September 8, 2025 • 39 mins
All over the world, for all of human history – and probably going back to our earliest hominid ancestors – people have found ways to try to keep themselves clean. But how did soap come about?
Research:
- “Soap, N. (1), Etymology.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, June 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1115187665.
- American Cleaning Institute. “Soaps & Detergents History.” https://www.cleaninginstitute.org/understanding-products/why-clean/soaps-detergents-history
- Beckmann, John. “History of Inventions, Discoveries and Origins.” William Johnston, translator.
- Bosart, L.W. “The Early History of the Soap Industry.” The American Oil Chemists' Society. Journal of Oil & Fat Industries 1924-10: Vol 1 Iss 2.
- Cassidy, Cody. “Who Discovered Soap? What to Know About the Origins of the Life-Saving Substance.” Time. 5/5/2020. https://time.com/5831828/soap-origins/
- Ciftyurek, Muge, and Kasim Ince. "Selahattin Okten Soap Factory in Antakya and an Evaluation on Soap Factory Plan Typology/Antakya'da Bulunan Selahattin Okten Sabunhanesi ve Sabunhane Plan Tipolojisi Uzerine Bir Degerlendirme." Art-Sanat, no. 19, Jan. 2023, pp. 133+. Gale Academic OneFile, dx.doi.org/10.26650/artsanat.2023.19.1106544. Accessed 18 Aug. 2025.
- Costa, Albert B. “Michel-Eugène Chevreul.” Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Michel-Eugene-Chevreul
- Curtis, Valerie A. “Dirt, disgust and disease: a natural history of hygiene.” Journal of epidemiology and community health vol. 61,8 (2007): 660-4. doi:10.1136/jech.2007.062380
- Dijkstra, Albert J. “How Chevreul (1786-1889) based his conclusions on his analytical results.” OCL. Vol. 16, No. 1. January-February 2009.
- Gibbs, F.W. “The History and Manufacture of Soap.” Annals of Science. 1939.
- Koeppel, Dan. “The History of Soap.” 4/15/2020. https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/history-of-soap/
- List, Gary, and Michael Jackson. “Giants of the Past: The Battle Over Hydrogenation (1903-1920).” https://www.ars.usda.gov/research/publications/publication/?seqNo115=210614
- Maniatis, George C. “Guild Organized Soap Manufacturing Industry in Constantinople: Tenth-Twelfth Centuries.” Byzantion, 2010, Vol. 80 (2010). https://www.jstor.org/stable/44173107
- National Museum of American History. “Bathing (Body Soaps and Cleansers).” https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object-groups/health-hygiene-and-beauty/bathing-body-soaps-and-cleansers
- New Mexico Historic Sites. “Making Soap from the Leaves of the Soaptree Yucca.” https://nmhistoricsites.org/assets/files/selden/Virtual%20Classroom_Soaptree%20Yucca%20Soap%20Making.pdf
- “The history of soapmaking.” 8/30/2019. https://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/history-science-technology-and-medicine/history-science/the-history-soapmaking
- Pliny the Elder. “The Natural History of Pliny. Translated, With Copious Notes and Illustrations.” Vol. 5. John Bostock, translator. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/60688/60688-h/60688-h.htm
- Pointer, Sally. “An Experimental Exploration of the Earliest Soapmaking.” EXARC Journal. 2024/3. 8/22/2024. https://exarc.net/issue-2024-3/at/experimental-exploration-earliest-soapmaking
- Ridner, Judith. “The dirty history of soap.” The Conversation. 5/12/2020. https://theconversation.com/the-dirty-history-of-soap-136434
- Routh, Hirak Behari et al. “Soaps: From the Phoenicians to the 20th Century - A Historical Review.” Clinics in Dermatology. Vol. No. 3. 1996.
- Smith, Cyril Stanley, and John G. Hawthorne. “Mappae Clavicula: A Little Key to the World of Medieval Techniques.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 64, no. 4, 1974, pp. 1–128. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1006317. Accessed 18 Aug. 2025.
- Timilsena, Yakindra Prasad et al. “Perspectives on Saponins: Food Functionality and Applications.” International journal of molecular sciences vol. 24,17 13538. 31 Aug. 2023, doi:10.3390/ijms241713538
- “Craftsmanship of Aleppo Ghar soap.” https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/craftsmanship-of-aleppo-ghar-soap-02132
- “Tradition of Nabulsi soap making in Palestine.” https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/tradition-of-nabulsi-soap-making-in-palestine-02112
- “Soaps.” https://www.fs.usda.gov/wildflowers/ethnobotany/soaps.shtml
- van Dijk, Kees. “Soap is the onset of civilization.” From Cleanliness and Culture. Kees van Dijk and Jean Gelman Taylor, eds. Brill. 2011. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctvbnm4n9.4
- Wei, Huang. &ldqu
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We got an email from
listener Liz asking for an episode on the history of soap.
That is something that I had on my list back
when Holly and I first joined the show in twenty thirteen.
Holly has thought about doing a soap episode. Also, it
(00:34):
has never happened. It never happened, So I was like,
why not.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Why not?
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Now that someone has actually asked for something that I
thought maybe no one would find interesting, we will do it.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
We'll do it now.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
This turned out to be tricky to do the research
on because Holly's laughing. A lot of writing about soap
is either really hyper specific, like the history of the
soap industry in one particular city over a specific period,
(01:07):
or it is so broad that it's hard.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
To pull details out of.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
And then there are also some details that just get
repeated all over the place, but they don't really add up.
A lot of the books that are connected to this
history are really histories.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Of cleanliness or hygiene, which is a slightly different thing.
So in parts of this episode, we're going to be
talking about a bunch of things that all happened in
roughly the same period of history, but not necessarily in
a specific order chronologically. And now you know why I
(01:47):
never got an episode about soap turned out.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Yeah, when I asked you about it, you said, I
think I ran into some kind of problem, and I
learned through experience what the problem was. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
All over the world, for all of human history, and
probably going back to our earliest hominin ancestors, people have
found ways to try to keep themselves clean. Hygiene norms
really vary from one society to another, but the existence
of some kind of norm seems universal, or at least
pretty close to it. People have washed or bathed in
(02:22):
springs and ponds and rivers. They have used sand or
pummice or brushes or corn cobs to scour the skin.
They have applied oils to their bodies and then scraped
it off with a blade or some other tool. Saunas,
sweat lodges, and sweat houses go back thousands of years
in multiple parts of the world. A lot of these
(02:42):
practices combine cleanliness and hygiene with some kind of spiritual
or religious ritual, and some of them also help build community.
People have also used a lot of different plants as
part of this, specifically plants that are high in sapnans,
which are naturally occurring molecules that foam in water. Sapinins
(03:05):
have a range of uses and effects, and some of
the plants they are found in are edible, although if
you eat too much sapinin that can make your tummy
heart High sapinin plants include the genus Sapinaria, or the
soap warts, which are native to Asia and Europe, as
well as the Sependacea, or the soap berries, which are
(03:29):
native to tropical regions in most of the world. Multiple
species of soap weed, yucca and soap bark tree are
native to the Americas. Common ivy, which is native to
Europe and Western Asia, and Chinese honeylocust, which is native
to East Asia are other examples of these plants that
(03:50):
can produce this foamy kind of soapy substance. People around
the world have used these and other high sapinin plants
to make preparations to clean their skin and hair, to
soothe and treat skin conditions and injuries, and to wash
clothing and other items. These range from the simple, like
boiling soap berries and then using the water to wash
(04:12):
your hair, to the complex, like multi step processes involving grinding, burning, steeping,
and mixing with other substances. In some parts of the world,
today's word for soap comes from the name for one
of these traditional preparations or the plants used to make them.
