Soap

We’re all probably using a lot more soap these days, but… what is it exactly? How does it work? Who invented it and how has it changed the world? Join Robert and Joe as they explore the invention of Soap. This episode marks the final installment of Invention as a standalone podcast, but invention-based episodes will continue on the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, This is Robert and this is Joe, and
we have an announcement to make about the Invention podcast. Uh.
This episode about the invention of soap is actually going
to be the last episode of Invention that is going
to be published in the Invention Feed for the foreseeable future.
That's right now. This does not mean that Robert and

(00:21):
I are done doing episodes about the history of inventions.
Those episodes will continue on the feed of our other podcast,
not not for the moment, regularly on Mondays, but they
will be part of our regular rotation of topics that
come up as we publish on Tuesdays and Thursdays in
the Stuff to Blow Your Mind feed. So this episode

(00:42):
is also going to be a regular episode of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind, but it'll be about an invention. Uh.
This is how Robert and I decided we could keep
the spirit of Invention going, uh while while doing our
other show, Stuff to Blow Your Mind, and at the
same time retiring the Invention Feed. And Robert, I gotta say,
I'm sorry to see this feed go. I have had
a lot of fun doing this show with you. Yeah, yeah,

(01:05):
I have as well. And I also really I think
we have a pretty awesome logo for the show, and
uh and uh. I mean, but that's the thing is,
like we love Invention enough that it's not actually going away.
It's actually going to just become a part of Stuff
to blow your Mind, and in a sense, really stuff
to blow your mind will re absorb the invention and
techno history based content that was a part of that

(01:28):
show before we kind of splintered off some of our
topics into this secondary show Invention. So it's not so
much as uh, something is going away, but something is
being reabsorbed back into the mother show, back into the
mother thing. That's a good way of putting it. So
what does this mean practically for you the listener of Invention, Well,
I would say, first of all, uh, there's no need

(01:50):
to unsubscribe from this feed. In fact, I would recommend
if if you don't mind staying subscribe, this probably a
good thing to do. This is a place where we
can let you know about future developments. If anything is
ever happening with our shows in the future, we could
probably publish updates and get in touch with you here.
So if you want to stay subscribed, I think that's
a great idea. The other thing is, of course, please
go subscribe to our other shows, Stuff to Blow your

(02:12):
Mind if you were not subscribed. Now that is our
that that is the show we've done for years before
we ever started Invention. At its heart, Stuff to Blow
Your Mind is a science podcast, but we take a
very innerdisciplinary approach, so we we look at science topics
through the lens of through of history, mythology, literature, you know.
We we kind of throw everything into a big cross
disciplinary blender there. And so of course invention is one

(02:35):
of the things that goes in that slurry. That's right.
And one other note that I would have for everybody
is if you if you feel a sense of anger
over this, if you, if you have your you have
a temptation to lash out about the the end of invention. Here,
we just want to remind what we want to urge
everybody that this was a mutual decision between uh myself

(02:56):
and Joe and our corporate overlords. Uh So no body
was nobody was forced to do anything here. If this
just seemed like the best practical decision moving into the future, yeah, totally.
But as we said, we're not done with inventions. They
will continue to pop up from time to time in
the topics we choose for Stuff to Blow your Mind.
So if you're not subscribed to Stuff to Blow your Mind,

(03:16):
go subscribe now Stuff to Blow your Mind. We think
you'll love it anyway. Uh, and and you will definitely
love the Invention episodes. Yeah, when you can find that
wherever you get your podcast. So, without further ado, let's
dive into this new episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
The Invention of Soap. Welcome to stot to Blow Your

(03:37):
Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff
to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and
I'm Joe McCormick and Robert I am ready to lather up.
That's right. Uh. In this episode, we are going to
be exploring un invention. Uh. We're getting into a little

(03:58):
techno history here, but we're going to considering soap. Soap
has been on everyone's mind a bit more these days,
I think. Uh, this is actually a topic that was
suggested to us for our our previous side show, Invention,
which is now back a part of Stuff to Blow
Your Mind itself. Um, soap is something that is I

(04:20):
think easy to take for granted, uh, given normal situations, right,
Soap is just the thing that you uh, you know,
speedily wash your hands with, you know, add a little
bit of a nice smell, take some of the grease
or grit off, so you can move on to something else.
Perhaps give you a little bit of peace of mind
before you do things like prepare food or put your
contacts in. But lately it is, of course, has been

(04:43):
stressed how essential it is via hand washing in the
prevention of the spread of COVID nineteen. All right, so
let's let's talk about soap. Soap is of course a
human invention. But did we ever get by without it?
I mean, it's hard for us to imagine life without soap.
It's specially now because it aids us in the cleaning
of our bodies. It also helps us so via you know,

(05:05):
detergents in the cleaning of our garments. We use uh
soaps to clean you know, objects and surfaces as well.
It helps maintain basic hygiene, It prevents the spread of disease,
and it can also impart a pleasing odor. You know,
what's not to love about soap? And how on earth
can we get by without it? Now? Obviously we can
look to the animal world for plenty of examples. Uh,

(05:27):
but but a few common examples do tell us a lot. Birds,
for instance, clean themselves with their beaks, and they use
water or dust to bathe themselves. Uh. Cats, dogs and
cows are frequent examples of animals that look themselves to
clean themselves. And uh, let's consider a few terms to
put things in perspective as well. We're talking about grooming,

(05:48):
which is a comfort behavior that is the practice of
cleaning the body surface, including the cleaning and oiling of
feathers with the bill or of the hair with the tongue.
And there are a few road categories here. There's first
of all, auto grooming, that is an animal's grooming of
itself and you know, ultimately that's what's going on when

(06:09):
you take a shower in the morning or in the
evening or whenever or both, you know, go go out. Uh.
There's also all of grooming, which is an animals grooming
of another for parental or social reasons. Yeah, and uh.
One thing that's very interesting is the the array of
social dynamics that seem to take place through grooming behaviors,
like say, primate grooming behaviors where primates will sometimes pick

(06:33):
pick little knits and bits and bugs out of each
other's hair as a way to to manage and mediate
social bonds within groups. Yeah, it becomes a part of
the society for creatures like that and for creatures like us.
So all of this amounts to a general physical removal
of particles scraped away, picked away, washed away. And there

(06:55):
may be bacteria sidal properties as well, you know, particularly
you'll see something there's some studies about saliva m into
what degree they may be able to kill bacteria. But this,
this basic removal can deal with everything from sand and
dirt to dead skin cells, loose hairs, loose feathers, and

(07:16):
like you mentioned, actual exo parasites, and of course in
cleansing oneself, it's helpful to use nails and claws and
beaks and all these these various uh um, you know,
bio tools that we've already mentioned. But in dealing with
with humans, in dealing with Homo sapiens and some of
Homo sapiens closest kin, we of course have to get

(07:38):
into tool use, We get into the techno history of
the situation here. And one of the sources I was
looking at for this episode was soaps from the Phoenicians
to the twentieth century. A historical review by roth at
All came out in nine They point out a few
key examples from quote the pre soap era. This is

