From the Vault: The Invention of 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. If you enjoyed the podcast Invention, stick with Robert and Joe as they continue to explore these same topics as part of Stuff to Blow Your Mind’s regular offerings. (Originally published 4/21/2020)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time to go into the vault for a classic episode
of the show. Today we're fishing out an episode of Invention.
I think so this one originally published in April of
twenty It was an Invention episode on the invention of soap,
and if I recall correctly, this one is like early

(00:26):
COVID themed Yeah, I believe so. Um it was you
lined up with a few different things. First of all,
COVID and ore are sort of rediscovered relationship with soap
at the time. But then also this was the final
episode of Invention as a separate entity from Stuff to
Blow Your Mind. But but the first also the first

(00:49):
episode of Invention that was part of the Stuff to
Blow Your Mind feet because now nowadays we'll still can
we'll still do Invention episodes from time to time. Um,
but they published in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind
feed right. I'd also be curious to listen back to
this one because it's going to be kind of a
time capsule in the evolution of our understanding of like
how COVID nineteen was spreading and stuff. So so I

(01:11):
expect this one to be interestingly dated. All right, let's
ladder up and get in there. Welcome to Stook to
Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey you

(01:31):
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 uninvention. Uh we're getting
into a little techno history here, but we're going to
be considering soap. Soap has been on everyone's mind a
bit more these days, I think. Uh, this is actually

(01:53):
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 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,

(02:15):
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 stressed how essential it is via
hand washing in the prevention of the spread of COVID nineteen.

(02:36):
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, especially now, because it aids us
in the cleaning of our bodies. It also helps us
so via you know, detergents in the cleaning of our garments.
We use uh, soaps to clean you know, objects and

(02:56):
surfaces as well. It helps maintain basic hygiene, it evince
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, But but a few common examples do
tell us a lot. Birds, for instance, clean themselves with

(03:18):
their beaks, and they use water or dust to bathe themselves. 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,
which is a comfort behavior that is the practice of
cleaning the body surface, including the cleaning and oiling of

(03:40):
feathers with the bill or of the hair with the tongue.
And there are a few broad 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
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 animal's grooming

(04:03):
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
pick little knits and bits and bugs out of each
other's hair as a way to to manage and mediate

(04:26):
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
may be bacteria sidal properties as well. Uh you know,
particularly you'll see something there's some studies about saliva um

(04:50):
and to 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, cell alls, loose hairs,
loose feathers, and 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,

(05:13):
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 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

(05:33):
the Phoenicians to the twentieth century. A historical review by
Role at All came out in n They point out
a few key examples from quote the pre soap era,
this is uh 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,

(05:54):
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 way to remove dirt, grime, dead skin cells. You know,
why depend on just those those So I'm guessing hard

(06:15):
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
hand axes, by faces or pieces of flint to process
animal carcasses and then to scrape their own skin clean.

(06:38):
But I have to guess there probably was a bit acrossover. Yeah,
it seems inevitable, doesn't it. But so the use of
a kind of a bit of mechanical leverage some some
scraping with a tool did not stop with Neolithic Stone
Age people. This actually did continue into classical civilizations like

(06:59):
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 they would
scrub and scrape the skin with a stridgle or skin
scraper made of bone, ivory or metal. And this basically

(07:20):
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, you know,
that outer layer of grime, dead skin, et cetera. I
guess some people still use something like this to cleanse themselves.

(07:40):
I mean in terms of just dealing with our skin.
I mean, I know, for 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 the like
the thickened callouses on their feet, and some of the
sometimes bad add advice they would give each other would

(08:01):
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,
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

(08:24):
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, oh, well,
what's the what do you call these? It's the it's
for the grating of say ginger for culinary purposes. A

(08:44):
micro yes, a microplane. Uh. So he held microhide and
he says, you can get one of these at bed
bath and beyond. It works great. Again, I would not
recommend using that in your body. I would recommend getting
a sand ng or scrubbing implement that is designed for
use on the skin and use on the feet. What

(09:05):
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 to treat
diseases of the skin. Okay, so soda is interesting here

(09:27):
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, this
can actually have a lathering soap like effect. Yeah. So,

(09:48):
so this is a nice ancient example. We'll get into
some more in a bit. But oh, and then another
example that wrowth 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
the reign of Ramesses. This would have been leven thirteen

(10:09):
through ten five BC, and Herodotas 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
what you call mummy mouth. Uh. One of my favorite
books on the history of hygiene is a book titled

(10:33):
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. Priest would show it 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,

(10:56):
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 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

(11:17):
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 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.

