During the Second World War, Dr Charles C Bass, a medical doctor, realised that nylon would have advantages over silk as a flossing material. Nylon could be produced in great lengths, which all had a consistent diameter. It could be supplied in different sizes, and had greater resistance to abrading and shredding than silk. Wax-coated dental floss was introduced in the 1940s, and dental floss in the shape of a tape, rather than a thread, was introduced in the 1950s. By 1996, American purchased over 4.3 million kilometres of dental floss per year.
Dental floss has many uses.
You can use it to slice cheese, remove biscuits that are stuck to the baking biscuit sheet, repair a backpack or tent or winter jacket when you're on the road, and if you're really obsessive, you can clean the crevices in the turned legs of your wooden furniture. Anaesthetists sometimes use dental floss to secure the location of an endotracheal tube - the tie the tube to a few teeth using dental floss. But of course, the main use for dental floss is to clean those little nooks and crevices between the teeth that you simply can't reach with your toothbrush. If you leave the bacteria there for too long, they turn into a plaque. After a while, this plaque turns into the hard substance called tartar.