Toothbrush Manufacturing: Bone Handles to ABB Robots

Toothbrush manufacturing turns plastic pellets and nylon filament into a finished brush in seconds, but it started with a man drilling holes into a bone. This post follows the toothbrush from William Addis's bone and bristle brushes of 1780 to nylon in 1938 and the tufting machines that staple bristles into heads by the thousand. It then looks at today's lines from Zahoransky and Boucherie, the production fault that hit Dyson's new CameraJet in September 2026, and where ABB robots such as the IRB 360 FlexPicker and machine-tending arms could plausibly fit.

Three modern manual toothbrushes with moulded plastic handles and nylon tufts. Photo: Jonas Bergsten / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

From Addis's bone brush to nylon bristles

People cleaned their teeth with chew sticks and rags long before anyone made a brush for sale. William Addis is believed to have made the first mass-produced toothbrush in England in 1780. The story goes that he made the first one while in jail, drilling small holes into a piece of bone and tying tufts of bristles into them. His company still exists: under the name Wisdom Toothbrushes it makes about 70 million toothbrushes a year in the UK. For more than a century after Addis, handles were cut from bone or wood and the bristles came from animals, set by hand.

A bone toothbrush recovered from the wreck of the SS Breda, stamped "Warranted pure bristle", with rows of drilled tuft holes. Photo: RexxS / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The first toothbrush patent in the United States went to H. N. Wadsworth in 1857, but American mass production did not start until 1885. Those brushes still had bone handles, with holes bored into them for Siberian boar hair. After that, handles came to be moulded from thermoplastics, and in 1938 DuPont replaced animal bristles with nylon. The first toothbrush with nylon bristles went on sale on 24 February 1938. Electric brushes followed, starting with the Broxodent, invented in Switzerland in 1954.

The machine workshop of the Naglič brush works in Šmarca, Slovenia, in the 1930s. Photo: Peter Naglič via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Plastic and nylon made the toothbrush a machine product. In the classic staple method, a tufting machine folds each tuft of filament into a U and drives a small metal anchor plate into a hole in the head, holding the tuft in place. Anchor-free methods came later. Boucherie's AFT machines fuse the bristle ends together instead of using metal, and in-mould tufting holds the tufts in a mould while plastic is injected around them. Patents for automated cells describe jointed robot arms moving brush bodies between moulding stations.

An Arburg Allrounder injection moulding machine, the type of press that moulds plastic handles. Photo: Bricetofly / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Tufting lines and the CameraJet fault

Today's lines are built by specialist machine makers such as Zahoransky in Germany and Boucherie in Belgium. Zahoransky's Z.orca 18, described in the plastics trade press in 2026, clamps moulded handles in a rotary turret, picks filament from storage, tufts it into the heads, then cuts the bristles to profile and rounds their ends. It can use brass or plastic anchors and is rated at 30 brushes a minute, or up to 60 for brushes with fewer tufts. Its Z.Vamp system tufts up to 20,000 filaments in one go without metal anchors.

A row of toothbrushes in cups, the everyday product of today's tufting lines. Photo: Poulpy / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Electric brushes add electronics, seals and motors to the job, and the risk shows in recent news. Dyson unveiled its CameraJet toothbrush on 1 September 2026, at £419.99 in the UK and $499.99 in the US. Within weeks, stores in France, the US, the UK and Singapore stopped selling it after owners reported water in the battery compartment, overheating and charging failures. On 30 September Dyson said one production batch of the brush's jet tubes had a process issue that could let water seep in, and that it had isolated the affected units. A Dyson spokesperson later said the isolated stock was back in full production and shipping to retailers, but one faulty batch had been enough to stop sales in several countries.

An electric toothbrush with its plastic cover removed, showing the circuit board, battery and motor. Photo: Tiia Monto / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

We found no published ABB toothbrush line, so what follows describes possibilities. Compact arms such as the IRB 1200 or IRB 1300 already unload injection moulding machines in other plastics plants, a job covered in our post on injection molding, and the same task exists for handles and heads. An IRB 360 FlexPicker running PickMaster could pick finished brushes off a conveyor into blister cards. For electric brushes, a YuMi or GoFa cobot could plausibly assemble small parts or hold handles for leak tests. None of these is a known ABB installation, and each would need its own business case.

An ABB IRB 4400 unloads parts from an ENGEL injection moulding machine in a Spanish plant. Photo: ABB

What toothbrush factories automate next

Material changes will keep pushing toothbrush manufacturing to adapt. Brands are trying plant-based and recycled plastics and brushes with replaceable heads; in September 2026 Suri launched its Core 1.0 toothbrush with plant-based heads. Each new material behaves differently in the mould and the tufting head, so plants need lines they can retune quickly. Engineers can try a new cell layout in RobotStudio before they stop a running line to change it.

Toothbrushes primitive and modern, from chew sticks used in India and Africa to a 20th century nylon brush. Photo: Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Inspection is the other open problem. A manual brush can have dozens of tufts, and one loose tuft or sharp filament end is a defect a customer feels in the mouth. Electric brushes add sealing, and Dyson's jet tube problem came from a single batch. Cameras already check parts on many moulding lines, and a robot that presents each handle to a camera, or to a water test, is a likely next step. That kind of work also needs technicians who can program and maintain the cells.

The vision guided ABB IRB 1600 in Limac FormPlast's moulding cell in Sweden. Photo: ABB

Cost sets the limit. A manual toothbrush sells for very little, so most of the work stays inside fast dedicated machines that mould, tuft and trim without a robot arm. Robots fit at the edges of the line: unloading moulds, feeding packaging machines, and stacking cases on pallets, where ABB's IRB 460 and IRB 660 palletizers already work in many consumer goods plants. Electric and premium brushes have more parts and sell for more, so flexible robot cells are more likely to pay off there.

An ABB FlexPicker cell set up with PickMaster Lite, the kind of picker that could load brushes into packs. Photo: ABB

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