In others, the word for soap is just a local
variant of soap, or of the word for soap In
(04:35):
another language. One step of the soap making process is
called saponification, and the words saponification and sappanin both trace
back to the Latin word for soap, which was sapo.
I'm just gonna say one.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Of the resources we've been using for pronunciation lookups has
been down for more than a week, so I apologize
if we se say any of these things wrong. These
plant preparations can produce a lather, and they help keep
things clean, but they are not exactly the same thing
as soap. Soap is a substance that's formed through a
(05:15):
chemical reaction between alkalis and fats. So if somebody added
soapberries to a fat like tallow and they mixed that
with an alkali like lye that would be considered soap,
but soapberries by themselves steeped in water would not. Since
soap comes from the interaction between alkalis and fat, it
(05:38):
seems reasonably likely that in the ancient past people all
around the world discovered a sort of proto soap as
they cooked meat over a fire and the fat dripped
into the ashes, or as they used ashes to scour
pots that had been used to cook or store oils
or fatty foods. But intentionally made soap has a somewhat
(05:58):
narrower early hit, one that's focused primarily on Western Asia,
northern Africa, and southern Europe, basically all around the shores
of the Mediterranean Sea. At the same time, tracing the
details even of this narrow history can be tricky. While
there are ancient documents that have been translated with the
(06:19):
word soap, it's not necessarily clear whether the original word
referred to actual soap or to some other substance that
was being used for cleaning. The earliest known written references
to soap are probably found in Sumerian Cuneiform tablets from
southern Mesopotamia in what's now Iraq. These tablets date back
(06:41):
about four thousand, five hundred years. A Time magazine article
from twenty twenty points specifically to a tablet describing the
use of wet ashes to remove the lanolin from wool,
saying that the ash would combine with the lanolin to
make soap. Wet ashes are an alkali that would have
(07:04):
helped remove the lanolin from the wool, but lanolin contains
mostly waxy esters rather than the fats that are needed
for subpotification, so it does not seem like this process
would have produced.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Much actual soap.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
So many other articles just refer obliquely to Somerian tablets
as giving recipes for soap, but they don't go into
detail about what the recipe actually says or which specific
their tablet they are talking about. Trying to track down
the details on this had me going in a bunch
(07:40):
of very annoying circles.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Another early written reference to soap dates back to the Babylonians,
who also lived in ancient Mesopotamia. This reference is in
the form of clay cylinders with an inscription that translates
to fats boiled with ashes. This suggests that the Babylonians
were intentionally making soap and then storing it for later use.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
The Ebers Papyrus has made a lot of appearances on
the show. This Egyptian medical text dates back about thirty
five hundred years, and among other things, it contains references
to using mixtures of oils and alkaline salts to wash
and to treat skin diseases. There is an incredibly widely
(08:26):
repeated story that the word soap comes from an ancient
Roman legend about Mount Sappo. According to this purported legend,
Mount Sapo was the site of animal sacrifices to the gods.
Animals were slaughtered and burned at the top of the mountain,
and then, according to the tail, after it rained, women
washing their clothes in the Tiber River at the foot
(08:48):
of the mountain found that their laundry got extra clean.
This is a fun story. On the surface, it seems
like it should make some reasonable amount of sense. The
ash from the burn process would have combined with the
fat from the animals to make a simple soap, and
then rain would have washed that into the Tiber. But
Mount Sappo is not a real place, and this legend
(09:11):
only seems to show up in articles about the history
of soap. I could not find anything that pointed back
to an original Roman document that references this story, And
it seems like any soap that could have been created
as a byproduct of burned animal sacrifices would have been
really heavily diluted by the time it was washed all
(09:35):
the way down a mountain side by the rain, and
then once it was in the river, it would have
been washed downstream really quickly. It does not really take
that much soap to clean things, like a lot of
people put way too much detergent in their laundry. But
this all just seems like kind of a stretch. Also,
(09:55):
while a lot of words related to soap do trace
back to Latin, that word made its way into Latin
from elsewhere, which we will be getting to.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
Roman author Pliny the Elder, who lived in the first
century CE, gave a very different explanation for where soap
came from than this purported Roman legend. This is in
a section of his Natural History on the treatment of scrofula,
which is a form of tuberculosis. We talked about scrofula
in an episode that ran as a Saturday Classic in
(10:27):
November of twenty twenty three, Specifically, Pliny wrote about how
to treat ulcerated source from scrofula. He listed a series
of unpleasant sounding treatments, many of which involved dung, vinegar,
animal parts, or even urine, one of the many historical
uses for urine, including its being used as a cleansing agent.
(10:48):
After all of this probably less than appealing treatment option list,
Pliny wrote, quote, soap too, is very useful for this purpose,
an invention of the Gauls for giving a reddish tint
to the hair. This substance is prepared from tallow and ashes,
the best ashes for the purpose being those of the
(11:11):
beech and yoke elm. There are two kinds of it,
the hard soap and the liquid, both of them much
used by the people of Germany, the men in particular,
more than the women. Pliny the Elder died in the
eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which also destroyed the Roman city
of Pompeii, and a lot of sources claim that Pompei
(11:33):
had a soap factory. This soap factory is mentioned in
pieces about soap about as often as that story of
Mount Sappo is. There is a room in the ruins
of Pompeii that has often been called the soap factory,
but that Moniker seems to trace back to a letter
that was written in the late eighteenth century. There was
(11:54):
something that had seemed kind of soap like that had
been discovered in this room, but later testing that it
was some kind of clay like Fuller's Earth. Other evidence
of soap has not been found at Pompeii like. There's
been a lot of cosmetics that have been found, things
that are probably make up, but not things that are confirmed.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
To be soap. And it's possible that this space was
really for doing laundry or for some kind of industrial
production of something that you would need big vats for.
A work attributed to Greek physician Galen, written roughly one
hundred years after the destruction of Pompeii, describe soap as
being made from the tallow of oxen goats or sheep
(12:35):
and a lie of ashes strengthened with quicklime. Galen describes
the best soaps is coming from Germany and the second
best is coming from the Gauls. So Pliny and Galen's
descriptions of soap feedback into the origins of the term.
As we said earlier, the Latin word for soap is sappo,
and then that feeds into a lot of other words
(12:57):
that are related to soap. But the word sappo probably
had Germanic origins, and there are also some similar words
in Turkic languages. So this suggests, but doesn't conclusively prove,
that the Romans learned about soap from the Germanic peoples
of northern Europe or the Turkic peoples of western and
Central Asia, or maybe some combination of both.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
It gets much easier to trace the development and manufacture
of soap a bit later in history, and we're going
to get into that after we pause for a sponsor break.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
Soap making started to become a more established craft in
parts of the world in the seventh and eighth centuries,
and at that point it does get easier to trace
its history. Although this is a section of the episode,
it's not completely chronological in.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
What we're talking about.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Stuff is happening at some points roughly the same time,
sometimes in sequence, but generally all in the same period
of history. Before we get to that, though, we are
going to talk a little bit how about how soap
works very quickly, because that is connected to how soap
making evolved as a trade. Soap is a type of
(14:19):
surfectant or surface active agent, which lowers the surface tension
of water. Surfactant molecules have two parts. One is hydrophobic,
meaning it repels water, and the other is hydrophilic, meaning
that it's attracted to water. Sometimes the hydrophobic end is
described as lipophilic, or attracted to lipids. So in soapy water,
(14:41):
the lipophilic end of the surfactant molecule attracts fats and
oils and other lipids, while the hydrophilic end keeps it
suspended in the water, so the surfactant and the lipids
it's attracted to can be washed away. Actions like agitation
and scrubbing help this process. As we said earlier, soap
(15:01):
forms when an alkali like lye interacts with a fat
like tallow, and this reaction is called subponification. It produces
a fatty acid salt, that being the soap and glycerine.