(08:00):
an area you might think of as the squeegee era,
you know, where there we did have some tools. We
we probably were interested in cleaning ourselves, but we didn't
have soap yet. So what can you do? Maybe you
can kind of squeege your skin with a with a
little bit of abrasive action. Yeah, And indeed, uh, Neolithic
people apparently used flint scrapers to clean themselves, a basic

(08:22):
way to remove dirt, grime, dead skin cells. You know,
why depend on just those those So I'm guessing horrid
fingernails that you have, uh, during the Neolithic period when
you can also start using some some some tools. You're
using tools to scrape other things. You need a good
scraping as well, So grab some flint and get in there. Now.
I really hope that they were not using the same

(08:45):
hand axes, by faces or pieces of flint to process
animal carcasses and then to scrape their own skin clean.
But I have to guess there probably was a bit acrossover. Yeah,
it seems inevitable, it doesn't it. But so the use
of a kind of a bit of mechanical leverage some

(09:05):
some scraping with a tool did not stop with Neolithic
or Stone Age people. This actually did continue into classical civilizations,
like the Romans did something similar yeah, before the Age
of Plenty in the first centuries. See the Greeks and
Romans depended on what they had vapor baths. They had,
you know, an extravagant bath system for sure, but also

(09:25):
they would scrub and scrape the skin with a strigle
or skin scraper made of bone, ivory or metal. And
this basically what it sounds like. You get the You
get the skin itself, you know, nice and moist from
a bath or perhaps via the application of an oil,
and then you can start scraping away and remove that,

(09:47):
you know, that outer layer of grime, dead skin, etcetera.
I guess some people still use something like this to
cleanse themselves. I mean in terms of just dealing with
our skin. I mean, I know, of instance that just
going to the y m c A, I'll hear some
of the the older gentleman in the locker room. Uh,
they would talk of ways that they would deal with

(10:08):
the like the thickened callouses on their feet, and some
of the sometimes bad advice they would give each other
would involve essentially scraping away the skin, generally with with
tools and implements that were not designed for that purpose. Wait,
it sounds like you've got a specific tool in mind,
or they like using a food processor blade or what. Um, well,

(10:31):
one was definitely there was a guy that was telling
me what you need to do is you need to
get yourself safety raiser and then remove some of the
safety features and then you can just you can, you know,
scrape away some skin, uh, which sounds like a bad
idea and I do not recommend anyone do that. Another
person said, what you need to do is you need
to get one of these and he held up um
uh oh, well, what's the what do you call these?

(10:54):
It's the it's for the grating of say ginger for
culinary purposes. Micro yes, a microplane. Uh so he held
microphlne and he says, you can get one of these
at bed, bath and beyond. It works great. Again, I
would not recommend using that on in your body. I
would recommend getting a sanding or scrubbing implement that is

(11:16):
designed for use on the skin and use on the feet.
What you do is you get a stick blender and
oh man, but that's not to say that that other
folks weren't engaging in the use of essentially chemical approaches
to the cleaning of the skin. The ancient Egyptians made
use of soda to clean their skin as well as

(11:37):
to treat diseases of the skin. Okay, so soda is
interesting here because that suggests we're we're getting a little
bit closer to soap like territories. This will make more
sense when we explain soapen a bit. But but soda,
of course is an alkali. It's a it's a base,
and in certain combinations, in the presence of fats and water,

(11:58):
this can actually have a lather rings soap like effect. Yeah. So,
so this is a nice ancient example. We'll get into
some more in a bit. But oh and then another
example that growth at all point point out fifth century BC.
During this time period, Herodotus wrote of the priest physicians
of the Temple of Ammon at Karnak in Egypt during

(12:19):
the reign of Ramesses. This would have been uhleven thirteen
through ten five BC. And Herodotus stated that they would
quote bathe in cold water twice a day and twice
a night and cleansed their mouths with natron. Now, natron
was a mixture of sodium bicarbonate and sodium carbonate. That's

(12:40):
what you call mummy mouth. Yeah. Uh. One of my
favorite books on the history of hygiene is a book
titled Clean by Virginia Smith, and in that she points
out that that natron was dissolved in water to clean
the body, to clean clothes, furniture, and sometimes it could
be ignited with incense as well. Priests would chew it

(13:00):
and drink it as a as a cleansing as well.
So it wasn't just used in the creation of mummies.
It was like, in a way, this kind of uh,
this kind of posh, high status chemical for for all
the you know that all your hygiene needs in a
way and be like you've got to have that mummy mouth. Yeah. Now.
I think one of the facts that we're getting into

(13:22):
here with especially within with an atron example, is that
we're dealing with medicine. We're dealing with medicinal uses. And
that's one of the amazing things is when you start
looking at some of the early history of what we
think of as soap. You're often dealing more specifically with
with medical practices and sort of the magic of early

(13:43):
medicine as opposed to just sort of the like, we
don't think about soap as medicine, we don't think about
hygiene as medicine. But it is, I mean, it is
preventative medicine. Uh, you know, you know, quite literally, yeah, totally. Now.
Other BC treatments include did um using olive oil on
the skin. I mentioned that already is something that you

(14:03):
know it might apply before scraping, clay and plant ashes
as well. During the Biblical period, we see a form
of soap made from plant derivatives, generally from salty regions
where the plants gathered potash and soda, and the Bible
actually mentions the washing materials bore, bore it, and shilig. Acadian, Syrian,

(14:25):
and Arabic languages all include words specific words for soap
producing plants. Plants that would be you know, would definitely
become important later on, if not then in the creation
of these soap like elements, and plant ash and clay
were also widely used in the cultures of India. Peru, Chili,
and Angola. Well, maybe this is a good place to

(14:46):
stop and explain how soap actually works. But should we
take a break first, We should, It will be right back,
all right, we're back, So it's time to talk about
how soap actually gets things clean. So in a lot
of cases, of course, we all know that simply washing
with water can be very effective. If you don't have soap,

(15:09):
you might as well wash your hands with water because
that gets a lot of stuff off. Maybe not everything,
but a lot, right, Yeah, yeah, I mean it is again,
it's it's often poorly understood by the people who use it,
but it's highly effective. And actually, there was a very
interesting passage about what I'm about to talk about in
the book Until the End of Time by Brian Green,

(15:30):
a recent guest on Stuff to Blow your Mind. The
passage highlights the fact that water is good for washing
things much for the same reason that it is the
basis for life on Earth. And if if that doesn't
make any sense, stick with me for a second. Here,
so Green is talking about the chemical properties of water.
He's talking about the fact that water is a polar molecule,

(15:51):
so you've got a one atom of oxygen with two
atoms of hydrogen. They're bonded together. And in this molecule
there is a net negative charre urge at one end,
the end where the oxygen atom is, and then there's
a net positive charge at the other ends where where
the two hydrogen atoms are. And this difference in electrical
charge across the length of the water molecule is essential

(16:13):
to its function in the world of biochemistry. It's what
makes water the molecule of life in a universe of death.
And so that this distribution of electrical charge across the
length of the molecule means that water can dissolve almost anything,
not anything, but almost anything. The oxygen end will bind
to almost anything that has even a slight positive charge,