(11:39):
Uh you know, you know, quite literally, yeah, totally. Now,
other BC treatments included um using olive oil on the skin.
I mentioned that already is something that you 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

(12:01):
potash and soda, and the Bible actually mentions the washing
materials bore, bore, it and she lig Acadian, Syrian, 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 been in the creation of these

(12:21):
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 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,

(12:42):
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, you might as
well wash your hands with water because that gets a
lot of stuff off. Maybe not everything, but lot right, Yeah, yeah,
I mean it is again, it's it's often poorly understood

(13:05):
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, 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.

(13:26):
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. 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 charge at one end, the end where the oxygen

(13:48):
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 to its funk. And in
the world of biochemistry, it's what makes water the molecule
of life in a universe of death. And so that

(14:08):
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, and the
hydrogen tips at the other end will bind to almost
anything that has even a slight negative charge. And Green

(14:29):
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 it comes
to cleaning the dishes, uh, this is this is a
this is a ammunition for your defense against the scrubbers.

(14:50):
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 lie. If
we we think of it as not something that's uh
you know that rips everything apart at the molecular level,
we think of it as this. You know, this this
cleansing healing kind of liquid, which of course it is

(15:12):
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
known chemically as sodium chloride. Sodium chloride is a molecule.
It's made from one atom of sodium and one atom

(15:33):
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
tips of the H two O molecule grab the negatively
charged chlorine ions. But it's not just table salt. Water

(15:54):
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
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

(16:17):
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 substances is indispensable to life. Sell interiors or miniature
chemistry labs whose workings require the rapid movement of a

(16:40):
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, is life's ferrying fluid. Nobel Laurea Albert's zen

(17:00):
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.
We are still living in water, having the water now inside.

(17:21):
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 that
it's basically the same reason that water is good for
washing your hands, and the reason that astrobiologists are looking

(17:41):
for signs of water on Mars. But while water is
an amazing 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
a dish in the kitchen. So so you've got a

(18:02):
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 rush overtop it, or at best it will

(18:24):
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 sure everybody will be able to identify with Robert

(18:45):
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 slipper hands. It's like, now,
it's like lotion plus one, right exactly. The lotion does

(19:05):
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, so a certain amount of physical
removal as possible. Generally, what I do is like I
washing off my hands real quick, and then like, oh
I had a lotion on and now I kind of
have to use like a hand towel that to physically

(19:28):
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
properties of the two substances. So we were talking about

(19:50):
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 are
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 at the top of
one block just very easily snaps onto the bottom and

(20:11):
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, say you take a jar and you put
some oil and some water in the jar together, and
then you shake it up really hard. If if you

(20:33):
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 molecules they'll get kind of dispersed throughout,
but they won't be able to form bonds with the
water themselves. And instead, the disrupted water molecules I was

(20:54):
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. So by forming these
orderly structures around these droplets of oil suspended in the water,

(21:18):
you are decreasing entropy. And we know that the universe
does not tolerate decreases in 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 until the oil molecules

(21:39):
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 many other substances do.

(22:00):
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 of course, with our hair.

(22:21):
I think if you've ever experimented with just rigorously shampooing
versus going no pooh as they say it, if they
call it um, that you can definitely observe this in action.
Uh so I feel the oils in your hair? Yeah,
Like like I will generally go no shampoo for um
for like a few weeks at a time, and I

(22:42):
will my hair doesn't. It varies from person to person,
you know, 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, well 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, and therefore I bust

(23:02):
out the shampoo, and when I do, all the oil
is gone. And now and then I just look like
like a troll do all, you know, because 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 to

(23:25):
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 or

(23:48):
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
is hydrophobic, meaning it doesn't like water, it avoids water molecules,

(24:12):
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
is that soap molecules will form a kind of bubble
structure called a mice cell around an oily contaminant, with

(24:37):
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
claw at one end and parachute on the other end.
One end grabs hold of the contaminant and the other

(24:59):
end hatches 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
wash lipid based dirt off of surfaces like your hands,
soap is also directly lethal to many kinds of germs,

(25:24):
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
by soap. The fat loving ends of soap molecules kind
of jam themselves into the lipid by layer on the

(25:46):
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
that outer membrane up and send Actually, what this does
is it disembowels the virus, so it's guts spill out
all over the place, and then they get washed away

(26:06):
harmlessly and my cells whenever you rinse 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.
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

(26:28):
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
a a brutal and destructive weapon. Well, yeah, you don't
want to have your your lipids dissolved, and hey, you