Tallo is rendered animal fat, and early soaps made with
it probably didn't smell grate. The tallow was also used
(15:24):
for other purposes, including cooking and candle making, and as
people figured out how to use it to make soap,
a lot of times, those and other applications were seen
as a higher priority than soap was.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
But starting in the seventh and eighth centuries, Arab soap
makers started using quicklime rather than lye, which produced a
harder soap, and these harder soaps started to be made
in places that also had an abundance of another fat.
That fat was olive oil. Over the centuries, soap making
centers were established all around the Mediterranean, including Aleppo in Syria,
(16:01):
Marseille in France, Savona in Italy, and Castile in Spain,
all names that are still associated with soap.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
While these soaps are all made from olive oil, they
all have their own distinctions, including the addition of laurel
oil or gar in Aleppo and the addition of almond
oil in Savona. By the tenth century, the city of
Nablis and Palestine was becoming known for its Niblsi soap,
which is also made from olive oil. At some point,
(16:32):
people in Morocco started making a black soap from olive oil,
with the soap getting that black color from macerated olives.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Also. Although olive oil soaps became particularly widespread, not all
soaps are being made from olive oil. Another black soap
developed by the Yoruba people and what's now Nigeria, is
made from shay butter also pronounced sheea butter, and sometimes
that includes palm oil as well. At first, these soaps
(17:02):
were mostly made by families or members of the community
for their own use, and they were and continue to
be culturally important in a lot of places. For example,
Nabulsi and Aleppo soaps both continue to be made through
traditional methods today, although sometimes on a much larger scale
than they were in earlier centuries. In twenty twenty four,
(17:24):
the making of Aleppo gar soap in Syria and Nabulsi
soap and Palestine were both inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List
of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Early soap formulations tended to have a fair amount of
alkali left behind in the finished product, and a lot
of times that made them too harsh to use on
human skin, especially on a regular basis. It might be
something you would use for a specific medical purpose, but
like not for day to day washing and bathing. So
(17:58):
during the medieval period, when this is the case, soaps
were more often used for things like laundry or cleaning surfaces,
and they had other uses as well. For example, the
collection of medieval manuscripts known as the Mape Calovicula, which
is sometimes translated as the Little Key to Everything, includes
numerous recipes and instructions that incorporate soap for things that
(18:21):
aren't cleaning. This includes making a rural green dye, which
involved smearing pure copper with the best soap, making azure dye,
which involved violet flowers and soap, and making a gold solder,
which required copper oxide, olive oil, soap, and calcothar, which
(18:43):
is an iron oxide.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
The Mape Clavicula also includes a process for making soap.
Burn some good logs and spread the ashes over a
fine wickerwork or a thin mesh strong sieve. Pour hot
water over the ashes so it drips through the wickerwork
or the sieve. What comes out on the other side
is lye. Repeat this process, pouring the lye through the
(19:06):
ashes and collecting it again until it's very strong. Boil
it until it starts to thicken, and then add oil
or tellow and add lime if desired. Allow this mixture
to cool, and pour off any liquid. After the soap
solids coagulate. According to this recipe, you can take this
poured off liquid and add salt to produce afronitrum, which
(19:27):
is used in soldering. Also during the.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
Medieval period, Muslim chemists were working on formulations for soap
that would be gentle enough for regular use on the
human body. The ritual washing that Muslims perform before prayer
typically involves only water or something like clean sand if
there's no water available, and in most cases soap is
(19:52):
used for this only when it is needed, but cleanliness
is also one of the core teachings of Islam. Philosopher
and alchemist Abu Baker Mohammad ibn Zachariah al Razi, also
called Roses, lived during this period that is known today
as the Islamic Golden Age, and he developed recipes for gentle,
(20:14):
pleasant smelling soaps and the olive oil that was needed
to make it in the tenth century.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
By that point, guild systems had started to develop in
the Byzantine Empire and in northern and western Europe, including
soap making guilds, and in much of Europe, two modes
of soap making evolved. Women were often making the soap
that their household would use, often in a big batch
once a year, either after the harvest and processing of
(20:41):
whatever plant the oil came from, or after the period
of slaughter, so that they would have the necessary animal fat.
And guilds produced soap for industrial use or for use
as a trade good. Guilds often had a monopoly on
any soap that was being sold, and soap making guilds
tended to be closely associated with the guilds that could
(21:02):
provide them with the tallow oil and lye or other
alkali that they needed to do it. This also meant
that soap making became interconnected with the economies of the
places where these guilds operated. Yeah a lot of times
it was not just soap. It was soap and also candles,
and also butchers, and like all of them interconnected together
(21:23):
into one big system. By the sixteenth century, soap making
was well established in northern and western Africa and in
much of Europe and Asia, including soaps for personal hygiene
also called toilet soaps, and soaps for household cleaning, and
an assortment of industrial uses. People in various parts of
(21:43):
the world were also making soaps out of other ingredients,
including palm oil, cottonseed, oil, canola oil, and whale blubber,
along with using an assortment of fragrances and dyes in
the soap. But even as the soap making industry expanded
and there were more soaps meant for use on people's
bodies in Europe in particular, the practice of bathing started
(22:07):
to go into decline, and there were a lot of
reasons for this. A lot of people did not have
a room for bathing in their homes, so they used
public bathhouses instead, and these bathhouses started to be associated
with the spread of disease, including syphilis. Europe saw its
first major syphilis outbreak at the end of the fifteenth century.
(22:29):
People probably were not getting syphilists from bathwater, but by
today's standards, these bathhouses were not particularly sanitary. Various writers
on health and medicine also started to speculate that soaking
in bathwater weakened people's bodies. Some of this was also
just connected to bigotry and religious persecution. As Christian communities
(22:52):
wanted to distance themselves from the ritual bathing and hygiene
practices of Judaism and Islam, Christians in your became more
focused on clean clothes than on washing their bodies, especially
when they visibly appeared clean.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
This continued for a couple hundred years, and it makes
it a little ironic that European influence became a huge
factor in the spread of soap and bathing culture a
few centuries later, which we will get to after a
sponsor break. As we've said, by the eighteenth century, soap
(23:35):
making was well established as an industry in parts of Europe, Asia,
and Africa. European colonists had also introduced soaps to the Americas,
where it quickly grew into an industry there. But it
could be difficult to make soap at a really large
scale in a lot of places. The limiting factor was
(23:57):
the alkali needed to start the pontification process. Making lye
from ashes and water was time consuming and it required
a lot of ash. Other sources of alkali, like limestone,
were also in demand for other purposes like making plaster
and mortar. Then, in seventeen seventy five, the French Academy
(24:20):
of Science offered a cash prize for the development of
a process to manufacture sodium carbonate, also called washing soda
or soda ash. French surgeon Nicola le Blanc created an
inexpensive method for doing this fifteen years later. It involved
sodium chloride or common table salt, along with sulfuric acid
(24:42):
and limestone, and this development affected so many industries. In
addition to its use in suponification, soda ash was used
in making things like paper, glass and porcelain. Belgian scientists
Ernest Solvee later built on LeBlanc's discovery to make a
commercially viable process for making soda ash at scale. People
(25:06):
also started to figure out exactly what was going on
during the process of subpodification, beyond just turning fat and
alkali into soap. French chemists and soap maker Michel Eugene
Chevau started studying soaps and the fats that they were
made from in the eighteen teens. He was building on
the work of earlier scientists, including French Apothecary Clause Joseph Geoffrey,
(25:31):
who had discovered that subpotified fat was soluble in alcohol,
while the fat that the soap had originally been made
from was not. Chevro figured out that the subpotification process
split a fat into two components. Those were the organic
acid salt that we call soap and glycerine from there
(25:54):
he started to isolate and name individual fatty acids and
to study how they behaved when they were used to
make both soap and candles. The isolation of glycerin from
soap making also made it possible for Alfred Nobel to
refine nitroglycerin into a commercial explosive that was dynamite in
(26:15):
eighteen sixty seven. The isolation of different fatty acids and
the ability to make inexpensive soda ash made it easier
to make soaps at scale and to make a more
consistent end product. Advances in transportation, including steamships and railroads,
also made it possible to transport large amounts of raw
materials to places that did not have an abundant supply
(26:38):
of olive oil or shade butter or some other ingredient.
