Flush With Excitement: Pitching the Modern Bidet

Arnold Cohen, 69, introduced the American Bidet... worlds first Bidet - Wash ’n Dry Toilet Seat, 50 years ago. Arnold believes that if American Bidets were featured and installed in hotels, the guests would experience the difference and want to buy one or more. Arnold has dedicated his life to changing the Toileting habits for Men, Women and Childen Worldwide.

Behind the Bidet Arnold Cohen's invention will spic-'n'-span you front to rear By Calvin Godfrey

Arnold Cohen wants your tushy clean. The desire took seed in the tall, polite gentleman sometime in the 1960s and has grown into a lifelong obsession. It's not weird either. Arnold believes America should catch up with the Old World where tushies are concerned; he believes in the bidet. "It's my life's work," he says. "Changing the habits of a nation, weening us off the Charmin." The bidet was conceived as a mere stool-mounted washtub. It was employed by Napoleon's cavaliers to cleanse their saddle-worn behinds, and then progressed to the bedrooms of fashionable French households. By the middle of the 20th Century, bidets had spread throughout Europe and parts of South America, and by the 1980s to Asia, where a new toilet-seat/bidet hybrid took hold. These days an estimated 60 percent of Japanese households contain toilet seats that squirt their users in the bum. Whom to thank? Quite possibly Arnold Cohen. Born to a wealthy family in Brooklyn, Cohen established his own advertising firm on Fifth Avenue at age 19 — with a little help from his folks. But he was not an ungrateful child. "I introduced the American Bidet 50 years ago, to help my father with a literal pain in the A." Arnold believes that daily use of an American Bidet can save lives... warns that Elvis's demise could be yours — citing a statistic that majority of heart attacks and strokes occur when using the Toilet during or after bowel elimination. With the help of the American bidet's soothingly invasive jet of warm water, his customers don't have to worry about straining themselves into cardiac arrest. He began plying the device at trade shows and placing large, illustrated ads in newspapers. "Ninety-nine percent of Americans did not know what a bidet was," he says, shaking his head. It was a difficult thing to explain back then. But in 1964 a Japanese trading company, Nichimen Jitsugyo, took notice and invited him for a visit. The firm began importing sitz baths and eventually worked up its own design catered to the country's plumbing and electrical specs as the "wash/dry seat." He was fine with that. "It's a tribute to my life's work," he says. "The more the merrier." In Japan the device took off. In 1980 a company called Toto Ltd. spun Cohen's device off into a product called the "washlet." By 1985, according to an article in the Japan Times, there were 30 Japanese companies doing business in bidets. "They don't realize they are sitting on top of a great revelation for mankind," the newspaper quoted Cohen as saying. Cohen has begun a new advertising surge locally and in major American cities. He is perfecting a new hand-held jet stream attachment (to be used before and after romantic encounters) that he hopes will be installed in thousands of  Hotel rooms across the country.

Mariah Cohen

Baby-Bidet Water Fountain

Daniel Cohen
taken 10/78 (age 2)

Jonas Cohen
taken 10/83 (age 2)

People with separate Bidets
Prefer Using Their
American Bidet Wash & Dry Toilet Seats