Lesson 1: Introduction
History of Soapmaking
Soap fact: The ruins at Pompeii revealed a soap factory complete with finished bars.
The word saponification is said to come from Sapo Mountain in Rome. According to Roman legend, women washing clothes in the Tiber River noticed that their clothes were cleaner if they washed them in a particular area. Animal sacrifice at an altar further up the mountain was producing a crude form of soap: animals fats mixing with ashes and lye were winding their way down the mountain to the river.
Soap was originally made from lye that was obtained by leaching water through hardwood ashes (this lye is know as KOH or potassium hydroxide, a different kind of lye than we will be using, NaOH or sodium hydroxide) and animal fat. Potassium hydroxide produces a soft soap that was kept in barrels or other containers and used mostly for laundry.
Soap only became an item for use on the body when soapmaker's guilds began to spring up in France, Italy and Spain . These soapmakers had access to olive oil and lye made from the ashes of the barilla plant which produced hard bars of Castille soap. Soap was considered a luxury item, and was very expensive and heavily taxed by the government. Soapmaking was to become more widespread after 1791, when Nicholas Leblanc, a French chemist, discovered a process that allowed lye to be made easily and cheaply from common salt.
The pioneers in America brought soapmaking into the the home by mixing rainwater with wood ash to make lye and rendering animal meat to produce tallow. They made their soap hard by adding salt (sodium) to the mixture. They often speeded up saponification by boiling the soap (kettle method) and collected the gylcerin which separated from the soap for other uses.
Soap factories sprang up in the 19th century and commercially produced soap became widely available from companies such as Colgate and Proctor & Gamble. After WWII, new synthetic processes allowed companies to produce soap-like sustances cheaply which were actually petrolleoum-based detergents. Mass produced soap from lye and oil is usually made using the continuous method at high temperatures, so that it could be made quickly and the gylcerin removed. Big soap companies can sell the by-product gylcerin for much more then they can sell their soap for!
In recent years, there has been revival of traditional soapmaking methods. Cottage industries have sprung up, many started by women to supplement thier income while staying at home with their children. The Internet allowed these women to come together in supportive communities and you will now find wonderful handmade soaps in plentiful supply on-line.