(16:37):
and the hydrogen tips at the other end will bind
to almost anything that has even a slight negative charge.
And Green rights that quote. In tandem, the two ends
of a water molecule act like charged claws that pull
apart almost anything that's submerged for a sufficient time. So
if you are if you're like a hardcore soaker when

(16:57):
it comes to cleaning the dishes, uh, this is this
is a this is a ammunition for your defense against
the scrubbers. Oh of course, yeah, I mean just sitting
something in water, Yeah, it will tend to just pull
things out. And it's funny because water is is the
fluid of life. We we think of it as not
something that's uh, you know that rips everything apart the

(17:20):
molecular level. We think of it as this you know,
this this cleansing, healing kind of liquid, which of course
it is to us. We need it to live. But chemically,
what it does and the reason why it's so useful
to our bodies is that it has this power to dissolve,
and so in dissolving things. Green gives the example of
table salt, a very very common example. Table salt is

(17:42):
known chemically as sodium chloride. Sodium chloride is a molecule.
It's made from one atom of sodium and one atom
of chlorine. And when you drop crystals of table salt
into water, the water molecules immediately start ripping them apart
and dissolving them. So the oxygen in the H two
O snags the positively charged sodium ions, and the hydrogen

(18:02):
tips of the H two A molecule grab the negatively
charged chlorine ions. But it's not just table salt. Water
works this way for a huge number of chemicals and substances,
and it's the reason water is good for washing things.
Substances previously stuck to the outside of your skin or
to the outside of a dish or a pan, are

(18:22):
grabbed and dissolved by the water and carried away when
the water runs off of you or off of the dish,
onto the ground, downstream in a river, or down the drain.
And here's where things get really interesting. Uh here, I
just want to quote directly from Brian Green's book Until
the End of Time. Quote well, beyond its utility and
personal hygiene, Water's capacity to grab hold of and ingest

(18:45):
substances is indispensable to life, sell interiors or miniature chemistry labs,
whose workings require the rapid movement of a vast collection
of ingredients, nutrients in, waste out, commingling of chemicals to
synthesize substances required for cellular function, and so on. Water
makes this possible. Water, constituting some seventy of a cell's mass,

(19:11):
is life's ferrying fluid. Nobel Laureate Albert's zent Georgy summarized
it eloquently. Quote water is life's matter and matrix, mother
and medium. There is no life without water. Life could
leave the ocean when it learned to grow a skin,
a bag in which to take the water with it.

(19:31):
We are still living in water, having the water now inside.
Oh wow, that's beautiful. Yeah, sloshy water bag creatures that
we are. It's true, we're bladders of life waddling around
in the desert above. But so this is amazing. It's
basically the same reason that water is good for washing

(19:52):
your hands, and the reason that astrobiologists are looking for
signs of water on Mars. But while water is an
amaze seeing solvent and good for washing all kinds of
stuff off your hands, there are some cases where it's
hygiene powers fall short. You of course know about this
if you ever tried to use water alone to wash
an oily, greasy substance off your hands or off of

(20:15):
a dish in the kitchen. So so you've got a
frying pans covered in you know, residue of butter or something,
and you try to run tap water over it to
wash it off. Does it work? Of course? Not right,
Like the water will maybe dislodge little bits of the butter, residue,
but mostly the oil on the surface of the pan
will continue to stick and the water will kind of

(20:36):
rush overtop it, or at best it will sort of
push waves of the oil around through force. Now I
do use that as an example because I know everybody
has done it. But if you remember from our fat
Bergs episode, please do not wash oil and grease down
the drain lest you begin to make a soap dragon
down the sewers below us. But here's another example I'm

(20:56):
sure everybody will be able to identify with Robert he
ever put lotion on your hands, like a sort of
oil based or kind of greasy lotion, and then you
need to wash your hands. You go and wash your
hands with just water without using soap. What happens there? Oh?
You just you get with these least slippery hands. It's
like now, it's like lotion plus one, right exactly. The

(21:19):
lotion does not get washed off. You have to use
soap in order to get lotion grease off of your hands,
and your hands will stay greasy no matter how much
water you run over them, right, yeah, Like yeah, I
mean obviously there's you know, a certain amount of physical
removal as possible generally, what I do is like I
I washing off my hands real quick and then realize, oh,
I had a lotion on and now I kind of

(21:40):
have to use like a hand towel that to physically
remove some of the lotion water mixture. Right. Uh So,
water by itself fails at washing away lipids, lipids or
a class of substances including oils, fats, waxes, and steroids.
And this is because simply oil and water do not
mix easily, which is in turn due to the chemical

(22:01):
properties of the two substances. So we were talking about
how water is a polar molecule. It's got different electric
charges at each end. And because of these different electric
charges at each end of the water molecule, water links
up with itself very easily through a series of connections
called hydrogen bonds. So you can kind of think of
the analogy of legos. Right, the top of one block

(22:24):
just very easily snaps onto the bottom and the next. Now, oils,
on the other hand, are made up of non polar molecules,
so they do not easily break through these bonds and
link up with water molecules to form new compounds or
dissolve into the water. So you say, so you take
a jar and you put some oil and some water
in the jar together, and then you shake it up

(22:45):
really hard. If if you shake the jar like that,
droplets of oil will be dispersed by force throughout the water.
But these molecules of oil will after So first they
will disrupt the hydrogen bonds between the water molecule, so
they'll get kind of dispersed throughout, but they won't be
able to form bonds with the water themselves. And instead,

(23:06):
the disrupted water molecules I was reading about this, they
they form a kind of molecular cage around the oil molecules. Uh.
And this cage is this kind of almost crystalline type
structure known as a class rate. And this cage actually
represents a temporary decrease in the entropy of the water.

(23:27):
So by forming these orderly structures around these droplets of
oil suspended in the water, you are decreasing entropy. And
we know that the universe does not tolerate decreases an
entropy forever. The universe always wants to increase the entropy again.
So gradually the mixed mass of water and oil manages
to increase its entropy by spontaneously bumping around and rearranging

(23:51):
until the oil molecules join up with one another into
a solid mass and separate from the water to float
on its surface. And of course, the reason that oil
floats on top of water when it's separated is that
oil is less dense than water. But for hygiene purposes,
I guess all you have to remember is the short
version that oil doesn't naturally dissolve in water like so

(24:12):
many other substances do. And this is why water alone
is not very good at dissolving and washing away oil
or fat based substances. And this, of course is where
soap comes in. Here's where we all know from experience
you can't get the water, you can't get the lotion
off your hands or the grease off your hands with
water alone, but if you use some soap, it comes
right off. Another example that comes to mind here is

(24:33):
of course, with our hair. I think if you've ever
experimented with just rigorously shampooing versus going no pooh as
they say it, if they can't um that, you can
definitely observe this in action. Um, so I feel the
oils in your hair? Yeah? Like like I will generally
go no shampoo for um, for like a few weeks

(24:55):
at a time, and I will my hair doesn't. It
varies from person to person, you depending on you know,
your particular hair and in a particular oil and how
it builds up. But with my own hair, like a
little bit of oil will build up in my hair
will will look tolerable and um, you know, I won't
have to do much with it. But then eventually I'll
come a point where I start feeling a little oily,