(26:49):
know what, you can actually start to feel a bit
of this yourself if you say, if you have washed
your hands too much, if you've been like cooking all
day or something, and you repeatedly having to wash your
hands over and over when you go in between tasks,
you may start to notice with with really frequent hand washing,
that the cumulative effects of soap on your skin do

(27:10):
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 what's going on
there is that is that natural lipids in your skin,
oils that are a healthy part of what your skin

(27:31):
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 washing with soap,
which is that I looked into this the question of time,
because we've all been told a bunch of times. Now

(27:52):
you know you need to wash your hands with soap
for at least twenty seconds, right, And maybe a lot
of people think, ah, no, way, you actually really need
to do it for twenty whole seconds, right. I mean,
you just told me that that soap. Soap can be
lethal too, lots of germs. So basically, 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

(28:14):
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 seconds
of soapy washing is pretty huge. I love how, especially
early on, to really get this message across, uh, there

(28:35):
were 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? I know that
was my my My initial thought was like, I don't
really need to sing the happy Birthday sound to know
how long twenty seconds is. I can just count to twenty.

(28:57):
But then I realized, well, no, this is this is
a 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
of doing it is like expressing it in terms of
the units of Ronnie Cox's monologue at the end of

(29:18):
total recall, how many Ronnie Cox monologues do you need
to do home in time for corn flakes? Is it
awd 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 I just I need to go
two thirds of the way through. I haven't done the
math myself, but some enterprising listener get on that. I

(29:40):
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. What was that? Maybe? Yeah,
I better do it wise, just to be ample. All right,

(30:03):
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. Alright, we're back, all right. So we're trying
to discuss now the question of who invented soap. And
this is not going to be one of those cases

(30:24):
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. Enter the history of humanity. Yes, now, I
love that you've brought up the idea like the the

(30:44):
handy and and just too good to be true idea
of William Soap having invented soap or he did 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 store
origin story that is often repeated on say websites about soap,

(31:08):
Like if there's a soap company and they have an
about page, they might soaps. 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
letters rearranged. So the story here and again you may

(31:30):
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
the clay ground beneath, and here washer women learned that

(31:53):
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 it's 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 just like, you know, one time there was

(32:13):
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 what's plausible, even if you don't have direct

(32:35):
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 handy and it's it's clean. Basically a
slice of false etymology here, but I guess the basically, Yeah,
when you start looking at the details of it, Yes,

(32:56):
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 the meat was actually like how much

(33:18):
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

(33:38):
in the pit from the fire where the animals being burned,
And of course, as I mentioned earlier, soap is made
generally from a combination 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.

(34:01):
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 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. Basically,
this is an origin story, a proposed origin story for

(34:22):
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
Tappo that's place, There's no there's no Mount Tappo, so

(34:42):
we can't 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,
perhaps even a straight up hoax. There another reason, though,
I think that's a very good argument that this is

(35:03):
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 going to 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

(35:24):
of 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 from? When was

(35:46):
the first soap born to us? It definitely was not
born on this Mount Sapo 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. There's
plenty of the elder right at all of soap. Oh,

(36:06):
he certainly does. Yeah, you know, if you know Plenty
is going 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 words
sappo as something the Galls used in their hair. And indeed,

(36:31):
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 ladder.
Now that that too, I don't know. That may be

(36:52):
an example that's partially invented just because it's sound. 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 sapo or from the Germanic saipa
based on the sources I was looking at. Um, there
are a couple of authors, Conkole and Rasmussen, and I'm

(37:13):
going to cite their full article, uh, 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 hair treatment

(37:34):
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 and it

(37:56):
has soap like properties that are then exploited. Additionally, the
Greek physician Galen, who lived through either one or to
sixteen see 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 dramatic because it is

(38:17):
creamy and pure, but gal 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

(38:37):
entirely clear that Gallen actually wrote this, as it could
have been. We could have actually gotten this quote via
pseudo Gallenic medieval handbooks. So so again per 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 everyday substance and explain it with some sort

(39:01):
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 to

(39:23):
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 were 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 you just writing
about everything, you might be tempted to just sort of

(39:44):
speed through the soap section and be like, uh, yeah,
it sounds like it came from some some gallic hair treatments,
something to that effect. But but I don't know, you know,
perhaps 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

(40:06):
Greek writers of the time did write about soap um
and we we see this with with Roman writers as well.
Uh plenty of 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.

(40:30):
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 date back to the third millennium BC
in the hit Type capital of bog Iscoy. And this

(40:52):
decided both in that paper by roth at All that
I already mentioned, as well as his paper by Conkole
and Rasmussen titled an a Cleaner Soap Production and Use
in Antiquity. This is published in Chemical Technology and Antiquity
in t all. Right, So what is the 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.

