Soap History
Most people washed themselves with only one
essential thing at the time, water.
This, of course, happened until the
development of soap in 2800 B.C. The soap
was found in clay cylinders during
the excavation of ancient Babylon. There were
inscriptions discovered on the
cylinders, which showed us that fats were boiled
with ashes, which was the
method of making the soap at this time. Records have
shown that Egyptians
bathed regularly. There was a medical document found called
"The Ebers
Papyrus" which described the combining of animal and vegetable
oils with
alkaline salts to form soap-like material. These were used for
treating skin
diseases and washing. At around this time, Moses gave the
Israelites
specific laws about personal cleanliness. He related cleanliness to
health
and religious cleansing. The early Greeks bathed for artistic
reasons.
Instead of washing with soap, they bathed themselves with blocks
of clay, sand,
pumice, and ashes. Then they anointed themselves with oil and
scraped off the
oil and dirt with a strigil. They washed their clothes in the
streams without
using soap. According to an ancient Roman legend, soap got
its name from Mount
Sapo where animals were sacrificed. When it had rain,
the water washed away the
animal fat and wood ashes down into the clay soil
along the Tiber River. Women
had found this clay mixture and it made their
wash much cleaner. Soap making was
a popular craft in Europe by the 17th
century. Vegetable and animal oils were
used with ashes of plants and
fragrance. More varities of soap gradually became
available for shaving and
washing hair, as well as bathing and washing clothes.
Italy, Spain, and
France were the early centers of soap manufacturing. The
English began
making soap during the 12th century. The chemistry of the soap
manufacturing
stayed the same until 1916 when the first synthetic detergent was
developed
in Germany. Synthetic detergents are non-soap washing and cleaning
products
that are "synthesized". Household detergent products became known
in the
United States around the 1930s. It is very important to understand the
basic
knowledge of soap and detergent chemistry. Water has a property
called
surface tension. In water, other water molecules surround each
molecule, but at
the surface, other water molecules only on the waterside
surround those
molecules. A tension is created as the surface molecules are
pulled into the
body of water. This tension causes the water to "bead up" on
the surface,
which slows down the cleaning process. During the cleaning
process, surface
tension must be reduced so the water can spread and wet
surfaces. Chemicals that
do this are called surface-active agents. The
surface-active agents perform many
important jobs in cleaning. They are
classified by their ionic properties in
water. These properties are anionic
which means a negative charge, nonionic
which means no charge, cationic which
means having a positive charge, and
amphoteric which means having either a
positive or negative charge. Soaps are
water-soluble sodium or potassium
salts of fatty acids. The fats and oils used
in soap making are made up of a
unique mixture of several different
triglycerides. In a triglyceride
molecule, 3 fatty acid molecules are attached
to one molecule of glycerine.
Fatty acids are the mechanism of fats and oils
that are used in soap. They
are weak acids of two parts, which are a carboxylic
acid group and a
hydrocarbon chain attached to the carboxylic acid group.