(25:16):
and therefore I bust out the shampoo and when I do,
all the oil is gone. And now and then I
just look like like a troll doll. You know, I said,
Now there's no oil in my hair at all, and
it's just this poufy blonde mess. But I bring this up.
There's just an example of you know, this is a
way to observe that water, even a lengthy shower, a
lengthy blast of of hot, steamy water, is not going

(25:39):
to get that oil out of your hair. Um, even
if it's just day after day, twice a day, even
uh not until you add that magical soap. Right, Yeah,
the oil just does not come away in the water.
So soap is made by classically it's made by combining
a fatty acid such as an oil or an animal
fat you know you can use like a animal tallow

(26:02):
or something with an alkali such as you would naturally find,
say in the ashes from a wood fire, or today
in a strong synthesized base like a lie uh so.
At the molecular level, soap is a pin shaped molecule
that plays well with both water and lipids. Its tail

(26:22):
is hydrophobic, meaning it doesn't like water, It avoids water molecules,
and it forms a bond with fats and oils. Meanwhile,
its head is hydrophilic, meaning it likes water. It bonds
with water easily, and it becomes suspended in a solution
of water and gets washed away when the water is
rinsed off. Now, often what happens after a good lathering

(26:43):
is that soap molecules will form a kind of bubble
structure called a mice cell around an oily contaminant, with
their hydrophobic tails pointing inward and and and snagging onto
the trapped particle, and their hydrophilic heads pointing outward and
being carried around by the water. So you can imagine
each soap molecule as a kind of a combination grasping

(27:07):
claw at one end and parachute on the other end.
One end grabs hold of the contaminant and the other
end catches the fluid current and is easily carried away.
But I should add that the hygienic properties of soap
don't end there, just at the ability to uh latch
onto these lipid molecules and carry them away in the
flow of water. In addition to making it easy to

(27:30):
wash lipid based dirt off of surfaces like your hands,
soap is also directly lethal to many kinds of germs,
including many kinds of viruses and bacteria. A lot of
viruses and bacteria, including the novel coronavirus responsible for COVID nineteen.
They're protected by an outer layer that can be disrupted

(27:51):
by soap. The fat loving ends of soap molecules kind
of jam themselves into the lipid by layer on the
outside of the virus. I've seen it compared by some
experts to like little chemical crowbars, just stabbing into the
lipid outer membrane of the of the virus and breaking

(28:12):
that outer membrane up. And essentially what this does is
it disembowels the virus, so it's guts spill out all
over the place and then they get washed away harmlessly
and my cells whenever you rense your hands. So as
an added benefit, the soap not only makes it much
easier to get these uh, these sticky little germs off
of your hands, it also just kills lots of germs.

(28:33):
Not every germ is is killed by soap, but lots are,
including the coronavirus. Yeah, I think it was. Maybe it
was the growth article that I referred to earlier. The
author's pointed out that you know we have this this
you know this safe mundane, this tame feeling about our soap.
Soap is gentle um. But for most most organisms that
we're dealing with, soap is a destroyer. It is just

(28:56):
a a a brutal and destructive weapon. Well, yeah, you
don't want to have your your lipids dissolved, and hey,
you know what, you can actually start to feel a
bit of this yourself. Uh if you say, if you
have washed your hands too much, if you've been like
cooking all day or something, and you're repeatedly having to
wash your hands over and over when you go in

(29:16):
between tasks, you may start to notice with with really
frequent hand washing, that the cumulative effects of soap on
your skin do become abrasive. Right, yeah. Yeah, if you
say helped your husband kill a king or something to
that effect, and washing your hands a lot, yeah, you'll
notice that this is starting to irritate the outer layer
of my body. I mean, I think a lot of

(29:38):
what's going on there is that is that natural lipids
in your skin, oils that are a healthy part of
what your skin normally does to protect itself, are removed.
Also when you wash your hands like that. Uh, and
if you just keep removing all that stuff, it can
kind of dry your skin out and irritate it. But
I do want to say one more thing about hand

(29:59):
washing with so which is that I looked into this
the question of time, because we've all been told a
bunch of times. Now you know you need to wash
your hands with soap for at least twenty seconds, right,
And maybe a lot of people think, I know, way,
you actually need to do it for twenty whole seconds, right.
I mean you just told me that that soap. Soap
can be lethal too. Two lots of germs. So basically,

(30:22):
if you get soap all over your hands. You're good, right,
You just get the soap on there and then you
rinse it off, and then you should be fine. That
that is not the case. It really does appear that
time is a factor in allowing soap to do its work.
I was looking at a couple of studies that seemed
to be an agreement that longer really is better, and
the difference between twenty seconds of soapy washing and five

(30:43):
seconds of soapy washing is pretty huge. I love how,
especially early on, to really get this message across. Uh,
there are all these different versions of hey, you can
remember how long twenty seconds is by singing this song
or this chorus from this song. My god, so many
articles like this which it's like, is it that hard
to know how long twenty seconds is? I know that

(31:05):
was my my My initial thought was like, I don't
really need to sing the Happy Birthday song to know
how long twenty seconds is. I can just count to twenty.
But then I realized, well, no, this is this is
as much about getting the message out and making the
message more fun as anything, and if it helps in
that regard, then yeah, let's let's keep reminding everybody which
songs match up with twenty seconds. I like the way

(31:26):
of doing it is like expressing it in terms of
the units of Ronnie Cox's monologue at the end of
Total recall, how many Ronnie Cox monologues do you need
to do home in time for corn flakes? Is it
a twenty second monologue? Or no? No, no, I don't
know it actually, but I should time it out and
then you can know, like, Okay, I need to do
it one and a half times, or just I need

(31:48):
to go two thirds of the way through. I haven't
done the math myself, but some some enterprising listener get
on that. I bet Conner's monologue from Highlander two is
about twenty seconds. Oh okay. Most people live a full
measure of life, but most people just watch it slowly
drip away. But if you can summon it all up
at one time in one place, you can accomplish something glorious.

(32:11):
What was that? Maybe? Yeah, I better do it twice
just to be able to stay all right on that note,
Let's take another break. But when we come back, we
will dive back into the history of soap and feel
around in the darkness of history for its inventor. Thank you,
thank you. Alright, we're back all right, So we're trying

(32:33):
to discuss now the question of who invented soap and
this is not going to be one of those cases
where it was Jonathan Soap or Elizabeth Soap working in
their their home laboratory. Uh, we don't know the actual
inventor of soap, but we have some very interesting clues
at a more sort of civilizational or cultural level about
wind soap entered the history of humanity. Yes, now, I

(32:56):
love that you've brought up the idea, like the the
handy and and just too good to be true idea
of William Soap having invented soap or heated soap having
invented soap, because the first example I want to talk
about here is kind of a version of that. It
is it does not seem to be a true account
of the history of soap. It is. It is too
it is too perfect. And but it's the story origin

(33:18):
story that is often repeated on say websites about soap,
Like if there's a soap company and they have an
about page, they might soap facts. Yeah, you might run
across this one, and that is that soap originates on
the mountain of Sappo. Okay, tell me about Mount Sappo. Okay,
that's that's Sappo s A p O. You know it
sounds like soap. We're already basically there. It's the same

