- First of all, why did Adams' fans choose towels to honour him with? A paragraph in his book provides the answer: “…a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (non-hitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a Toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, Compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit, etc. etc. …What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against the odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.”
- Adams wasn't the only writer to sing the praises of the towel. Mary Henrietta Kingsley, in her 1897 work Travels in West Africa, writes “What is life without a towel?”
- Archaeologists in the Middle Ages acknowledged the importance of towels, too, when they wrote in their papers that they'd found "... closely held personal items included the ever present knife and a towel."
- According to tradition, towels as we know them today were invented in the Turkish city of Bursa, which was capital of the Ottoman State in the 14th-century. People there started using woven linen or cotton to wrap around themselves in Turkish baths. They called these pieces of cloth Pestamel. Thanks to the knowledge of carpet weaving in the area, pestamel could be made with intricate patterns.
- Towels with loops sticking up from the material started to appear in the 18th century. There was another word for these in Turkish - havly - which evolved in to the modern Turkish word for a towel, havlu, meaning "with loops".
- A bath towel usually measures around 30 in × 60 in (76 cm × 152 cm), and a hand towel is smaller - about 12 in × 24 in (30 cm × 61 cm).
- Towels are mentioned twice in the Bible, both in chapter 13 of the Gospel According to John. Shakespeare, however, never mentions towels at all.
- Towel as a verb (ie "to towel yourself dry") was first used by Charles Dickens in 1836.
- The phrase “throw in the towel” for giving up in a boxing match was first used in 1915. Before that, boxers would say they were "throwing up the sponge".
- Traditionally, towels are the items most often stolen from hotel rooms. Baseball legend Yogi Berra when asked what his hotel was like, once quipped: “The towels were so thick there I could hardly close my suitcase.” However, if you're planning to make off with some nice towels next time you go on holiday, beware - many of them now have radio trackers sewn into them (washable ones, of course), along with the bedsheets and bathrobes, so now, they can track you down. A resort in Hawaii reported 3,250 less towels a month had been stolen since they implemented the system.
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