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History of Soap Introduction - Part 1

The fat was neutral, but the acids within the fat reacted with the alkali carbonates of the plant ash to form soap. According to ancient Roman legend, Mount Sapo was the site upon which animals were sacrificed by fire, and the ashes from the fire mixed with the animal fats and the process of saponification occurred to form the primitive soap. The mixture of melted tallow and wood ashes merged with the heavy clay soil along the Tiber River, and women found that this mixture cleansed their clothes with less physical effort. Originally wood or plant ashes from everyday cooking or heating fires contained potassium carbonate in the ash, which were dispersed in water, with added fat. This mixture was boiled until the water began to evaporate and more ash was added. As a cleansing agent it would have certainly worked but the odour from all that rancid fat would have been best left to the imagination.

Clay cylinders containing a soap like substance have been found in modern Iraq which was ancient Babylon which suggest that the basics of soap making process was understood about 2800 B.C. Inscriptions on the cylinders prescribe the recipe for boiling fats with ashes, as a hair styling aid. This method of making soap certainly would have worked but it bears little resemblance to the twenty-fist method of making soap. Moses instructed the Israelites about cleanliness and a type of religious purification, they had a recipe for hair gel from ashes and oil.
This primitive method of soap making was virtually universal until the Celts discovered that using fats with free fatty acids initiated the process. Soap production did not become a scientific process until slaked lime was used to causticize the alkali carbonate which made the chemically neutral fats saponify easily with caustic lye. The Leblanc process produced soda ash from brine, and it catapulted the process of making soap from a home based cottage industry to an industrial process.

Michel Euge`ne Chevreul, a French chemist discovered that saponification as a chemical reaction resulted from splitting fat into the alkali salt of fatty acids that is, soap and glycerine. In 1783, King Louis XVI of France in conjunction with the French Academy of Sciences offered a prize of 2400 livres for a method to produce alkali from sodium chloride (sea salt). In 1791, Nicolas Leblanc, physician to Louis Philip II, Duke of Orle'ans, patented the solution and built the first Leblanc plant which had a capacity to produce 320 tons of soda per year. Unfortunately, he never received his prize because the events of the French Revolution caught up with Louis’s head! The method of boiling with open steam, introduced at the end of the 19th century, was another step in the process of the industrialisation of soap.

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Soap making involved a chemical process called saponification, which occurred when ashes and fats were mixed, though in the early days of making soap this chemistry would have not had been understood. The process of saponification would have occurred by accident rather than by design.

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