(33:41):
letters rearranged. So the story here and again you may
have heard it, is that soap making began three thousand
years ago on Mount Sappo near Rome. The ideas that
animal sacrifices were made to the gods there, and streams
of melted fat and ashes dribbled and dripped from the altar,
and this mixture made its way down into the to

(34:03):
the clay ground beneath, and here washer women learned that
the resulting substance animal fat, ash and some clay, it
resulted in something that could be used in the cleaning
of garments. This sounds like sort of like one of
those like evolution explanation narratives that people sometimes come up with.
It's not based on any evidence at all, but it's

(34:25):
just like, you know, one time there was a monkey
and it and you know it needed a rock to
do this, and so this is what happened. The stories
like this are fun to come up with because you
can try to imagine what's plausible. Though I think we
can interrogate the plausibility of this one based on things
we actually know about Roman sacrifices and stuff. But but
you can try to come up with a story about

(34:47):
what's plausible, even if you don't have direct evidence for it.
But coming up with a plausible story, as we know,
does not mean that you've discovered where something actually came from.
And in this case, we pretty much know this story
is wrong. Right, Yeah, despite the fact that it's andy
and it's it's clean. Basically a slice of false etymology here,
but I guess the basically, yeah, when you start looking

(35:09):
at the details of it, Yes, this is the sort
of thing that could have happened. Yeah, this story, as
we've related it sounds plausible. But first of all, there's
no mention of it in classical mythology. And it's also
been pointed out that the manner of animal sacrifice that
was practiced by the Romans would not have created vast
amounts of soap um. And I believe a lot of
this had to do with just like how much of

(35:30):
the meat was actually like, how much of the the
animal is actually burnt, and how much of it was
sort of taken apart for other uses, Right, So the
chemical reasoning here would be that you've got animal sacrifices,
animal bodies being burned, and there's a lot of fat
on them, and the fat is just rendering out as
the animal is being burned, and it's pouring off into
this area where there's also ash in the in the

(35:53):
pit from the fire where the animals being burned. And
of course, as I mentioned earlier, soap is made generally
from a common a nation of lipids like animal fats,
and a base like ashes. Ashes can work for that.
So you combine fats and ashes and and and water,
and then you can basically have something like a crude
or rudimentary soap. So you can imagine something like this happening.

(36:15):
But one criticism I was looking at was that, uh,
apparently in Roman animal sacrifices, you know, they take off
most of the usable fat. It was like, it was
like if you could, if you could do something with
the fat, they weren't going to burn that on the altar.
Yeah they were. They were too practical for that. Uh Yeah. Basically,
this is an origin story, a proposed origin story for

(36:36):
soap that would say that soap is essentially a byproduct.
And I guess like basically you would need enough of
that byproduct to be produced for people to realize that
it had some sort of a useful property to it.
Um Also, did we mention that there is no Mount Sappo,
That there's no there's no Mount Sappo, so we can't

(36:57):
even identify it on on a map, or again, there's
no writings about it in the ancient traditions. So it
seems that there's not much evidence to really back this up.
It seems to be an altogether invented origin story. Uh,
perhaps even a straight up hoax. There's another reason, though,
I think that's a very good argument that this is

(37:17):
not actually the origin of soap, which is that we've
got literary references to soap that we'll get to in
just a little bit that are actually older than this
story alleges for the for the creation of soap. Yeah, exactly,
And I think that's gonna be one of the key
factors here. Now, I do have to say it's it's
certainly possible and within like generally within the history of

(37:39):
of humanity that things get invented and reinvented, that the
basic chemical properties in one like medicinal concoction in one culture. Uh,
you know that it gets reinvented somewhere else, you know,
accidentally or with some tinkering in another culture. So that
sort of thing is still possible, and I guess we
have to keep that in mind. But in terms of
saying where did it come for, when was the first

(38:00):
soap born to us? It definitely was not born on
this Mount Sappo three thousand years ago. Uh. Stuff that
we can pretty accurately say is soap predates it by
quite a bit. Okay, I got a question. Yes, we
love to hear from Plenty on ancient substances. Does Plenty
of the elder right at all of soap? Oh? He
certainly does. Yeah. You know, you know Plenty is going

(38:23):
to talk about soap if it if it is it
all around. Now. He does not mention Mount Sappo, which
I think is another uh, you know, key fact to
keep in mind and certainly adds to our our heap
of evidence against the idea of that being an accurate
story at all. But he does mention the word Sappo
as something the Galls used in their hair. And indeed,

(38:45):
there is another story that you sometimes come across and
that's the idea that, uh, that that you had a
man in Gall discovering the properties of this sappo when
his hair dressing of goat oil and beech tree ash
got soaked in a rainstorm and formed a nice frothy lather.
Now that that too, I don't know. That may be

(39:06):
an example that's partially invented just because it's sounds. It's fun, right,
It's like, oh, by accident, my hair treatment has turned
into soap. But but soap does seem to come from
either the gall world sappo or from the Germanic saipa
based on the sources I was looking at. Um, there
are a couple of authors, Conkole and rest Mussin, and

(39:27):
I'm going to cite their full article, um, just in
a little bit here. Uh. They mentioned that this soap
in particular was probably tinged with plants to dye hair,
and this was then imported to Rome because Roman women
really coveted what they described as red gold coloration of
the hair. So we're imagining some sort of soap like

(39:48):
hair treatment that that is used to impart die to
human hair. And then yeah, it becomes a possible that
people realize, oh, this actually can be used for cleaning
as well. Not to say this was the invention of soap,
but this could be an example. You could. You can
think of this as an example of the sort of
the reinvention of soap or a particular substance becoming popular

(40:10):
and it has soap like properties that are then exploited. Additionally,
the Greek physician Galen lived through either one or to
sixteen CE, wrote of soap as well, saying it worked
as a better detergent than soda, and then it was
made from fat mixed with lie and quicklime. And he
added that the best soap is Germanic because it is

(40:31):
creamy and pure, but gall soap second best. Okay, here's
a quote from Galen quote. All types of soap can
severely loosen and remove all filth from the body and
from clothing. You can also dry things out in the
same manner as soda or foam of soda and is
put in caustics. But I should add it is not

(40:52):
entirely clear that Gallon actually wrote this, as it could
have been. We could have actually gotten this quote via
pseudo Gallenic medieval handbooks. So uh so again potentially more
misinformation about where soap comes from. There's something about so
there's something about our need to explain the origin of
such an an everyday substance and explain it with some

(41:15):
sort of a novel, fun little story. Yeah, I wonder
what's what is held in common by the types of
inventions where you know, there are tons of inventions that
we just don't know where they came from. And some
of these get all these like, uh, these these false
origin stories, and others don't. What What are the ones
that get the false origin stories have in common? Are
they just the ones that maybe children are most likely

(41:38):
to wonder about and ask about. Yeah, where I was thinking,
perhaps they're sort of sidebars, like soap is so important.
And yet at the same time, it's easy to imagine
if one we're writing like you know, people like plenty did,
if they were just writing about, you know, the general
history and state of the world. If there's writing about everything,
you might be tempted to just sort of speed through

(41:59):
the soap section and be like, uh, yeah, it sounds
like it came from some some gallic hair treatments something
that effect. But but I don't know, you know, perhaps
the more has been written and said on this this
aspect of of human curiosity, But whether or not that
was actually a gallon that that we quoted. Their other

(42:20):
Greek writers of the time did write about soap um
and we we see this with with Roman writers as well.
Uh Plenty rights that soap is made from the ashes
of beech trees and goat fat, and that there are
two types, thick and liquid, both kinds used in by
a Germanic cultures. Plenty stated that the Phoenicians discovered soap
making in he gave the rough data six b C.