(41:16):
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

(41:37):
you 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

(42:00):
washing 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 this worth keeping in mind. Here we're dealing about
finding written accounts of the physical soap, right because you

(42:24):
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

(42:45):
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. You know, the point about natural suppontification happening.

(43:08):
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 lated 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

(43:28):
the lipids, the fat layers around the outside of their
body react with the chemicals in the soil to form
a kind of entombment 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

(43:48):
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 kind,
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 isn't

(44:09):
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, Conkol and Rasmussen,
they they do point to this, this third dynasty of
or that's account as being quote a detailed economic account

(44:32):
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 record of soap making. Now,
they point out that the soap is generally mentioned in
connection with medical writings in Mesopotamian cultures centering in on

(44:55):
the diagnosis and prognosis of illnesses and the creation of
dorbal 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

(45:16):
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 wait, wait, wait, what's the ailing or yeah, I was,

(45:37):
I was wondering about that too. It brought some rather
um specific ideas to mind. Apparently there's some uncertainty there,
but the authors later in the articles speculate that we're
talking about hands and feet, so organ used very loosely here.
It still makes me wonder. I mean, like, I know,
in some ancient documents, like in some books of the
Hebrew Bible, I believe scholars speculate that references to the

(46:00):
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
being washed with a you know, a medical semi magical

(46:21):
solution and ancient 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 look
at say, you know, air vedic medicine, you look at

(46:42):
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. M hm.
Speaking of diarrhea. While soap is is great for washing
the outside of your body, do not ingest it? Oh yeah,

(47:04):
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, and
then he labeled it the diarrhea potion as one of

(47:29):
the worst potions in Snape's class. I completely flunked the
Diary of potion portion of the Snape semester that the
Diary of potion is still in the bathroom. Um, maybe
I should take a picture of it and share it
with with people on the Stuff to Blow your Mind
discussion module on Facebook, because uh, yeah it exists, and

(47:51):
you know what, it probably works. Probably works. I believe
in magic, alright. So back to kun Cool and Rasmussen.
Here they point to a few other examples that the
paper is is really good. It's worth looking at, uh,
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 tamarisks, date palm, pine cone, and some

(48:16):
unidentified plant that is referred to as master call the
quoting question, may the tamarisk whereof the tops grow high
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

(48:39):
an aqueous solution of mastercal plant to the gods of
the heavens, as I would bring forth to you for purification.
So will you cleanse me? It's another kind of magical
um uh you know, intonation of the of the the
substance that has been prepared. Uh So what are the
authors that make of the mignificance of this? Like is,

(49:01):
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 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.

(49:23):
Tamarisk is also mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh, when
the goddess nin son Gilgamesh's mother bathed ceremoniously in a
bath of tamarisk and soap work. 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

(49:46):
is certainly possible before that date we gave earlier in
the third millennium BC. It's just a matter of finding
hard evidence for a hard records of it that we
can We can definitely point to um. Plus. You know,
it does make as we've seen with the gall origin idea,
which again is much later in human history, that the

(50:06):
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 of being discovered rediscovered,
uh to, to varying degrees across different cultures. Uh So,
I want to read just this nice closing from conk
Cool and rasmussin quote. The slightly complicated process of rendering

(50:29):
the fats and oils and combining with with alkali could
not have been developed spontaneously. There must have been a
series of steps or procedures that slowly evolved, 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,

(50:50):
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 grease, 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 ed ashes or concentrated alkali salts were used.

(51:14):
That's very plausible route of development to me. That maybe
first you just had the oil as the 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,

(51:36):
I can definitely see something like that, maybe that like
ashes from a fire pit or kind of the stepping stone. Yeah,
so so yeah, this is interesting 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.

(51:59):
One of the funny things so that I was just
thinking about is that throughout history you would have had
all of these uh, soap making industries 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 other types

(52:21):
of uses. So I can imagine that the process of
making soap throughout history might often have been 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

(52:43):
does have this air of of sort of chemical nobility
to it right today, especially when you're dealing with with
with with with crafts people bespoke soaps and so forth.
But yeah, which I made with rancid goat rancid goat

(53:03):
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 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

(53:25):
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 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

(53:45):
durable than others, or more or harsher. Like I remember
my my grandfather would always wash and lather up with
lava soap, which was one that was definitely gendered, you know,
but it was it was like a workman. So I
guess they probab we 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

(54:06):
the most masculine bar of soap imaginable. This will turn
you into leather, it will make beef jerky out of
your skin. Yeah, to just rip your skin right off.
And then, of course you see what the Irish spring
and there, I mean, there's I'm sure a plethora of
different uh you know, masculine soaps out there. Uh. And
then of course the reverse is true as well. You
have something you know that lots of floral tones and

