When Was The Soap First Made?

Soap was not one of the necessary and useful inventions of man. It is quite a recent thing in man’s history and is about 2000 years old. The ancient people anoint their bodies with olive oil. They also used juices and ashes of certain plants to clean themselves. But, by the time of pliny, a Roman writer of first century AD, we already have a reference to two kinds of soap, soft and hard. He describes it as an invention for brightening up the hair and gives the Gauls credit for inventing it.

In the ruins of Pompeii, by the way, there was found buried as establishment for turning out soap that very much resembles the soap of today! And yet, one hundred years ago nearly all soap used in the United States was made at home.

Fats and oils are boiled with an alkali. In the great soap factories, the fats and alkalis are first boiled in huge kettles. This process is called ‘saponification’. When it is almost completed, salt is added. This causes the soap to rise to the top of the kettle. The brine or salt solution containing glycerine, dirt and some excess alkali sinks to the bottom and is drawn off. This step is repeated as many as five to six times. More wets and alkali are added each time until the last bit of fat is saponified, or converted from a fat into soap.

The next step is to churn the soap into a smooth mass while adding certain ingredients, such as perfumes, colouring, water softeners, and preservatives. The hot melted soap is ready to be fashioned into bar, cakes, flakes, granules, globules, etc. Toilet soaps go through a process called “milling which shreds and dries them, then rolls then into sheets.