The bathing machine was a device, popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, to allow people to change out of their usual clothes, possibly change into swimwear and then wade in the ocean at beaches. Bathing machines were roofed and walled wooden carts rolled into the sea. Some had solid wooden walls; others had canvas walls over a wooden frame.
The bathing machine was part of sea-bathing etiquette more rigorously enforced upon women than men but to be observed by both sexes among those who wished to be "proper".
Especially in Britain, men and women were usually segregated, so nobody of the opposite sex might catch sight of them in their bathing suits, which (although modest by modern standards) were not considered proper clothing in which to be seen.
Famous quotes containing the words bathing and/or machine:
“I know, you have forgotten those June nights on the Riviera, where we sat ‘neath the shimmering skies, moonlight bathing in the Mediterranean! We were young, gay, reckless! The night I drank champagne from your slipper—two quarts. It would have held more, but you were wearing inner soles!”
—Irving Brecher, U.S. screenwriter, and Edward Buzzell. J. Cheever Loophole (Groucho Marx)
“The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)