Modern pregnancy tests are amazingly convenient.  Unbox the stick, pee on the stick, re-cap stick, wait for the stick to indicate
pregnancy.  The entire process often takes no more than 5 minutes top to bottom!

I vaguely recall that the pregnancy tests of 10-20 years ago used to be rather inconvenient.  Involving cups and egg timers.  Ick.

If I’d have been born 1,000 BC, I’d have to pee on a sack of wheat and barley seed to find out if I were pregnant.  Then wait to see if they sprouted or not.  If no sprouts, no baby.  But the rule was if the wheat sprouted I’d have a girl, and if the barley sprouted then it was a boy.  Apparently they tested this theory in the early 60s and history was vindicated!  At least about the sprouting, it had something to do with the woman’s excess estrogen.

Around the same era, the Greeks found it perfectly normal to place bulb of garlic or onion into your womanly area overnight (gag!).  If your breath didn’t stink of onion the next morning, you were preggo!  Don’t ask me, I don’t get it either.

The next earliest test test, though it was hardly a viable home option, was the ‘Rabbit’ test, developed in 1927.  A woman’s urine was injected into a juvenile (female) rabbit, rat or mouse.  The poor baby animal was then euthanized a few days later and its ovaries dissected.  If ovulation was found to have been induced in the juvenile animals, the woman was pregnant.

People later moved onto African frogs, which are more humane because they, when injected with pregnant women’s pee, would just lay eggs so… no killing necessary.

The pregnancy test as we think of it was invented in the 1970’s as a two-hour long process. It called ‘Wampole’s two-hour pregnancy test.

The test kit consisted of; two test tubes, a plastic rack, a bottle of control solution, a bottle of hCG-antiserum and a bottle of cell suspension.  You provide your pipettes and centrifuge.  Ha!  Just kidding, you couldn’t take a pregnancy test at home yet, you had to take your ‘sample’ to a laboratory or doctor’s office.

In ’78, we get the EPT (Early Pregnancy Test) test that takes us from waiting in waiting rooms to waiting in bathrooms.

As at home pregnancy tests moved into the ‘80s and beyond, wait times are reduced, accuracy is increased with the introduction of digital pregnancy tests.  Ovulation kits are introduced into the mix.  What, do you suppose, will they come out with in the future?