Laundry Detergent History

Laundry Detergent History

For whereas elongated over tribe own been around and have worn apparel, licensed has been some way for cleaning those costume. Ropes copious of our historical movies, we peek scenes footing male oomph down to the river to clean their attire. The lore of Indian manliness beating their clothes on rocks by the river is sliver of cultural history, whether authentic is veracious or not. Scrupulous since compelling are actual washboards from frontiersman times that mortals from the introductory oldness of our country used to scrub attire notoriety the senile west.

The methods and detergent used to clean laundry obtain changed for sure but not the need for clean clothes. But it is fun and instructional to think about the history of laundry soap and see how it has evolved over the centuries to what we have today. One thing we can say for sure is that our forefathers in various generations throughout history were not lucky enough to have the modern laundry detergents that we can so easily buy at the supermarket to use in our washing machines at home.

The earliest forms of laundry soap have been found by archeologists to have been mixtures of ash and animal fats. Early versions of laundry cleansers can be found as far back as 5000 years ago in such diverse civilizations as Babylon and Egypt. The fat was used to penetrate the garment and the ash content to break up the dirt. This is a very primate version of the same chemical detergents we used today.

It is interesting to note that during the middle ages it is believed that culture stopped using laundry soap entirely on the theory that it was not natural to wash clothes in this way. More than one historian has speculated that the Bubonic Plague or the " Black Death " may have spread so quickly because of the lack of hygiene due to the abandonment of what were at the time conventional laundry cleaning materials. That historical fact alone gives us some valuable perspective on the value of laundry detergent in our society today.

But laundry detergent did not disappear entirely. Common religious teachings held that cleanliness was important so using soaps to clean clothes was continued even though in some ways it was controversial because in European society, certain factions considered the use of soap to be a scheme of the devil.

For a simple cleaning tool as we view laundry detergent today, it is amazing that even this helpful cleanser once was at the heart of religious controversy. But during that era of western history where superstition and fear of witchcraft was dominant, some of the more fearful people in society suspected that any substance that could transform a garment from soiled and useless to like new and clean had to be possessed of the devil or the result of black magic. We are fortunate we live in a time of education and enlightenment where the power of soaps to transform our clothing is attributed correctly to good science, not otherworldly evil.