This wasn't completely new. England had an established soap industry
by the thirteenth century, including in Bristol, Coventry, and London,
with soaps made from tallow as well as imported olive oil.
But steamships and railroads made it much easier to move
(26:59):
raw materials and finished products. All of that progress or developments,
combined with industrial techniques that had been in progress since
the eighteenth century, including the discovery of steam power and
a renewed focus on cleanliness and personal hygiene in Europe
(27:19):
and North America. That included the germ theory of disease
becoming more widely known and accepted, and all of that
came together to turn soap into an enormous business. Most
of these commercially made soaps were sold in bar form,
but the first liquid soaps hit the market in the
(27:39):
mid nineteenth century, and there were powdered and flaked versions
by the early twentieth century. The soap industry that evolved
in the nineteenth century included a whole lot of names
that are still around today. Many of them got their
start producing both soap and candles, or by making candles
before moving into soap. Soap and candlemaker William Colgate established
(28:03):
his company in New York in eighteen oh seven. Three
decades later, Cincinnati candlemaker William Proctor formed a partnership with
Irish soapmaker James Gamble. British brothers William and James Lever
established a business to make soaps from vegetable oils. In
eighteen eighty five, bj Johnson created a soap made of
(28:23):
palm and olive oils, calling it Paul Molive.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
In eighteen ninety eight. Colgate and pal Malive merged. In
nineteen twenty eight, and a year later, Lever merged with
Margarine Uni NV, which had formed through the merger of
two Dutch margarine manufacturers and that formed Unilever. Back at
the beginning of the show, we talked about how peoples
and cultures all over the world for essentially all of
(28:49):
human history, have had ways to clean their bodies and
their clothes and their environment, and have had various norms
for cleanliness and hygiene. But as the soap industry industrialized
and soap became widely available as a consumer product, and
as social reformers focused on hygiene and cleanliness, all kinds
(29:11):
of people started to think of soap as the only
acceptable way to be clean. That included politicians, church leaders,
social workers, missionaries, and soap marketers. Soap ads equated cleanliness
with purity and wholesomeness, especially if that cleanliness came through
the use of soap. In the eighteen eighties, British firm
(29:35):
Pairs Soap, which would later be acquired by Unilever, quoted
the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher in its advertisements quote, if
cleanliness is next to godliness, soap must be considered a
means of grace, and a clergyman who recommends moral things
should be willing to recommend soap. Soap makers also equated
(29:58):
soap with civilization and whiteness. For soaps like Ivory, this
tied the color of the soap itself to the idea
that it was ninety nine point four to four percent pure.
As big soap manufacturers in the US and Europe started
selling their products in places like the Pacific Islands and Africa,
they ran advertisements rooted in the idea that soap would
(30:20):
bring civilization to these places. Ads like these ran within
the US as well, framing soap as civilizing indigenous communities
and as washing the color from black people's skin, as
though it would be preferable for their skin to be white,
and as though using this soap would help them assimilate
to white society.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
Since soaps were often marketed to women in women's magazines,
this was also tied to ideas of femininity and womanhood,
especially white women's purity. There are really whole books about
this kind of stuff, including things like the general use
of indigenous imagery and advertising, and the use of caricatures
(31:03):
of black people to sell soap and other products. This
is way more than we can cover every aspect of here.
This also went beyond advertising. Nineteenth century German scientist Eustace
von Liebeg claimed that soap consumption was an indicator of
a nation's wealth and civilization. Teachers at mission schools told
(31:26):
indigenous children around the world that they were dirty if
they didn't use soap. An added layer to this was
that some of the soaps they were advocating were made
with culturally important oils extracted from these same communities to
be sold to people living elsewhere. This nineteenth century globalization
of soap and the soap industry circles back to something
(31:48):
we said at the beginning of this show about the
word for soap in different parts of the world and
how in some places it's derived from the traditional preparations
that soap was replacing. Into the twentieth century, new discoveries
continued to affect the way soaps could be made, with
a lot of those discoveries now coming from scientists who
(32:10):
worked for major soap manufacturers. For example, Procter and Gamble
patented processes for hydrogenating oils in nineteen oh nine. Today
people probably think of hydrogenated oils in the context of food,
but hydrogenation could help harden the fats that were used
to make soap. There were multiple patents related to hydrogenation
(32:33):
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and so
this led to a whole series of legal battles over
patents and licensing rights when it came to hydrogenation in
soap making. When World War One started in nineteen sixteen,
many of the raw materials used to make soap were
needed for other wartime applications. This led to chemists developing
(32:56):
synthetic surfectants as a replacement. The first synthetic surfactant predated this.
It was sulfinated castor oil known as red turkey oil,
and that had been discovered in eighteen fifty one, but
the first intentionally developed synthetic surfactants are usually credited to
German scientist Fritz Gunter, who worked for BASF during World
(33:17):
War One. Synthetically made surfactants became known as detergents, and
today a lot of things that people call soap are
actually detergents. Yeah, they're still surfactants, they're still cleaning things,
but they're not that technical definition of soap. Tangentially related,
The first soap operas made their debuts in the nineteen thirties. Those,
(33:39):
of course, are serialized dramas starting on the radio and
then moving to television with soap companies as their major sponsors.
That is another entirely different subject. Into the twentieth century,
soap manufacturers started developing more specialty products with that it's
(34:00):
meant to work on specific types of soil or to
be used for specific tasks. This includes the first laundry
and dishwasher detergents in the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties,
which produce less foam so they don't cause the machines
to overload with SuDS. The first household liquid soap meant
specifically for hand washing was soft soap, and that debuted
(34:22):
in nineteen eighty. The twentieth century also saw an assortment
of additives to different soap and detergent products, like optical
brighteners which make whites look whiter in the laundry, or
enzymes meant to break down specific types of stains or oils. So,
as we mentioned, there are connections between the globalization of
(34:44):
soap and racism, colonization, and oppression. At the same time,
washing your hands with soap and water really does help
reduce the spread of numerous diseases. So a lack of
access to soap and clean water can have a serious
and damaging effect on public health. Research at places like
(35:06):
refugee camps and communities that are facing widespread poverty have
shown a measurable reduction in certain illnesses, especially diarrheal illnesses,
when people have access to soap and water. These illnesses
can be fatal in young children, elderly people, and people
who have other illnesses or who are already facing malnutrition
(35:28):
or dehydration. So this connection between soap availability and disease
reduction has led to programs to distribute soaps in places
that need it and to do things like recycle partially
used hotel soaps to distribute.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
To poorer parts of the world. Soap.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
Uh, that's some stuff about soap, sometimes chronologically and sometimes not.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
I have listener mail about pens Love It from Ralph.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Ralph wrote, Holly and Tracy, I really enjoyed your recent
episode on the Ballpoint pen I also am very particular
about the pens I use, but for a slightly different reason.
