“When I first entered the industry, toothbrushes were more like toilet brushes or shoe brushes,” he says, with a mixture of pride and scorn. “It’s a wonder anyone over the age of 20 had gums!”

Spitz has been rewarded richly for his invention, of course. He has been living off the royalties for close to 40 years, on an enormous 150ha ranch in Portland, Oregon. He divides his time between his beloved horses and curating a “toothbrush museum” in nearby Salem, which attracts a small but enthusiastic group of visitors each year.

But a restless, inventive mind such as Spitz’s doesn’t stay dormant for long. Inspired by his thoroughbreds, Spitz is in the process of pioneering a new toothbrush, which insiders believe could once again revolutionise the industry. Leaning in, speaking just above a whisper, he displays an earnestness that’s unsettlingly intense. “Have you ever stroked an Arabian’s mane? I mean like really stroked it. It’s soft and silky, yet at the same time, incredibly sturdy. In other words, it’s the ideal toothbrush.”

According to Spitz, an early prototype was made from actual horsehair, but it proved economically unfeasible. Now, a team of technicians, working out of a secret underground lair at his Portland ranch, have begun experimenting with a synthetic substitute. “The Japanese bullet train was inspired by the kingfisher bird. Wind turbines were inspired by the humpback whale. Is a toothbrush modelled on a horse’s mane actually that improbable?” He muses on this for a while. “There’s game-changing product design everywhere in nature. You just need the eyes to see it.”