Eventually, washable wallpapers and sanitary wallpapers were invented as a solution to this problem.

The late nineteenth century saw a great rise in sanitary concerns, and wallpapers seemed to bear the brunt due to the fact they could not be cleaned. For example, if a person in your home had a contagious disease, the homeowner was advised to strip off the wallpaper, sanitize the walls, and then reinstall new wallpaper once the threat had passed.

In 1904 the William Campbell Wall Paper Company filed a patent that was said to prevent the absorption of germs into the wallpaper’s pigment. A number of wallpapers in the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s collection use this patented technology – shown by the inscription “Antiseptic Pat’d 8-9-04.”