The History of the Making of Soap

Soap, we all take it for granted, we bath with it, we wash our clothes, wash our dishes with it, we even wash our cars with it but where would we be without soap. We'd probably be a very stinky world. The history of soap making is the story of a product that was first manufactured by craftsmen and women, one batch at a time. Today, factories turn out millions of bars of soap each year in a billion dollar industry,

No one can document the discovery of soap; like so many vital inventions, the combination of grease and alkali to form a cleansing substance was most likely a matter of chance.

Few records of the ancient world refer to soap or its use. It may be that the ancients looked upon soap as something of little importance because they did not value cleanliness as highly as later civilizations.

Around 1500bc, Moses gave the Israelites an elaborate code of laws, which, among other things prescribed person cleanliness. Jews were inadvertent innovators in linking cleanliness and health. They followed rituals to clean themselves in order to please their God, and as a result lived healthier lives.

The early Greeks did not use soap, although they bathed their bodies by scraping themselves with blocks of clay, sand, pumice and ashes. Then they anointed themselves with oil and used the strigil (a metal instrument) to scrape off the oil and dirt.

The Roman legend does offer us an explanation of how soap got its Latin name. They would sacrifice animals on Mt. Sapo, then rainwater combined with the animal fat and ashes and washed into the Tiber. When doing their laundry they noticed that their clothing became cleaner when the foamy combination of fats and alkali was present. Eventually, people referred to this mixture as sapo after the location, which in turn was passed to English soap.

The very first true evidence of soap making was from the work of Pliny the Elder, who wrote about Rome in the first century AD. Describing various soft and hard soaps made form goat tallow and wood ash. A hundred years later, Galen, a Roman physician recommended bathing with soap for both medicinal and cleansing purposes.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, hygiene plunged the deterioration of health standards, which favored the conditions for the outbreak of the great plagues of the Middle Ages.

In the medieval and early modern periods, trade associations and guilds controlled the soap industry. Apprentices learned the art of soap making from master tradesmen and secrets of the trade were carefully guarded.

The American colonist hesitated to take up the task of manufacturing soap. In the Massachusetts Bay colony, they relied on a regular supply brought from England. Large barrels, or firkins, were employed to transport soap to the colonies as late as the 1630's.

Later, the early settlers mastered the technique of combining wood ash and animal fat. The resulting harsh lye soap was not popular with everyone. However, soap making remained essentially a household chore.

By the late 18th century, several breakthroughs in chemistry made the mass production and marketing of soap possible so that soap making became one of the fastest growing industries in England and America.

The first company to operate the largest scale soap company in the United States was William Colgate along with partner Frances Smith; started the Smith and Colgate in New York in 1807. He purchased a large kettle to make 45,000 pounds soap batches.

It wasn't until 1830s that soap was wrapped individually and sold in a uniform weight. The Colgate Company introduces the first perfumed soap, Cashmere Bouquet, in 1872.

Proctor and Gamble received its first big break when the federal government needed to supply the army with soap during the Civil War. This prompted the company to develop new ways of making soap.

An employee, in 1879, returned from lunch and discovered he forgot to turn off the soap mixer, and that a large amount of air had been beaten into the batch of pure white soap. His supervisor's decided to keep the mistake a secret and packaged and shipped the air-filled bars to customers across the country. The company's big surprise was when customers were asking for soap that floats! Executives named the bar Ivory soap, one of the most successful products in the history of the industry.

Since then lots of companies have come and gone, several have bought out the other but the one main thing that has stayed and will always stay is soap. So the next time you take a shower or bath, consider that slippery bar of soap and the amount of efforts that went into developing a product that is both safe and effective.