I'm left handed, so I have problems with the ink
in most pens smearing as I draw my left hand
across it. However, I have found that the pilot V
(36:20):
Ball pens with green ink don't smear. The red, black,
and blue ones all smear, but for some reason, the
green ones don't. So that is my go to pen
of choice and has been for several years now. Plus
green is one of my favorite colors, which is a bonus.
In fact, people in my office know that if something
is written in green ink, it's mine. I love your
show and the wide variety of topics you cover. I've
(36:42):
been listening since the beginning of the pandemic and usually
listen to your episodes while I'm out cycling along our
local bike trail along the river. I'm gonna pause and
say that sounds lovely. M I have also attached my
pet tax photos of my cat's Madison on the floor
in Savannah on the sink. These photos are takes and
on their seventeenth birthday on April fourth this year.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
Thanks again for all you do, Ralph. We do, indeed
have a kitty cat with two front feet in the sink,
two back feet on the edge of the counter. And
then this kitty cat's sibling with very very similar face
and coloring. They could almost be twins, I mean, like
(37:26):
identical twins, not just cats born together in the same litter.
The cat that is on the floor, named Madison looks
very startled. They are both.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
They are both tabby cats with little white faces, like
just little white right around their mouths and noses. Happy
birthday Madison and Savannah just monthsly.
Speaker 1 (37:50):
Yeah, this is from July. The birthday happened. The email
is from July. So thanks so much, Ralph.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
I just I'm technically a right handed person. I've always
had questions about whether I ought to have learned to
write with my left hand. I did not understand what
the teacher meant when they said put it in the
hand that it feels the most comfortable end. I was like,
this feels bad in both my hands. What are you
talking about? But my spouse is a lefty, and so
(38:21):
I have seen his struggles with the world of things
that are built for right handed people.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
Also, yeah, so thank you for this email. If you'd
like to send us a note about this or any
other podcast. We are at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot
com and you can subscribe to our show. I'm the
iHeartRadio app, or wherever else you like to get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We got an email from
listener Liz asking for an episode on the history of soap.
That is something that I had on my list back
when Holly and I first joined the show in twenty thirteen.
Holly has thought about doing a soap episode. Also, it
(00:34):
has never happened. It never happened, So I was like,
why not.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Why not?
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Now that someone has actually asked for something that I
thought maybe no one would find interesting, we will do it.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
We'll do it now.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
This turned out to be tricky to do the research
on because Holly's laughing. A lot of writing about soap
is either really hyper specific, like the history of the
soap industry in one particular city over a specific period,
(01:07):
or it is so broad that it's hard.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
To pull details out of.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
And then there are also some details that just get
repeated all over the place, but they don't really add up.
A lot of the books that are connected to this
history are really histories.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Of cleanliness or hygiene, which is a slightly different thing.
So in parts of this episode, we're going to be
talking about a bunch of things that all happened in
roughly the same period of history, but not necessarily in
a specific order chronologically. And now you know why I
(01:47):
never got an episode about soap turned out.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Yeah, when I asked you about it, you said, I
think I ran into some kind of problem, and I
learned through experience what the problem was. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
All over the world, for all of human history, and
probably going back to our earliest hominin ancestors, people have
found ways to try to keep themselves clean. Hygiene norms
really vary from one society to another, but the existence
of some kind of norm seems universal, or at least
pretty close to it. People have washed or bathed in
(02:22):
springs and ponds and rivers. They have used sand or
pummice or brushes or corn cobs to scour the skin.
They have applied oils to their bodies and then scraped
it off with a blade or some other tool. Saunas,
sweat lodges, and sweat houses go back thousands of years
in multiple parts of the world. A lot of these
(02:42):
practices combine cleanliness and hygiene with some kind of spiritual
or religious ritual, and some of them also help build community.
People have also used a lot of different plants as
part of this, specifically plants that are high in sapnans,
which are naturally occurring molecules that foam in water. Sapinins
(03:05):
have a range of uses and effects, and some of
the plants they are found in are edible, although if
you eat too much sapinin that can make your tummy
heart High sapinin plants include the genus Sapinaria, or the
soap warts, which are native to Asia and Europe, as
well as the Sependacea, or the soap berries, which are
(03:29):
native to tropical regions in most of the world. Multiple
species of soap weed, yucca and soap bark tree are
native to the Americas. Common ivy, which is native to
Europe and Western Asia, and Chinese honeylocust, which is native
to East Asia are other examples of these plants that
(03:50):
can produce this foamy kind of soapy substance. People around
the world have used these and other high sapinin plants
to make preparations to clean their skin and hair, to
soothe and treat skin conditions and injuries, and to wash
clothing and other items. These range from the simple, like
boiling soap berries and then using the water to wash
(04:12):
your hair, to the complex, like multi step processes involving grinding, burning, steeping,
and mixing with other substances. In some parts of the world,
today's word for soap comes from the name for one
of these traditional preparations or the plants used to make them.
In others, the word for soap is just a local
variant of soap, or of the word for soap In
(04:35):
another language. One step of the soap making process is
called saponification, and the words saponification and sappanin both trace
back to the Latin word for soap, which was sapo.
I'm just gonna say one.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Of the resources we've been using for pronunciation lookups has
been down for more than a week, so I apologize
if we se say any of these things wrong. These
plant preparations can produce a lather, and they help keep
things clean, but they are not exactly the same thing
as soap. Soap is a substance that's formed through a
(05:15):
chemical reaction between alkalis and fats. So if somebody added
soapberries to a fat like tallow and they mixed that
with an alkali like lye that would be considered soap,
but soapberries by themselves steeped in water would not. Since
soap comes from the interaction between alkalis and fat, it
(05:38):
seems reasonably likely that in the ancient past people all
around the world discovered a sort of proto soap as
they cooked meat over a fire and the fat dripped
into the ashes, or as they used ashes to scour
pots that had been used to cook or store oils
or fatty foods. But intentionally made soap has a somewhat
(05:58):
narrower early hit, one that's focused primarily on Western Asia,
northern Africa, and southern Europe, basically all around the shores
of the Mediterranean Sea. At the same time, tracing the
details even of this narrow history can be tricky. While
there are ancient documents that have been translated with the
(06:19):
word soap, it's not necessarily clear whether the original word
referred to actual soap or to some other substance that
was being used for cleaning. The earliest known written references
to soap are probably found in Sumerian Cuneiform tablets from
southern Mesopotamia in what's now Iraq. These tablets date back
(06:41):
about four thousand, five hundred years. A Time magazine article
from twenty twenty points specifically to a tablet describing the
use of wet ashes to remove the lanolin from wool,
saying that the ash would combine with the lanolin to
make soap. Wet ashes are an alkali that would have
(07:04):
helped remove the lanolin from the wool, but lanolin contains
mostly waxy esters rather than the fats that are needed
for subpotification, so it does not seem like this process
would have produced.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Much actual soap.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
So many other articles just refer obliquely to Somerian tablets
as giving recipes for soap, but they don't go into
detail about what the recipe actually says or which specific
their tablet they are talking about. Trying to track down
the details on this had me going in a bunch
(07:40):
of very annoying circles.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Another early written reference to soap dates back to the Babylonians,
who also lived in ancient Mesopotamia. This reference is in
the form of clay cylinders with an inscription that translates
to fats boiled with ashes. This suggests that the Babylonians
were intentionally making soap and then storing it for later use.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
The Ebers Papyrus has made a lot of appearances on
the show. This Egyptian medical text dates back about thirty
five hundred years, and among other things, it contains references
to using mixtures of oils and alkaline salts to wash
and to treat skin diseases. There is an incredibly widely
(08:26):
repeated story that the word soap comes from an ancient
Roman legend about Mount Sappo. According to this purported legend,
Mount Sapo was the site of animal sacrifices to the gods.