(42:44):
But when we actually look for the earliest evidence of
an actual soap like material, it certainly takes us back
further than that. Okay, let's hear about it. So basically
we can go back and we can look at Sumerian
clay tablets that it date back to the third millennium
BC in the hit Type capital of Bogskoi. And this

(43:06):
decided both in that paper by roth at all that
I already mentioned, as well as his paper by Conkal
and Rasmussen titled an Ancient Cleaner Soap Production and Use
in Antiquity. This was published in Chemical Technology and Antiquity
in two All right, so what is this Sumerian clay
Tablet's say, how how do we know that it's talking
about soap? It says with water, I bathed myself with soda.

(43:31):
I cleansed myself with soda from a shiny basin. I
purified myself with pure oil from the basin. I beautified
myself with a dress of heavenly kingship. I clothed myself. Ah. So,
you're getting all the elements of soap. They're right. You're
getting water, you're getting the alkali and soda, and you're
getting the oil when it says oil. So if you

(43:52):
combine those things together, you can get a rudimentary form
of soap. Yeah. And uh and this is from a
Sumerian clay cylinder found during the excavation of the ancient
city of Babylon from the R dynasty. Uh So it
is essentially sounds like a soap making process. Now, there's
also a roughly b c E text concerning the washing

(44:15):
of wool, but according to Concho and Rasmussen uh quote,
details concerning the identity and contents of these tablets have
not been reported. Like in all of this, I guess
you know, we're dealing with the fact that the history
of soap is difficult to uncover, and this is something
that that's worth keeping in mind. Here we're dealing about
finding written accounts of the physical soap, right, because you

(44:38):
can't find fossil soap, right. Yeah. The authors here point
out that that, first of all, ancient soap is difficult
to study because it is organic and does not leave
behind direct archaeological evidence. In addition, organic residues can simply
undergo suppontification and become soap or soap like without any
human chemistry actually interfering. So instead, the best we can

(45:00):
hope for is a written record of it, especially in
the form of a recipe, and in that we deal
with all the normal problems of looking at the historical
record to understand human history, because it's a question of
what was actually recorded, and then what was recorded in
a way that that could survive, and then what actually
did survive. Uh, you know the point about natural suppontification happening.

(45:22):
This ties into something we've talked about on the podcast
a couple of times, I believe, such as like the
soap corpses. One very famous example is known as the
soap Lady that's housed at the Mooder Museum in Philadelphia,
which is what happens when people are buried in soil
with a certain kind of soil chemistry and uh and

(45:42):
the lipids, the fat layers around the outside of their
body react with the chemicals in the soil to form
a kind of in tumbment or encasement of soap around
the body as it decomposes. Yeah, so that's yeah, that's
an example there. Like nobody was making soap on purpose there,
but sometimes soap happens. Likewise, nobody's nobody's trying to make

(46:03):
soap in the sewers with that's right, with the soap dragons. Yeah, yeah,
because yeah, you can imagine if potentially someone looking back
and they were like, well they created this, the aliens
come and they're like, they created this enormous system underground,
and it's so purpose seemed to be the construction of
massive pieces of soap. I mean, I guess that stuff

(46:23):
isn't technically soap. I mean it has soap like qualities,
but yeah, or I don't know, is it technically soap.
I don't actually remember the answer to that question. It
is soap like in some ways, at least now. Kunkle
and Rasmussen. They they do point to this, this third
dynasty of or that's account as being quote a detailed

(46:46):
economic account of cloth manufacture, and this is what includes
a recipe for an impure liquid soap made from oil
and potash, and this is what he is generally and
currently considered to be the oldest verified wreck of soap making. Now,
they point out that the soap is generally mentioned in
connection with medical writings in Mesopotamian cultures, centering in on

(47:09):
the diagnosis and prognosis of illnesses and the creation of
herbal remedies that usually consist of a pharmacological ointment containing oil,
plant matter, and various other substances. So they also point
to a Sumerian pharmacological tablet from from Nippur that is

(47:30):
seemingly the oldest medical record of soap. But it's also
kind of deconstructed soap because the quote unquote ailing oregon
is washed with a special solution, then rubbed with oil,
and then covered with plant ash. So it's kind of
like deconstructed Wait wait, wait, what's the ailing organ? Yeah,

(47:51):
I was, I was wondering about that too. It brought
some rather um specific ideas to mind. Apparently, there's some
uncertainty there, but the authors laid or in the article
speculate that we're talking about hands and feet. So Oregan
used very loosely here. It still makes me wonder. I mean, like,
I know, in some ancient documents, like in some books

(48:11):
of the Hebrew Bible, I believe scholars speculate that references
to the feet are often euphemistic references to the genitals. Yeah, well,
and ultimately, hey, the genitals need washing too, and genitals
also suffer ailments, both of the skin, uh and other varieties.
So I mean it's you know, we might snicker at
the idea of um, you know, old genitals, ailing genitals

(48:32):
being washed with a you know, a medical semi magical
solution and ancient uh samaria, but I mean that's part
of it, you know, in the same way that we
often think of intestinal disruptions, you know, and um, you know,
diarrhea and the like. There's there's kind of a humor
to those those ailments, at least when we're not suffering
them ourselves or when they're not too severe. But you

(48:54):
look at say, you know, air vedic medicine, You look
at any medical you know, old medical practice and there's
a lot of attention given to digestive problems. I mean,
that's just that's part of being human, and that's part
of our quest to to treat the ailments of humanity.
Mm hmm. Speaking of diarrhea. While soap is is great

(49:14):
for washing the outside of your body, do not ingest it?
Oh yeah, we we. We were reminding my son of
this several months ago, maybe half a year ago now,
and at the same time, he was, as he is now,
super into Harry Potter, so he's into potion making. So
when we told him about this, he took this potion
bottle that he plays with the with the bat in
the bathtub, and he filled it like mostly with soap,

(49:35):
and then he labeled it the diarrhea potion as one
of the worst potions in Snape's class. I completely flunked
the diarrhea of potion portion of the Snape semester. That
the diarrhya potion is still uh in the bathroom. Um,

(49:57):
maybe I should take a picture of it and share
it with with people on the Stuff to Blew your
Mind discussion module on Facebook because uh, yeah, it exists,
and you know what, it probably works, probably works. I
believe in masgic alright, So back to Conkol and Rasmussen.
Here they point to a few other examples that the
paper is is really good. It's worth looking at, uh,

(50:19):
you know, looking at say some there's a for instance,
a seventh century text of a private Acadian citizen. Uh
that's describing using tamar risks, date palm, pine cone, and
some unidentified plant that is referred to as master call.
The quoting question, May the tamarisk, whereof the tops grow high,

(50:39):
cleanse me? May the date palm which faces every wind
free me? May the master call plant which fills the
earth clean me? May the pine cone, which is full
of seed corns free me? I carry a container with
an aqueous solution of master call plant to the gods
of the heavens, as I would bring forth to you
for pureification. So will you cleanse me? So another kind

(51:04):
of magical um uh you know, intonation of the of
the the substance that has been prepared. Okay. Uh So
what are the authors, though, make of the significance of this,
like is, why would this be a soap here? Okay?
So they say, quote, the description of cleansing agents is
quite interesting, and that it contains ingredients that form the

(51:24):
two components of soap. The tamarisk, genus of a group
of saline and alkaline soil tolerant flowering shrubs native to
raise in Africa, could be a potential source of alkali
along with the mastacol plant. Tamarisk is also mentioned in
the Epic of Gilgamesh when the goddess nin son Gilgamesh's
mother bathe ceremoniously in a bath of tamarisk and soap work.

