Humans had been making soap for 4,000 years. In 1816 we finally knew what the reaction was.
In 1791 the French chemist Nicolas Leblanc patented a process for making sodium carbonate — soda ash — out of table salt, sulfuric acid, and limestone.
Suddenly alkali was cheap, uniform, and industrially scalable.
It’s hard to overstate what that meant. For 4,000 years soapmakers had burned plants or gathered ash to get their lye. Now you could buy it. With enough capital you could produce soap in quantities that had been unthinkable before.
Leblanc himself didn’t get to enjoy it. The French Revolution confiscated his patent. He got the factory back in 1801, but had no funds to restart it. He took his own life in 1806.
His process was used for the rest of the 1800s.
In 1816 the French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul explained what actually happens when you boil fat with lye. He isolated stearic acid, oleic acid, and palmitic acid. He defined soap as “a salt of a fatty acid and an inorganic base.”
Humans had been making soap for 4,000 years. Only now did we know what we were actually making.
It’s worth letting that hang: we had used the technology longer than most writing systems have existed before we understood what the reaction was. We knew that it worked. We didn’t know why.
Procter and Gamble was founded in Cincinnati in 1837 by two brothers-in-law — an Irish soapmaker and an English candlemaker, married to the sisters Olivia and Elizabeth Norris. Both trades used tallow and lye. It was a logical merger.
In 1879 P&G launched Ivory soap. “Ninety-nine and forty-four hundredths percent pure.” That figure came from an independent laboratory P&G hired to embarrass Castile soap.
Ivory’s famous “It Floats” property came about by accident. A worker left the mixing machine running over the lunch break and pumped air into the soap. P&G kept it. It became part of the campaign in 1891.
And in 1882 Pears Soap hired the actress Lillie Langtry to say she used their soap.
It’s history’s first celebrity endorsement of a commercial product. Ever.
Soap invented celebrity marketing.
Sources og noter
- Wikipedia — Nicolas Leblanc — 1791 patent, 1806 selvmord
- Wikipedia — Leblanc process — industriel NaOH-produktion
- Wikipedia — Michel Eugène Chevreul — fedtsyre-isolation, sæbe-definition 1816
- Wikipedia — Procter & Gamble — grundlagt 1837 i Cincinnati
- Wikipedia — Ivory (soap)) — 1879
- Wikipedia — Lillie Langtry — Pears Soap endorsement 1882