A Brief History of Soap, Essay Example

Though soap is a daily fixture for most of us, it was not always so. Claims about how long ago soap was first created vary widely from source to source, ranging from several hundred to several thousand years B.C.E. (“The History of Soap,” 2011). What is agreed, though, is that for much of soap’s history, it was considered difficult, time consuming, and expensive to make (“The History of Soap,” 2011). Those attributes, coupled with prevailing social and cultural attitudes about personal hygiene, meant that soap was not widely used, but was rather a luxury reserved mostly for the wealthy (“The History of Soap,” 2011). It wasn’t until the relatively recent 18^th Century that methods for making soap improved to the point where it became the common household staple we know of today (“The History of Soap,” 2011).

Though almost surely apocryphal, one legend has it that soap was first used in ancient times by bathers on Mount Sappo, which lent soap its name (“Chemistry Explained: Soap,” 2011). The earliest soaps were typically made from a combination of tallow (animal fat) and ashes from various types of wood (“Chemistry Explained: Soap,” 2011) . Early Romans, for example, had several methods for cleaning themselves, including rubbing talc in their hair to trap and remove oils, and rubbing the aforementioned tallow blend on their skin and then scraping it of, followed by immersion in hot water (“Bubbles and Soap,” 2011).

Surprisingly, little changed in the manufacture of soap for centuries, until French chemist Nicholas Leblanc divined a method for using common table salt to create a chemical called caustic soda; this chemical afforded an easy and inexpensive reaction with fats and oils from plants and animals, leading to a revolution in the mass production of soap (“The History of Soap,” 2011). To this day, though, products like tallow and beeswax, as well as various plant extracts and oils, are still used in the manufacture of some soaps (“The History of Soap,” 2011) .

Bibliography

Calvert, J.B. (2004, March 20). Bubbles and soap. Retrieved from http://mysite.du.edu/~jcalvert/phys/bubbles.htm

Chemistry explained: soap. (2011). Retrieved from http://www.chemistryexplained.com/Ru-Sp/Soap.html

The history of soap. (2011). Retrieved from http://science.jrank.org/pages/6209/Soap-history-soap.html