(51:47):
The date palm, which contains a number of fatty acids
in both the seed and the flesh of the fruit,
could provide the second component needed to produce soap. So again,
we're in the zone of possible soap here. Again, the
chemistry of soap is certainly possible before that date we
gave earlier in the third millennium BC. It's just a
matter of finding hard evidence for it, hard records of

(52:09):
it that we can we can definitely point to um plus.
You know, it does make sense, as we've seen with
the gall origin idea, which again is much later in
human history, that the likely origin of soap might involve,
you know, an adjacent area of health, hygiene, medicine, or cosmetics,
and these examples, and you could well imagine it's sort

(52:29):
of being discovered rediscovered uh to to varying degrees across
different cultures. Uh So, I want to read just this
nice closing from Conkol and Rasmussen quote. The slightly complicated
process of rendering the fats and oils and combining it
with alkali could not have been developed spontaneously. There must
have been a series of steps or procedures that slowly evolved,

(52:52):
where each step results in a process useful enough to
be adopted in its own right. One proposed sequence of
development is that people use sand or ashes to remove
the grease from skin. If they rinse the ashes off
with water, the water and their skin would become slippery,
which was because of the dissolved alkali salts. This water
would clean better because the dissolved alkali reacts with the grease,

(53:14):
converting it into soap. The more grease that was was
dissolved in the solution, the better it cleans because more
soap is formed. At some point, the ashes were discarded
and the solution from leech d ashes or concentrated alkali
salts were used. That's very plausible route of development to me.
That maybe first you just had the oil as the

(53:35):
contaminant itself, and then if you used ashes and the washing,
it would naturally combine with the oils that you were
trying to get off to make the soap. Uh, and
that of course that would wash off much more easily
because it bonds with the water you're using to rinse.
So yeah, I can definitely see something like that, maybe
the like ashes from a fire pit or kind of
the stepping stone. Yeah, so so yeah, this is interesting

(53:58):
to really sort of you know, peer back through history.
And again you don't have that wonderful aha moment where
where you suddenly have something accidentally produced. Instead, it's it's
something that develops out of these um, these hygienic practices
and rituals. You know. One of the funny things that
I was just thinking about is that throughout history you
would have had all of these uh soap making industries

(54:21):
that we're making use of rendered animal fats, and I
would guess that a lot of the animal fats they
were using were probably not the ones that were like
still freshest and best for I don't know, culinary uses
or types of uses. So I can imagine that the
process of making soap throughout history might often have been

(54:42):
rather nasty and stinky work. You know, what you're making
is ultimately the thing that that gets the gets the
rich butts clean. Yes, so making does even knowing you
know a little bit more about what goes into the
into the sausages, it does have this air of u
a sort of chemical nobility to it right today, especially

(55:03):
when you're dealing with with with with with crafts people,
right and bespoke soaps and so forth. But yeah, which
I made with rancid goat fat. Rancid goat fat is
not used in the marketing enough. You know. I always
think back to those Irish spring commercials when I was
a kid, where it's like, you know that the manly

(55:25):
Irish soap that is appears to just spring forth from
the earth. Uh, it's like some weird manna that flows
out of the uh you know, the mountains uh in
Ireland or something. You know. Soaps another thing we've talked
before about we're like products they get gendered marketing and
products that don't um and like, of course soap is

(55:47):
one of those that's so interesting, Like you know, there's
feminine soap and there's masculine soap and like why, I
don't know. Yeah, I mean, I mean, obviously some soaps
are are more I guess, um, you know, more durable
than others, or more or harsher like I remember my
my grandfather would always wash and lather up with lava soap,

(56:09):
which was one that was definitely gendered, you know, but
it was it was like a workman. So I guess
they probably still make it. I'm certainly not in the
market for it. But it was a harsh and abrasive
bar of soap. It was the it was the most
masculine bar of soap imaginable. This will turn you into leather,
It'll make beef jerky out of your skin. Yeah, just
rip your skin right off. And then, of course you

(56:30):
see the Irish Spring and there, I mean, there's I'm
sure a plethora of different uh uh you know, masculine
soaps out there. And then of course the reverse is
true as well. You have something that you know that
lots of floral tones and are definitely going in the
other direction. I don't know. I'm more of the the
gender neutral soap category. I like something uh, you know,

(56:51):
nice uh and politely in between, so uh of course
it doesn't matter whether you use masculine soap or feminine
soap or gender neutral soap. It's very important that whatever
kind of soap you use, you wash your hands. And
that's one of the reasons we wanted to do this
episode today. Robert, you discovered there's actually a Global Handwashing Day.

(57:13):
I didn't know about that. Yeah, this is this was
news to me. October fifte is Global Handwashing Day, and
uh it was established by the Global Handwashing Partnership in
two thousand eight. Uh quote. The observance aims to increase
awareness and knowledge of the benefits of handwashing with soap.
I have been going, um, yeah, certainly since its inception,
I have not noticed uh this holiday. I have a

(57:36):
feeling this October we might give it a little more attention. Yeah,
and and certainly I do want to stress if it's
masculine soap, gender neutral soap, you know, feminine soapa, whatever,
kids soap, grown up soap. Use something you like. If
if if it is a certain branding or or fragrance

(57:56):
or whatever, uh makes you like it more or makes
your your child like it more, go for it. That's
my take on it. Uh. But but yeah, the Global
Handwashing day is coming up, and uh, I was looking
into it, and I found some wonderful stats via the
CDC about just the benefits of handwashing, specifically the benefits

(58:17):
of hand washing education within a given community. They point
out that it can first of all, reduce the number
of people who get sick with diarrhea by about twenty
three to It can reduce absenteeism due to gastro intestinal
illness and school children by twenty nine to fifty seven percent.
It can reduce diar real illness in people with weakend

(58:40):
immune systems by about fifty eight percent, and it can
reduce respiratory illnesses like colds in the general population by
about sixteen to twenty one. Yeah. Now, one thing that's
highlighted here is that hand washing is going to have
different levels of effectiveness with different kinds of germs and diseases.
I think one thing that we should probably be clear