Animals were slaughtered and burned at the top of the mountain,
and then, according to the tail, after it rained, women
washing their clothes in the Tiber River at the foot
(08:48):
of the mountain found that their laundry got extra clean.
This is a fun story. On the surface, it seems
like it should make some reasonable amount of sense. The
ash from the burn process would have combined with the
fat from the animals to make a simple soap, and
then rain would have washed that into the Tiber. But
Mount Sappo is not a real place, and this legend
(09:11):
only seems to show up in articles about the history
of soap. I could not find anything that pointed back
to an original Roman document that references this story, And
it seems like any soap that could have been created
as a byproduct of burned animal sacrifices would have been
really heavily diluted by the time it was washed all
(09:35):
the way down a mountain side by the rain, and
then once it was in the river, it would have
been washed downstream really quickly. It does not really take
that much soap to clean things, like a lot of
people put way too much detergent in their laundry. But
this all just seems like kind of a stretch. Also,
(09:55):
while a lot of words related to soap do trace
back to Latin, that word made its way into Latin
from elsewhere, which we will be getting to.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
Roman author Pliny the Elder, who lived in the first
century CE, gave a very different explanation for where soap
came from than this purported Roman legend. This is in
a section of his Natural History on the treatment of scrofula,
which is a form of tuberculosis. We talked about scrofula
in an episode that ran as a Saturday Classic in
(10:27):
November of twenty twenty three, Specifically, Pliny wrote about how
to treat ulcerated source from scrofula. He listed a series
of unpleasant sounding treatments, many of which involved dung, vinegar,
animal parts, or even urine, one of the many historical
uses for urine, including its being used as a cleansing agent.
(10:48):
After all of this probably less than appealing treatment option list,
Pliny wrote, quote, soap too, is very useful for this purpose,
an invention of the Gauls for giving a reddish tint
to the hair. This substance is prepared from tallow and ashes,
the best ashes for the purpose being those of the
(11:11):
beech and yoke elm. There are two kinds of it,
the hard soap and the liquid, both of them much
used by the people of Germany, the men in particular,
more than the women. Pliny the Elder died in the
eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which also destroyed the Roman city
of Pompeii, and a lot of sources claim that Pompei
(11:33):
had a soap factory. This soap factory is mentioned in
pieces about soap about as often as that story of
Mount Sappo is. There is a room in the ruins
of Pompeii that has often been called the soap factory,
but that Moniker seems to trace back to a letter
that was written in the late eighteenth century. There was
(11:54):
something that had seemed kind of soap like that had
been discovered in this room, but later testing that it
was some kind of clay like Fuller's Earth. Other evidence
of soap has not been found at Pompeii like. There's
been a lot of cosmetics that have been found, things
that are probably make up, but not things that are confirmed.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
To be soap. And it's possible that this space was
really for doing laundry or for some kind of industrial
production of something that you would need big vats for.
A work attributed to Greek physician Galen, written roughly one
hundred years after the destruction of Pompeii, describe soap as
being made from the tallow of oxen goats or sheep
(12:35):
and a lie of ashes strengthened with quicklime. Galen describes
the best soaps is coming from Germany and the second
best is coming from the Gauls. So Pliny and Galen's
descriptions of soap feedback into the origins of the term.
As we said earlier, the Latin word for soap is sappo,
and then that feeds into a lot of other words
(12:57):
that are related to soap. But the word sappo probably
had Germanic origins, and there are also some similar words
in Turkic languages. So this suggests, but doesn't conclusively prove,
that the Romans learned about soap from the Germanic peoples
of northern Europe or the Turkic peoples of western and
Central Asia, or maybe some combination of both.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
It gets much easier to trace the development and manufacture
of soap a bit later in history, and we're going
to get into that after we pause for a sponsor break.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
Soap making started to become a more established craft in
parts of the world in the seventh and eighth centuries,
and at that point it does get easier to trace
its history. Although this is a section of the episode,
it's not completely chronological in.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
What we're talking about.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Stuff is happening at some points roughly the same time,
sometimes in sequence, but generally all in the same period
of history. Before we get to that, though, we are
going to talk a little bit how about how soap
works very quickly, because that is connected to how soap
making evolved as a trade. Soap is a type of
(14:19):
surfectant or surface active agent, which lowers the surface tension
of water. Surfactant molecules have two parts. One is hydrophobic,
meaning it repels water, and the other is hydrophilic, meaning
that it's attracted to water. Sometimes the hydrophobic end is
described as lipophilic, or attracted to lipids. So in soapy water,
(14:41):
the lipophilic end of the surfactant molecule attracts fats and
oils and other lipids, while the hydrophilic end keeps it
suspended in the water, so the surfactant and the lipids
it's attracted to can be washed away. Actions like agitation
and scrubbing help this process. As we said earlier, soap
(15:01):
forms when an alkali like lye interacts with a fat
like tallow, and this reaction is called subponification. It produces
a fatty acid salt, that being the soap and glycerine.
Tallo is rendered animal fat, and early soaps made with
it probably didn't smell grate. The tallow was also used
(15:24):
for other purposes, including cooking and candle making, and as
people figured out how to use it to make soap,
a lot of times, those and other applications were seen
as a higher priority than soap was.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
But starting in the seventh and eighth centuries, Arab soap
makers started using quicklime rather than lye, which produced a
harder soap, and these harder soaps started to be made
in places that also had an abundance of another fat.
That fat was olive oil. Over the centuries, soap making
centers were established all around the Mediterranean, including Aleppo in Syria,
(16:01):
Marseille in France, Savona in Italy, and Castile in Spain,
all names that are still associated with soap.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
While these soaps are all made from olive oil, they
all have their own distinctions, including the addition of laurel
oil or gar in Aleppo and the addition of almond
oil in Savona. By the tenth century, the city of
Nablis and Palestine was becoming known for its Niblsi soap,
which is also made from olive oil. At some point,
(16:32):
people in Morocco started making a black soap from olive oil,
with the soap getting that black color from macerated olives.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Also. Although olive oil soaps became particularly widespread, not all
soaps are being made from olive oil. Another black soap
developed by the Yoruba people and what's now Nigeria, is
made from shay butter also pronounced sheea butter, and sometimes
that includes palm oil as well. At first, these soaps
(17:02):
were mostly made by families or members of the community
for their own use, and they were and continue to
be culturally important in a lot of places. For example,
Nabulsi and Aleppo soaps both continue to be made through
traditional methods today, although sometimes on a much larger scale
than they were in earlier centuries. In twenty twenty four,
(17:24):
the making of Aleppo gar soap in Syria and Nabulsi
soap and Palestine were both inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List
of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Early soap formulations tended to have a fair amount of
alkali left behind in the finished product, and a lot
of times that made them too harsh to use on
human skin, especially on a regular basis. It might be
something you would use for a specific medical purpose, but
like not for day to day washing and bathing. So
(17:58):
during the medieval period, when this is the case, soaps
were more often used for things like laundry or cleaning surfaces,
and they had other uses as well. For example, the
collection of medieval manuscripts known as the Mape Calovicula, which
is sometimes translated as the Little Key to Everything, includes
numerous recipes and instructions that incorporate soap for things that
(18:21):
aren't cleaning. This includes making a rural green dye, which
involved smearing pure copper with the best soap, making azure dye,
which involved violet flowers and soap, and making a gold solder,
which required copper oxide, olive oil, soap, and calcothar, which
(18:43):
is an iron oxide.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
The Mape Clavicula also includes a process for making soap.
