Way back in the days of yore, people heated water in pots over a fire or on a stove, poured it into a tub, and took a bath. At some point, indoor plumbing and dedicated gas/electric water-heating appliances became a thing, and at some point after that, showers became a popular alternative to baths. When did that happen?
According to this, showering versus bathing started to become popular in the 1920s in the US, which sounds believable to me.
Agreed, that’s when we started seeing showers as part of the bathroom package. Prior to that you’d mostly find a clawfoot tub with no shower. My apartment was built in 1914 and it originally just had a clawfoot tub, though retrofitting a shower head and curtain rod was/is relatively easy. I have seen plenty of homes where the servants’ quarters still had just a tub, which itself was also more likely to be freestanding, in homes built in the early 1930s. The family bathrooms still had proper tub/showers or completely separate showers.
That makes sense - American cities were at their peak and the suburbs were in their infancy, so a very large portion of Americans, maybe a majority, lived in apartments.
Based on looking at my city’s water department’s history, that’s right about the time that large-scale municpal water purification and treatment became a thing as well.
So maybe the advent of consistent water pressure made showers viable?
Maybe. They started building tenements in big cities with high-pressure showers, and when their residents spread out to the rest of the country, they took their love of showers with them.
One could, but I have to question this statement. If you are just bathing at home and have to slowly/laboriously/expensively heat pots of water, how often are you going to fill up an entire tub full of water, versus calling it quits after soaping up and rinsing off, skipping the final soak?
Fair point, maybe people didn’t often laze for an hour in a full-depth tub of piping hot water. I’m mostly wondering about the transition from a tub-based sponge bath kind of thing to a situation where a continuous spray of warm, clean water is raining down from an overhead shower nozzle.
I had no idea.
I’m glad that showers took some time to catch on.
Old westerns would have been far less atmospheric if they’d shown cowboys lathering up under a gentle spray 
while wearing bathing caps.
Plenty of westerns had the female cast showering from train stop elevated train stop water tanks.
FWIW, there’s a scene in Our American Cousin (the play Lincoln was watching when he was assassinated) where the eponymous cousin, visiting his aristocratic English relatives for the first time, drenches himself to considerable slapstick effect because he’s unfamiliar with showers and how they work. So, presumably, by the mid-nineteenth century, they were a) common enough to be an expected thing in an upper-class English household, and a familiar enough concept for the play’s audience to recognize one when they saw it; but b) uncommon enough that it would be plausible for a grown man from Vermont never to have seen one before. (Or, at any rate, not more implausible than everything else that happens in Our American Cousin. Realistic drama it’s not.)
A Brief History Of Showers - ThermaSol.
The modern shower did not become available until the 1960s with the introduction of electric showers. From the 80s onwards the shower began to be trendy and different accessories and jet designs were developed, which eventually replaced the bath.
From a practical standpoint, the shower is more cost-effective, faster and generally more hygienic than the bath. Over time the bath has become more of an occasional relaxation accessory and shower cabins are often preferred in modern constructions, even combined with a bathtub.
I used to see RE listing where a bathroom with just a shower stall was called a “3/4 bath” (toilet and sink is 1/2 bath).
Huh??
Nothing refreshes like a gentle cascade of warm electrons.
Yeah that’s a strange take. I’ve seen rich people houses from the 1920s and 1930s that have original equipment body sprays and multiple heads. Maybe the 1960s is when we started to see electronically-controlled shower systems with fine-tuned temperature control and various programs? That’s still not common by any stretch. You still find plenty of homes with the standard tub/shower, a diverter valve, and one head. That’s little different from what was installed in a modest home in 1925.
I can just report my own experience. In the house I grew up in there was hot and cold running water, a bathtub, but no shower. You would fill the tub a couple inches with warm water, get in, lie down to get thoroughly wet, then stand up and soap yourself all over, then lie back down to rinse. I lobbied for a shower and finally, some time in the early 1950s, a shower was installed over the bathtub and a rail for a curtain.
I once (1998) stayed in a hotel in Paris that had an old-fashioned tub with an added shower, but not curtain. It was challenging avoiding getting water all over the floor. The hotel also had an open cage elevator.
Maybe WW2 had something to do with it? Millions of men spent the first half of the 1940s showering instead of bathing, and might have brought the habit home with them.
From the article @Jackmannii posted:
By the 1960’s, tankless water heaters were invented with made modern showers – known as electric showers – available to the wider public in the UK. This allowed consumers to generate an instant supply of hot water without relying on a water tank.
So I assume electric showers are a UK thing, apparently some sort of tankless electric water heater coupled to the shower head. And I guess that’s what they consider to be “the modern shower”. So do Brits consider American showers, which do typically rely on a largish tank style water heater, to be old fashioned?
So I found a cite which notes early historical examples
Notes the early hand pump shower
Discusses another gross version
And finally credits the modern proliferation of the shower to French barracks in the 1870s, whose communal style spread to boarding schools and bath houses.
That claim also tracks here.
https://en.m.wiki pedia. org/wiki/Communal_shower
(I broke the link because it weirdly shows naked pictures of people showering, including kids!)
I’ll note that these are references to communal showers. I suspect that this was the initial way that showering started. It was only after it became the norm at places like boarding schools or military service that people (who had become used to the practice) adopted them at home.
“Electric showers” might to do either or both of two things. First, as WildaBeast suggestss, heat the water as required, rather than drawing from a tank of pre-heated water. Secondly, use an electric motor to pump the water, rather than relying on gravity pressure.