History of Soap

History of Soap

There is no clear evidence that use of soap for personal hygiene precedes the Christian era. Two mentions appear in the Old Testament. "Even if you wash you with Nitre, and take thee much soap, but your iniquity is marked before me," says Jeremiah. A more modern translation reads: "Even if you wash with soda and soap lavish ...."

1. There are doubts about whether this is a reference to true soap. It has been suggested that there may be a lye, made by mixing alkaline plant ash with water, was referred to, or possibly a kind of Fuller's earth.

2. This view is perhaps supported by the second mention, on virtually the last page of the Old Testament book of Malachi, where both the authorized edition of 1611 and the modern translations read almost identical: "He is like a refiner's fire, which a fuller's soap. "

3. It has been suggested that one or another form of soap, made by boiling fats with ashes, which were made in Babylon as early as 2800BC, but probably only used for washing clothes. Pliny the Elder (7BC-53AD) mentions that soap was made from tallow and beech ashes by the Phoenicians in 600BC.

Bathe in classical times:

In classical times was perfumed oils in widespread use for bathing and was combined with the use of strigil, a metal implement used to scrape the skin free of oil and dirt. It is argued that in order to wash themselves, the Romans used a type of clay found near Rome called "sapo" from which the word soap is derived. an alternative proposal for the derivation of the name is that the Romans learned the art of soap making using animal fat or vegetable ash from the Celts who called it "saipo".

With soap in personal hygiene does not seem to have been adopted before the second century, when the physician Galen (130-200AD) mentions its use for washing of the body. Another doctor reported Priscianus (around 385AD), use of soap as a shampoo and made the first mention of the trade in "saponarius", or soap-kettle.

While the soap was in use during the Roman period, its adoption has been slow, despite the popularity of public and private baths throughout the empire. Possibly early soap made from animal fat and crude alkali, was not very attractive in appearance and odor, and was considered more suitable for cleaning and laundering. The remains of what could have been a soap factory was discovered in Pompeii, which was overwhelmed by an eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD, but maybe it was a place for the production of a type that Fuller's earth for the cleaning of textiles.

Early center of soap making:

Little is known of the use of soap in the dark ages that followed the fall of Rome. Personal hygiene was probably not a high priority in regions where life was uncertain. Saponins are widespread in the plant kingdom, and these plants Saponaria officinalis, Quillaia saponaria, Gypsophila species and Sapindus species contain useful amounts can be used for cleaning purposes.

For the manufacture of soap in Europe and the Mediterranean was revived in the late first millennium. Early center of production was Marseille in France and Savona in Italy. It has been suggested that the French word Savon, the soap comes from the name of the latter center.

In Britain references began to appear in literature from around 1000AD, and in 1192 the monk Richard Devizes refer to the number of soap makers in Bristol and the unpleasant smells which their activities produced.

A century later, soap making was reported in Coventry. Other early manufacturing center covering York and Hull. In London for a 15th century "sopehouse" was reported in Bishopsgate, elsewhere in Cheapside, where there was Soper's Lane (later renamed Queen Street), and by the Thames in black Brothers.

Early means of production:

Throughout its long history of the chemical process for the manufacture of soap has not fundamentally changed. Neutral oils or fats are boiled with alkali in a reaction that produces soap and glycerin. Potassium salts produce soft-soap refers Sodium soaps are harder and more widely employed. When metallic radical is calcium or magnesium as insoluble soaps are made, this forms the foam produced when soap dissolved in hard water. The quality of the produced soap is very dependent on the quality of the materials used in the reaction. Earlier attempts at soap relied ash produced by burning various plant materials, as an impromptu of alkali. For example, plant Salsola in Spain were burned to produce an alkaline ash called Barilla. This used in conjunction with locally available olive oil, offered a good quality soap, by salting-out or "Graining" the boiled liquid with brine, Law soap to float to the surface, leaving the lye, vegetable colors and impurities to settle out. This produced what was probably the first white hard soap: Jabon de Castilla, or Castile soap, also known as chemists or hispaniensis sapo sapo castilliensis. Originally an important product of the Castile region in central Spain, Castile eventually became the generic name for the hard, white, olive oil soap.

Chemistry soap:

Glycerin was first observed by the Swedish chemist Scheele in 1779, which called it "the sweet principle of fat". But it was the great French chemist Michel Eugene Chevreul, born in 1786 and live in an age of almost 103, to study chemistry and soap to identify the "sweet principle" as the common denominator of fat and to call it "glycerine". Working in the first quarter of the 19th century, he showed that oils and fats are glycerides, and that boiling with caustic soda or caustic potash formed salts of fatty acids, or soaps, liberating the glycine, which he has obtained a production patent activity in 1811. This knowledge paved the way for the great extension of the soap later in the century, when more secure sources of alkali were significant.

Manufacturing Methods:

Traditional soap manufacturing processes involved in the boiling of oils and fats with caustic solution in open pans with a capacity of somewhere between 10 and 150 tonnes, followed by the addition of salt or brine in the "salting out" process soap separated from lye. The skilled operator would control the process by "toweling". From the way the soap slipped from a heated hand trowel he could assess whether more brine or caustic was required, and when the party was ready for "settling". By successive washing in brine in caustic solutions were separated from the soap and glycerine recovery. The soap was dried and cut into bars for delivery to wholesale and retail. In the old days, a dealer would cut the bars in the blocks at the point of sale, using cheese wire or a sharp knife, and would hand wrap the blocks in the paper. It is interesting that the name "Soap" persistence, although the product is now generally available in individual tablets and a true soap-bar is a pleasant sight. Traditional transparent soaps such as "pear" is produced by prolonged evaporation and drying of an alcoholic liquid soap in a process that takes up to three months. The characteristic concave shape of the soap tablet is achieved not by casting, but shrinkage in the drying process. Modern soap manufacture, however, are continuous processes supported by instrumentation and automatic control systems.

Soap and pharmacy

Besides the traditional selling of many kinds of soap products by pharmacists through retail outlets, even soap has found numerous applications in pharmacy, as the pill is doing, and liniment creams, dentifrices, plasters, enemas, suppositories and folders, in addition to veterinary applications . Older pharmacists will remember sessions in pharmacy manufacturing laboratory Sapo mollis and Spirits saponis, and perhaps their first embarrassing experience as a young apprentice, when asked about Opodeldoc until a patient pharmacist explained that this was to find a Winchester says Linimentum saponis.

Using soap to the pharmacy is long established. In 1761 Quincy's English exceptions recommended that "the kind of soap that is best suited for medical purposes, and in view of the inside are from Venice or from Castile." In 1768 the Experimental History of Materia Medica by William Lewis, FRS, claimed: "The best of the common soaps is that the so-called Spanish or Castile soap, which is made with olive oil and basic salt called soda or Barilla." Though progress in the chemistry of surfactants in the 20th century has been remarkable and has revolutionized methods of manufacture of household and industrial detergents, washing agents, shampoos and other cosmetics are traditional soaps retain their popularity for washing and bathing, and soap can see another century of large scale production and daily use.