(54:28):
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, 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

(54:51):
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 hand Washing Day. I didn't know about that. Yeah,
this is this was news to me. October fifte is
Global hand Washing Day, and it was established by the
Global Handwashing Partnership in two thousand and eight. Uh quote
The observance aims to increase awareness and knowledge of the

(55:12):
benefits of handwashing with soap. I have been going, um, uh,
you know, certainly since its inception, I have not noticed
uh this holiday. I have a feeling this October fift
we might give it a little more attention. Yeah, and
and certainly I do want to stress if it's masculine sop,
gender neutral soap, you know, feminine soap, whatever, kids soap,

(55:36):
grown up soap, Use something you like. If if if
if a certain branding or or fragrance 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 the

(56:00):
benefits of handwashing, specifically the benefits 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

(56:23):
diarrheal illness in people with weakened immune systems by about
fifty eight percent, and it can reduce respiratory illnesses like
colds in the general population by about sixteen to one. Yeah,
and 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

(56:46):
that we should probably be clear 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 for
other people onto you. So stuff that you would receive,
you know, from people talking or breathing, coughing, sneezing in

(57:07):
your presence. That's the primary route. But of 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

(57:28):
a week there where like every business just went crazy
with hand sanitizer and handwashing, UH encouragement, you know, with
just handwashing stations or or hand sanitation of stations everywhere.
But then it quickly became you know, off hiss that
that was that's only the secondary transmission. Primary transmission is

(57:49):
going to be those droplets. Therefore social distancing is necessary,
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

(58:10):
are plenty of fringe benefits UH to an additional you
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 Affectious Diseases, UH, an individual
everyone you know, is seeing a lot about week after week.

(58:31):
He was talking to the Wall Street Journals podcast about 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 uh and shelter in place
uh requirements. He said. Quote when you gradually come back,

(58:52):
you don't jump in with both feet. You say, what
are the things you could still do 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,

(59:12):
it would probably it probably would decrease instances of influenza
dramatically in this country. But 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

(59:34):
about it, does anybody else enjoy it? I mean, it's
literally just a friendly 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

(59:57):
even like a normal handshake is at least for me,
kind of awkward. But I think part of it is
like you think about, you know, when do you hand
and 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 Foxci's
advice here. But I guess the other thing is we're

(01:00:18):
often talking about kind of like business handshakes and that
that level of stranger handshake. 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 class place during the passing

(01:00:38):
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 leave those behind. Do something else instead.
We can do the elbow bump thing we cannot 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

(01:00:58):
was just looking at the study for the American Journal
of Infection Control in by Sarah Miller and David E.
Whitworth called the fist bump and 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.

(01:01:21):
And what they found was that quote nearly twice as
many bacteria were transferred during a handshake, and the mean
here was one point to four times ten to the
eight CFU. That's cfu means colony forming units compared with
the high five, whereas the fist bump consistently gave the
lowest transmission. So I think, if you must touch fist

(01:01:44):
bump instead of handshake, especially, don't do prolonged handshakes. Um
This is the they measured that 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 U S president engage in where

(01:02:05):
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 or like the ones.
Uh I think aren't there some of these in like
action movies like an Arnold Schwartzenigger movies like the beginning
of Predator and caral weather Is they're just like holding
hands for several minutes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's an iconic scene.

(01:02:28):
It it's just so raw, the big muscles and all.
They not a good idea. But they both had diarrhea
for a week after that. Yeah, I mean probably just
that was that they probably were already happy they were
in the jungle scenario right living off the land. Now.
I did notice that they point out a difference between

(01:02:49):
fist bump and prolonged fist bump. So it's like, I
wonder it 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 bump or or
And then 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

(01:03:11):
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, 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. Yeah,

(01:03:33):
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. So hopefully you'll all
think this is something you can think about during those
twenty plus seconds that you wash your hands. Totally. All right,
So we're gonna go ahead and close it up there.

(01:03:54):
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 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

(01:04:14):
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. At least for the
immediate future, we're planning to continue doing invention themed episodes

(01:04:36):
on a periodic basis, So I don't think that's gonna
be No, 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 you know, firm
schedule in place on that. But we love covering inventions,
we love covering human techno history, so we will continue
to do so we'll do when we feel like it,
and we feel like in an awful lot, I'd say

(01:04:57):
yeah anyway, huge Thanks to our ex 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 Blow Your

(01:05:23):
Mind is production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
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