About Soap
No one is quite sure how soap was discovered, but like most great discoveries it was probably just a fortunate accident. At Mount Sapo, near Rome, the locals sacrificed burnt offerings to their Gods.
The melted fat and wood ash accumulated at the base of the altars, and washed down the hillside into the Tiber River below. Local women found that washing laundry with this sapo-clay cleaned better than water alone, and on the days when there was a lot of sacrificing going on, the river waters were cloudy with this most basic kind of soap. The local women would wait for these days. All that remained was for some enterprising chemist to work out the correct proportions of fat and ash.
Even though soap known about since early times, its use was not widespread – it was mostly used for washing clothes. The idea of washing the body with soap came much later. Common personal cleaning agents at this time were oils, which you would apply to the skin then scrape off – removing some dirt. People would also use fine sand, or just plain water.
By the 14th and 15th century, a fair amount of soap was being made but once again it wasn’t being used for washing bodies with – it was still used for laundering clothes! Queen Isabella of Spain boasted that she only had two baths in her life – one when she was born, and the second when she was married. Queen Elizabeth the 1st was considered a sophisticated woman for her time: she bathed every 3 months “whether she needed it or not”. It seems that everyone just used lots of perfume.
At this time bathing for anything other than medical reasons, was considered not only eccentric but also downright dangerous. Water was considered to have strange magical properties, and that if used incorrectly could cause disease. (This attitude still persists amongst some teenagers today!) Not only was water regarded as dangerous, but the Christian dogma of the time believed that undue concern with bodily functions was detrimental to the spirit, and an overdeveloped sense of modesty meant that taking your clothes off, even in private, was sinful. Bathing was even thought by some, to be the instrument of the devil.
This was the era of the Great Unwashed, and its waves of devastating plagues, which lasted throughout the Dark Ages, Middle Ages and into the early 18th century, when a doctor of the time Louis Pasteur made the connection between microbes and disease. It should be pointed out however, that amongst many native cultures – considered “savages” by white Europeans – as well as the Jewish and Arabic people, personal cleanliness always remained a high priority part of every day life.
In 1790 the chemist, Nicholas Leblanc, discovered how to make caustic soda from common salt. Caustic soda is now used to make lye.
This process could have made soap available to everyone, but soap was so highly taxed in Britain and many parts of Europe, as to be prohibitively expensive. In England this levy on soap lasted until 1852, when soap finally started to be commonly available.
The first references to soap making are believed to be in Babylon about 2800BC; the boiling of fat with ashes. The Romans were big on baths, but during the 1000 years of the dark ages with the fall of the Roman empire, bathing was often frowned upon in the European countries.