A history of soap would be very interesting. Who invented it? When and
where did it first come into common use? How did our remote ancestors
wash themselves before soap was invented? These are historical
questions that naturally arise at first contemplation of the subject;
but, as far as we are aware, historians have failed to answer them. We
read a great deal in ancient histories about anointing with oil and the
use of various cosmetics for the skin, but nothing about soap.
These ancients must have been very greasy people, and I suspect
that they washed themselves pretty nearly in the same way as modern
engine-drivers clean their fingers, by wiping off the oil with a bit of
cotton-waste.
We are taught to believe that the ancient Romans wrapped themselves
round with togas of ample dimensions, and that these togas were
white. Now, such togas, after encasing such anointed oily skins,
must have become very greasy. How did the Roman laundresses or
launders—historians do not indicate their sex—remove this grease?
Historians are also silent on this subject.
A great many curious things were found buried under the cinders
of Vesuvius in Pompeii, and sealed up in the lava that flowed over
Herculaneum. Bread, wine, fruits, and other domestic articles,
including several luxuries of the toilet, such as pomades or
pomade-pots, and rouge for painting ladies’ faces, but no soap for
washing them. In the British Museum is a large variety of household
requirements found in the pyramids of Egypt, but there is no soap, and
we have not heard of any having been discovered there.
Finding no traces of soap among the Romans, Greeks, or Egyptians, we
need not go back to the pre-historic “cave men,” whose flint and bone
implements were found embedded side by side with the remains of the
mammoth bear and hyena in such caverns as that at Torquay, where Mr.
Pengelly has, during the last eighteen years, so industriously explored.
All our knowledge, and that still larger quantity, our ignorance, of
the habits of antique savages, indicate that solid soap, such as we
commonly use, is a comparatively modern luxury; but it does not follow
that they had no substitute. To learn what that substitute may probably
have been we may observe the habits of modern savages, or primitive
people at home and abroad.
This will teach us that clay, especially where it is found having
some of the unctuous properties of fuller’s-earth, is freely used for
lavatory purposes, and was probably used by the Romans, who were by
no means remarkable for anything approaching to true refinement. They
were essentially a nasty people, the habits of the poor being “cheap
and nasty;” of the rich, luxurious and nasty. The Roman nobleman did
not sit down to dinner, but sprawled with his face downwards, and took
his food as modern swine take theirs. At grand banquets, after gorging
to repletion, he tickled his throat in order to vomit and make room
for more. He took baths occasionally, and was probably scoured and
shampooed as well as oiled, but it is doubtful whether he performed any
intermediate domestic ablutions worth naming.
A refinement upon washing with clay is to be found in the practice once
common in England, and still largely used where wood fires prevail. It
is the old-fashioned practice of pouring water on the wood ashes, and
using the “lees” thus obtained. These lees are a solution of alkaline
carbonate of potash the modern name of potash being derived from the
fact that it was originally obtained from the ashes under the pot. In
like manner soda was obtained from the ashes of seaweeds and of the
plants that grow near the seashore, such as the _salsover soda_, etc.
The pot-ashes or pearl-ashes being so universal as a domestic
bi-product, it was but natural that they should be commonly used,
especially for the washing of greasy clothes, as they are to the
present day. Upon these facts we may build up a theory of the origin of
soap.
It is a compound of oil or fat with soda or potash, and would be formed
accidentally if the fat on the surface of the pot should boil over and
fall into the ashes under the pot. The solution of such a mixture if
boiled down would give us soft soap.
If oil or fat became mixed with the ashes of soda plants, it would
produce hard soap. Such a mixture would most easily be formed
accidentally in regions where the olive flourishes near the coast, as
in Italy and Spain for example, and this mixture would be Castile soap,
which is still largely made by combining refuse or inferior olive oil
with the soda obtained from the ashes of seaweed.
The primitive soap-maker would, however, encounter one difficulty—that
arising from the fact that the potash or soda obtained by simple
burning of the wood or seaweed is more or less combined with carbonic
acid, instead of being all in the caustic state which is required for
effective soap-making. The modern soap-maker removes this carbonic
acid by means of caustic lime, which takes it away from the carbonate
of soda or carbonate of potash by simple exchange—_i.e._, caustic
lime _plus_ carbonate of soda becoming caustic soda _plus_ carbonate
of lime, or carbonate of potash _plus_ caustic lime becoming caustic
potash _plus_ carbonate of lime.
How the possibility of making this exchange became known to the
primitive soap-maker, or whether he knew it at all, remains a mystery,
but certain it is that it was practically used long before the
chemistry of the action was at all understood. It is very probable
that the old alchemists had a hand in this.
In their search for the philosopher’s stone, the elixir of life, or
drinkable gold, and for the universal solvent, they mixed together
everything that came to hand, they boiled everything that was boilable,
distilled everything that was volatile, burnt everything that was
combustible, and tortured all their “simples” and their mixtures
by every conceivable device, thereby stumbling upon many curious,
many wonderful, and many useful results. Some of them were not
altogether visionary—were, in fact, very practical, quite capable of
understanding the action of caustic lime on carbonate of soda, and of
turning it to profitable account.
It is not, however, absolutely necessary to use the lime, as the soda
plants when carefully burned in pits dug in the sand of the sea-shore
may contain but little carbonic acid if the ash is fluxed into a hard
cake like that now commonly produced, and sold as “soda ash.” This
contains from three to thirty per cent of carbonate, and thus some
samples are nearly caustic, without the aid of lime.
As cleanliness is the fundamental basis of all true physical
refinement, it has been proposed to estimate the progress of
civilization by the consumption of soap, the relative civilization of
given communities being numerically measured by the following operation
in simple arithmetic:—Divide the total quantity of soap consumed in
a given time by the total population consuming it, and the quotient
expresses the civilization of that community.[28]
The allusion made by Lord Beaconsfield, at the Lord Mayor’s dinner in
1879, to the prosperity of our chemical manufactures was a subject
of merriment to some critics, who are probably ignorant of the fact
that soap-making is a chemical manufacture, and that it involves many
other chemical manufactures, some of them, in their present state, the
results of the highest refinements of modern chemical science.
While the fishers of the Hebrides and the peasants on the shores of the
Mediterranean are still obtaining soda by burning seaweed as they did
of old, our chemical manufacturers are importing sulphur from Sicily
and Iceland, pyrites from all quarters, nitrate of soda from Peru and
the East Indies, for the manufacture of sulphuric acid, by the aid
of which they now make enormous quantities of caustic soda from the
material extracted from the salt mines of Cheshire and Droitwich. These
sulphuric acid works and these soda works are among the most prosperous
and rapidly growing of our manufacturing industries, and their chief
function is that of ministering to soap-making, in which Britain is now
competing triumphantly with all the world.
By simply considering how much is expended annually for soap in
every decent household, and adding to this the quantity consumed in
laundries and by our woolen and cotton manufacturers, a large sum
total is displayed. Formerly, we imported much of the soap we used at
home; now, in spite of our greatly magnified consumption, we supply
ourselves with all but a few special kinds, and export very large and
continually increasing quantities to all parts of the world; and if
the arithmetical rule given above is sound, the demand must steadily
increase as civilization advances.