Burn some good logs and spread the ashes over a
fine wickerwork or a thin mesh strong sieve. Pour hot
water over the ashes so it drips through the wickerwork
or the sieve. What comes out on the other side
is lye. Repeat this process, pouring the lye through the
(19:06):
ashes and collecting it again until it's very strong. Boil
it until it starts to thicken, and then add oil
or tellow and add lime if desired. Allow this mixture
to cool, and pour off any liquid. After the soap
solids coagulate. According to this recipe, you can take this
poured off liquid and add salt to produce afronitrum, which
(19:27):
is used in soldering. Also during the.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
Medieval period, Muslim chemists were working on formulations for soap
that would be gentle enough for regular use on the
human body. The ritual washing that Muslims perform before prayer
typically involves only water or something like clean sand if
there's no water available, and in most cases soap is
(19:52):
used for this only when it is needed, but cleanliness
is also one of the core teachings of Islam. Philosopher
and alchemist Abu Baker Mohammad ibn Zachariah al Razi, also
called Roses, lived during this period that is known today
as the Islamic Golden Age, and he developed recipes for gentle,
(20:14):
pleasant smelling soaps and the olive oil that was needed
to make it in the tenth century.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
By that point, guild systems had started to develop in
the Byzantine Empire and in northern and western Europe, including
soap making guilds, and in much of Europe, two modes
of soap making evolved. Women were often making the soap
that their household would use, often in a big batch
once a year, either after the harvest and processing of
(20:41):
whatever plant the oil came from, or after the period
of slaughter, so that they would have the necessary animal fat.
And guilds produced soap for industrial use or for use
as a trade good. Guilds often had a monopoly on
any soap that was being sold, and soap making guilds
tended to be closely associated with the guilds that could
(21:02):
provide them with the tallow oil and lye or other
alkali that they needed to do it. This also meant
that soap making became interconnected with the economies of the
places where these guilds operated. Yeah a lot of times
it was not just soap. It was soap and also candles,
and also butchers, and like all of them interconnected together
(21:23):
into one big system. By the sixteenth century, soap making
was well established in northern and western Africa and in
much of Europe and Asia, including soaps for personal hygiene
also called toilet soaps, and soaps for household cleaning, and
an assortment of industrial uses. People in various parts of
(21:43):
the world were also making soaps out of other ingredients,
including palm oil, cottonseed, oil, canola oil, and whale blubber,
along with using an assortment of fragrances and dyes in
the soap. But even as the soap making industry expanded
and there were more soaps meant for use on people's
bodies in Europe in particular, the practice of bathing started
(22:07):
to go into decline, and there were a lot of
reasons for this. A lot of people did not have
a room for bathing in their homes, so they used
public bathhouses instead, and these bathhouses started to be associated
with the spread of disease, including syphilis. Europe saw its
first major syphilis outbreak at the end of the fifteenth century.
(22:29):
People probably were not getting syphilists from bathwater, but by
today's standards, these bathhouses were not particularly sanitary. Various writers
on health and medicine also started to speculate that soaking
in bathwater weakened people's bodies. Some of this was also
just connected to bigotry and religious persecution. As Christian communities
(22:52):
wanted to distance themselves from the ritual bathing and hygiene
practices of Judaism and Islam, Christians in your became more
focused on clean clothes than on washing their bodies, especially
when they visibly appeared clean.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
This continued for a couple hundred years, and it makes
it a little ironic that European influence became a huge
factor in the spread of soap and bathing culture a
few centuries later, which we will get to after a
sponsor break. As we've said, by the eighteenth century, soap
(23:35):
making was well established as an industry in parts of Europe, Asia,
and Africa. European colonists had also introduced soaps to the Americas,
where it quickly grew into an industry there. But it
could be difficult to make soap at a really large
scale in a lot of places. The limiting factor was
(23:57):
the alkali needed to start the pontification process. Making lye
from ashes and water was time consuming and it required
a lot of ash. Other sources of alkali, like limestone,
were also in demand for other purposes like making plaster
and mortar. Then, in seventeen seventy five, the French Academy
(24:20):
of Science offered a cash prize for the development of
a process to manufacture sodium carbonate, also called washing soda
or soda ash. French surgeon Nicola le Blanc created an
inexpensive method for doing this fifteen years later. It involved
sodium chloride or common table salt, along with sulfuric acid
(24:42):
and limestone, and this development affected so many industries. In
addition to its use in suponification, soda ash was used
in making things like paper, glass and porcelain. Belgian scientists
Ernest Solvee later built on LeBlanc's discovery to make a
commercially viable process for making soda ash at scale. People
(25:06):
also started to figure out exactly what was going on
during the process of subpodification, beyond just turning fat and
alkali into soap. French chemists and soap maker Michel Eugene
Chevau started studying soaps and the fats that they were
made from in the eighteen teens. He was building on
the work of earlier scientists, including French Apothecary Clause Joseph Geoffrey,
(25:31):
who had discovered that subpotified fat was soluble in alcohol,
while the fat that the soap had originally been made
from was not. Chevro figured out that the subpotification process
split a fat into two components. Those were the organic
acid salt that we call soap and glycerine from there
(25:54):
he started to isolate and name individual fatty acids and
to study how they behaved when they were used to
make both soap and candles. The isolation of glycerin from
soap making also made it possible for Alfred Nobel to
refine nitroglycerin into a commercial explosive that was dynamite in
(26:15):
eighteen sixty seven. The isolation of different fatty acids and
the ability to make inexpensive soda ash made it easier
to make soaps at scale and to make a more
consistent end product. Advances in transportation, including steamships and railroads,
also made it possible to transport large amounts of raw
materials to places that did not have an abundant supply
(26:38):
of olive oil or shade butter or some other ingredient.
This wasn't completely new. England had an established soap industry
by the thirteenth century, including in Bristol, Coventry, and London,
with soaps made from tallow as well as imported olive oil.