(59:01):
about is that I want to say, based on everything
I've been reading, the primary route of transmission, for example
of the novel coronavirus is going to be probably through
droplets dispersed directly from other people onto you. So stuff
that you would receive, you know, from people talking or breathing, coughing,
sneezing in your presence. That's the primary route. But of

(59:23):
course we we do think that a strong secondary route
is you know, contaminated surfaces and and spreading through contact
through the hands, touching the face. Yeah, I mean that's
why handwashing alone is not enough. That's why you know,
early on in the pandemic here in the United States,
it was there was like this. There are a few days,
maybe even a week there where like every business just

(59:45):
went crazy with hand sanitizer and handwashing, um encouragement, you know,
with just handwashing stations or or hand sanitation stations everywhere.
But then it quickly became you know, obvious that that
would and that's only the secondary transmission. Primary transmission is
going to be those droplets. Therefore social distancing is necessary,

(01:00:06):
exactly right. But of course you can see with many
other diseases, especially a lot of diseases I think that
affect the digestive system, like diarrheal diseases have a very
strong component of of you know, contamination delivered through the
hands to the mouth, all these fecal oral route diseases
and stuff. Yeah, so even outside of COVID nineteen, there
are plenty of fringe benefits UH to an additional you

(01:00:28):
know it benefits to doing all that hand washing. I
found this interesting. I imagine other folks heard about this
as well. But Dr Anthony Focci, the director of the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases UH, an individual
everyone you know, is seeing a lot about week after week.
He was talking to the Wall Street Journals podcast about

(01:00:49):
this UH and he said, he's talking about like what
happens when we we sort of begin to emerge from
our current um you know, social distancing and to and
shelter in place HUM requirements. He said, quote, when you
gradually come back, you don't jump in with both feet.
You say, what are the things you could still do

(01:01:11):
and still approach normal? And one of them is absolute
compulsive handwashing. The other is you don't shake anyone's hands.
I don't think we should ever shake hands ever again.
To be honest with you, not only would it be
good to prevent coronavirus disease, it would probably it probably
would decrease instances of influenza dramatically in this country. But

(01:01:33):
how will this be received by the people who just
love shaking hands? I say, as a joke because I
assume nobody does. I mean, I guess some people actually
probably do enjoy it. I mean, I don't know, does
anybody except like the certain kinds of people who like
to play some weird dominance game about it, does anybody
else enjoy it? I mean, it's literally just a friendly

(01:01:54):
greeting words are great, yeah, and uh. And like I
was thinking of a little bit about this myself, because
certainly the handshakes that I remember are like the big dominant,
like hand crushing handshakes you encounter, and also the awkward
like dead fish handshakes, and and even like a normal
handshake is at least for me, kind of awkward. But

(01:02:14):
I think part of it is, like you think about,
you know, when do you hand shake hands? When do
you not? We tend not to shake hands with our
closest friends and co workers, etcetera. It's like new people. Uh.
And that's part of why I mean that that flows
right into a Dr Fauci's advice here. But I guess
the other thing is we're often talking about kind of
like business handshakes and that that level of stranger handshake.

(01:02:39):
But then there are also the sort of handshakes that
often take place and say a communal church environment. So
my initial response was yes, I hate business handshakes, but
then I had to think, well, how about handshakes that
take places place during like the passing of peace in
a church and those so those are okay, those are nice.
I like those that being said, Uh, I'm happy to

(01:03:00):
if those behind do something else instead. We can do
the elbow bump thing we canno do each other. There
are tons of things we can do and still have
that communal experience. I want to see churches past the
piece with a fist bump, because I was just looking
at a study from the American Journal of Infection Control
in ten by Sarah Miller and David E. Whitworth called

(01:03:21):
the fist bump a more hygienic alternative to the handshake.
They actually studied how much at like, what percentage of
germs were spread by handshakes versus other types of greetings,
including a high five and a fist bump. And what
they found was that quote, nearly twice as many bacteria
were transferred during a handshake, and the mean here was

(01:03:44):
one point to four times ten to the eight cfu.
That's CFU means colony forming units compared with a high five,
whereas the fist bump consistently gave the lowest transmission. So
I think if you must touch fist bump instead of handshake, especially,
don't do prolonged handshakes. Um this is they measured that

(01:04:06):
a strong handshake quote or a prolonged handshake is even
worse than a moderate handshake. So like those ridiculously long
handshakes that um uh they you sometimes see the US
President engage in where like nobody's letting go, like where
it's like the test of the test of will that's
just a natural way to to pass on various ailments,

(01:04:29):
or or like the ones. Uh, I think, aren't there
some of these in like action movies like an Arnold
Schwarzenegger movies like the beginning of Predator and Coral Weather
Is they're just like holding hands for several minutes. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's an iconic scene and it's so raw, the big
muscles and all the Yeah, not a good idea. But
they both had diarrhea for a week after that. Yeah,

(01:04:51):
I mean probably just that was that they probably were
already happening. They were in the jungle scenario right living
off the land. Now, I did notice that they point
out a difference between fist bump and prolonged fist bump.
So it's like, I wonder, is a prolonged fist bump
going to be more like the snail or some of
these these uh you know, these variations on the fist

(01:05:12):
bump or or and then and then also where does
are they blowing it up at all? Is there they're
doing the hand grenade? So many questions I would I
would imagine the blowing it up is pretty safe. I
don't think any germs are transferred during blowing it up. Yeah,
as long as it blows up quickly. Maybe that's the
great thing about it. The blowing it up is a
way to remind ourselves that we've got to keep this
brief because this hand grenade is about to go off. Well,

(01:05:37):
I will say my personal prejudice against hand shaking aside,
if you're gonna be shaking hands, and make sure you
wash your hands a lot, wash your hands before, wash
your hands after, and and use soap. Use soap. Yeah,
because soap again is a fabulous human chemical invention. It
has a very long history, a very fascinating history. Uh,

(01:05:58):
so hopefully you'll think this is something you can think
about during those uh twenty plus seconds that you wash
your hands. Totally alright, So we're gonna go ahead and
close it up there. Um. You know, obviously there's there's
more we could have gone into, and you know, in
terms of certainly the more recent history of soap uh
and and so forth. But but really I think that
the ancient history here and just the basic basic understanding

(01:06:22):
of how soap works were the most important things to
focus in on. In the meantime, if you want to
check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind,
head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That will lead you over to the I heart listing
for this show. But you can also find Stuff to
Blow your Mind wherever you get your podcasts, wherever that
happens to be. Just make sure you rate, review, and subscribe.

(01:06:44):
At least for the immediate future, we're planning to continue
doing Invention themed episodes on a periodic basis, So I
don't think that's gonna be it's not gonna be weekly,
but you know it's I think it's gonna at least
be monthly. That's my my gut. There's no real, uh
a firm schedule in place on that. But we love
covering inventions, we love covering human techno history, so we

(01:07:06):
will continue to do so. We'll do when we feel
like it, and we feel like it an awful lot,
I'd say yeah anyway, huge thanks to our excellent audio
producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get
in touch with us with feedback on this episode or
any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or
just to say hello, you can email us at contact
at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to

(01:07:37):
Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For
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(01:08:00):
She was wanted to have a time about a