How Soap Is Made
There is a myth that has gone around lately that soap was discovered by women who washed clothes downstream from the sites of human and animal sacrifices. How soap is made gives some insight to how this myth got started.
Soap production has been going on for a very long time. There is a soap recipe that was written on a clay tablet in Babylon somewhere around 2200 B.C. that calls for a mixture of water, alkali, and Cassia Oil. Egyptian, Roman, and Greek society also used soap in various forms. Until very recently, soap making was a craft and was not practiced on a large scale at all. The simple reason for this was that people did not use it that much, nor did they see a lot of advantage is washing themselves on a regular basis.
Much of the early soap was more likely to have been used for washing fabric and clothing anyway. This use has been taken over by detergents, for the most part, and soap is used more for personal washing of the hands and body. However, soap has been mass produced in the last one hundred and fifty years because science and medicine have recognized the connection between person hygiene and the spread of infectious disease.
Soap is made by mixing a fatty acid of some type with an alkali in a process called saponification. In the old Babylon recipe, the Cassia Oil provided the fatty acid and the alkali was most likely some type of chemical such as Soda Ash. Sodium hydroxide, caustic soda, lye, or potassium hydroxide are all examples of alkaloid substances used in this process. The end result of saponification is glycerol and crude soap flakes. The resulting product is boiled to remove sodium chloride, sodium hydroxide and the glycerol.
The next step involves the removal of water by drying resulting in soap flakes that can be compacted into pellets and then molded into the common bars or any other shape desired. The fatty material used in the original process varies. Rendered beef fat produces sodium tallowate and this is a common product used in soap production. Palm oil is an example of a vegetable oil that tends to produce a milder soap. Pure Olive Oil is used in the production of a type known as Castile Soap.
It is the use of rendered fat that led to the myths about the waters below the sacrifice sites making the clothes come cleaner. This myth was mentioned by a character in a recent motion picture, Fight Club. It is rather unlikely the presence of rendered fat in the water would have been much help in the cleaning of clothes in the river by primitive women without the rest of the process of soap making.
By: John Grimes
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