But steamships and railroads made it much easier to move
(26:59):
raw materials and finished products. All of that progress or developments,
combined with industrial techniques that had been in progress since
the eighteenth century, including the discovery of steam power and
a renewed focus on cleanliness and personal hygiene in Europe
(27:19):
and North America. That included the germ theory of disease
becoming more widely known and accepted, and all of that
came together to turn soap into an enormous business. Most
of these commercially made soaps were sold in bar form,
but the first liquid soaps hit the market in the
(27:39):
mid nineteenth century, and there were powdered and flaked versions
by the early twentieth century. The soap industry that evolved
in the nineteenth century included a whole lot of names
that are still around today. Many of them got their
start producing both soap and candles, or by making candles
before moving into soap. Soap and candlemaker William Colgate established
(28:03):
his company in New York in eighteen oh seven. Three
decades later, Cincinnati candlemaker William Proctor formed a partnership with
Irish soapmaker James Gamble. British brothers William and James Lever
established a business to make soaps from vegetable oils. In
eighteen eighty five, bj Johnson created a soap made of
(28:23):
palm and olive oils, calling it Paul Molive.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
In eighteen ninety eight. Colgate and pal Malive merged. In
nineteen twenty eight, and a year later, Lever merged with
Margarine Uni NV, which had formed through the merger of
two Dutch margarine manufacturers and that formed Unilever. Back at
the beginning of the show, we talked about how peoples
and cultures all over the world for essentially all of
(28:49):
human history, have had ways to clean their bodies and
their clothes and their environment, and have had various norms
for cleanliness and hygiene. But as the soap industry industrialized
and soap became widely available as a consumer product, and
as social reformers focused on hygiene and cleanliness, all kinds
(29:11):
of people started to think of soap as the only
acceptable way to be clean. That included politicians, church leaders,
social workers, missionaries, and soap marketers. Soap ads equated cleanliness
with purity and wholesomeness, especially if that cleanliness came through
the use of soap. In the eighteen eighties, British firm
(29:35):
Pairs Soap, which would later be acquired by Unilever, quoted
the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher in its advertisements quote, if
cleanliness is next to godliness, soap must be considered a
means of grace, and a clergyman who recommends moral things
should be willing to recommend soap. Soap makers also equated
(29:58):
soap with civilization and whiteness. For soaps like Ivory, this
tied the color of the soap itself to the idea
that it was ninety nine point four to four percent pure.
As big soap manufacturers in the US and Europe started
selling their products in places like the Pacific Islands and Africa,
they ran advertisements rooted in the idea that soap would
(30:20):
bring civilization to these places. Ads like these ran within
the US as well, framing soap as civilizing indigenous communities
and as washing the color from black people's skin, as
though it would be preferable for their skin to be white,
and as though using this soap would help them assimilate
to white society.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
Since soaps were often marketed to women in women's magazines,
this was also tied to ideas of femininity and womanhood,
especially white women's purity. There are really whole books about
this kind of stuff, including things like the general use
of indigenous imagery and advertising, and the use of caricatures
(31:03):
of black people to sell soap and other products. This
is way more than we can cover every aspect of here.
This also went beyond advertising. Nineteenth century German scientist Eustace
von Liebeg claimed that soap consumption was an indicator of
a nation's wealth and civilization. Teachers at mission schools told
(31:26):
indigenous children around the world that they were dirty if
they didn't use soap. An added layer to this was
that some of the soaps they were advocating were made
with culturally important oils extracted from these same communities to
be sold to people living elsewhere. This nineteenth century globalization
of soap and the soap industry circles back to something
(31:48):
we said at the beginning of this show about the
word for soap in different parts of the world and
how in some places it's derived from the traditional preparations
that soap was replacing. Into the twentieth century, new discoveries
continued to affect the way soaps could be made, with
a lot of those discoveries now coming from scientists who
(32:10):
worked for major soap manufacturers. For example, Procter and Gamble
patented processes for hydrogenating oils in nineteen oh nine. Today
people probably think of hydrogenated oils in the context of food,
but hydrogenation could help harden the fats that were used
to make soap. There were multiple patents related to hydrogenation
(32:33):
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and so
this led to a whole series of legal battles over
patents and licensing rights when it came to hydrogenation in
soap making. When World War One started in nineteen sixteen,
many of the raw materials used to make soap were
needed for other wartime applications. This led to chemists developing
(32:56):
synthetic surfectants as a replacement. The first synthetic surfactant predated this.
It was sulfinated castor oil known as red turkey oil,
and that had been discovered in eighteen fifty one, but
the first intentionally developed synthetic surfactants are usually credited to
German scientist Fritz Gunter, who worked for BASF during World
(33:17):
War One. Synthetically made surfactants became known as detergents, and
today a lot of things that people call soap are
actually detergents. Yeah, they're still surfactants, they're still cleaning things,
but they're not that technical definition of soap. Tangentially related,
The first soap operas made their debuts in the nineteen thirties. Those,
(33:39):
of course, are serialized dramas starting on the radio and
then moving to television with soap companies as their major sponsors.
That is another entirely different subject. Into the twentieth century,
soap manufacturers started developing more specialty products with that it's
(34:00):
meant to work on specific types of soil or to
be used for specific tasks. This includes the first laundry
and dishwasher detergents in the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties,
which produce less foam so they don't cause the machines
to overload with SuDS. The first household liquid soap meant
specifically for hand washing was soft soap, and that debuted
(34:22):
in nineteen eighty. The twentieth century also saw an assortment
of additives to different soap and detergent products, like optical
brighteners which make whites look whiter in the laundry, or
enzymes meant to break down specific types of stains or oils. So,
as we mentioned, there are connections between the globalization of
(34:44):
soap and racism, colonization, and oppression. At the same time,
washing your hands with soap and water really does help
reduce the spread of numerous diseases. So a lack of
access to soap and clean water can have a serious
and damaging effect on public health. Research at places like
(35:06):
refugee camps and communities that are facing widespread poverty have
shown a measurable reduction in certain illnesses, especially diarrheal illnesses,
when people have access to soap and water. These illnesses
can be fatal in young children, elderly people, and people
who have other illnesses or who are already facing malnutrition
(35:28):
or dehydration. So this connection between soap availability and disease
reduction has led to programs to distribute soaps in places
that need it and to do things like recycle partially
used hotel soaps to distribute.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
To poorer parts of the world. Soap.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
Uh, that's some stuff about soap, sometimes chronologically and sometimes not.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
I have listener mail about pens Love It from Ralph.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Ralph wrote, Holly and Tracy, I really enjoyed your recent
episode on the Ballpoint pen I also am very particular
about the pens I use, but for a slightly different reason.
I'm left handed, so I have problems with the ink
in most pens smearing as I draw my left hand
across it. However, I have found that the pilot V
(36:20):
Ball pens with green ink don't smear. The red, black,
and blue ones all smear, but for some reason, the
green ones don't. So that is my go to pen
of choice and has been for several years now. Plus
green is one of my favorite colors, which is a bonus.
In fact, people in my office know that if something
is written in green ink, it's mine. I love your
show and the wide variety of topics you cover. I've
(36:42):
been listening since the beginning of the pandemic and usually
listen to your episodes while I'm out cycling along our
local bike trail along the river. I'm gonna pause and
say that sounds lovely. M I have also attached my
pet tax photos of my cat's Madison on the floor
in Savannah on the sink. These photos are takes and
on their seventeenth birthday on April fourth this year.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
Thanks again for all you do, Ralph. We do, indeed
have a kitty cat with two front feet in the sink,
two back feet on the edge of the counter. And
then this kitty cat's sibling with very very similar face
and coloring. They could almost be twins, I mean, like
(37:26):
identical twins, not just cats born together in the same litter.
The cat that is on the floor, named Madison looks
very startled. They are both.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
They are both tabby cats with little white faces, like
just little white right around their mouths and noses. Happy
birthday Madison and Savannah just monthsly.
Speaker 1 (37:50):
Yeah, this is from July. The birthday happened. The email
is from July. So thanks so much, Ralph.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
I just I'm technically a right handed person. I've always
had questions about whether I ought to have learned to
write with my left hand. I did not understand what
the teacher meant when they said put it in the
hand that it feels the most comfortable end. I was like,
this feels bad in both my hands. What are you
talking about? But my spouse is a lefty, and so
(38:21):
I have seen his struggles with the world of things
that are built for right handed people.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
Also, yeah, so thank you for this email. If you'd
like to send us a note about this or any
other podcast. We are at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot
com and you can subscribe to our show. I'm the
iHeartRadio app, or wherever else you like to get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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