What has been called “disposable culture” or “the throwaway ethic” began in the United States around the middle of the nineteenth century, when a variety of cheap materials became available to industry. Innovations in the machinery of paper production, for example, made paper a practical substitute for cloth. The millions of paper shirtfronts (bosoms, as they were then called), as well as the collars and cuffs that adorned nineteenth-century American men, owe their commercial success to this technological advance. Men found clothing parts made of paper convenient because laundry services in those days were unreliable, expensive, and available mainly in large urban centers. Single men, who often could not afford professional laundry services, bought replaceable shirt parts in bulk and changed them whenever the most visible parts of their attire became stained or discolored. Disposing of a soiled cuff, collar, or bosom was as easy as dropping it into the nearest fireplace or potbellied stove. The beauty of these disposable products, as far as paper manufacturers were concerned, was that demand for them seemed endless- that is, until the advent of modern washing machines in the twentieth century, which destroyed the paper-shirtfront business. It was not just products that were replaceable.