Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren bog Obam here with a classic episode from what host who came before? Christian Sager. This is a topic we stumbled on a few years back and just had to do an episode about because it turns out that dry cleaning isn't dry. So what is it? Hey, brain stuff, it's Christian Sager. Have you ever wondered how dry cleaning is actually dry? Well, you're about to know. You're about to know how dry cleaning works a little bit.
So dry cleaning, here's the thing. It's not really dry. It's actually using liquids. It just doesn't use water, and that's why they call it dry cleaning, which, yeah, it's pretty stupid, but look that's just the case. In the old timey days, dry cleaning used to use a solvent called kerosene. You might light your heater with it in your home, especially if you live in a rural area
and you don't have electric city. But people figured out that kerosene is not that great for clothes, especially once we had something called para chloral ethylene or perk in dry cleaning vernacular. This is the solvent that's most commonly used today. It's probably highly toxic. And there's a lot of dry cleaners out there that you'll see say they use greener methods. Now, when you see that, they're usually using liquefied carbon dioxide, which is a lot greener than perk,
and which is again a highly toxic solvent, but it works. Now. A dry cleaning machine looks a lot like a combination washer dryer that you might see, you know, an industrial sized one, and it is a finely tuned instrument. What the dry cleaner will do is throw your clothes in there with this perk or whatever solvent it is that they're using, and they heat it to a perfect eighties
six degrees fahrenheit. Anything more than that it's just going to destroy your clothes, and anything less than that it might not have the cleaning ability that you wanted to have. And it's going to agitate it and take the perk
and filter it out and reuse it. And then when it's finally done, all of the perk is going to be captured and reused and sequestered before they even open the door, because you don't want this stuff going into the atmosphere and then voila you have a dry cleaned wet shirt that has been cleaned with industrial solvents, and that is dry cleaning. And yes, it's wet still, but at least it's not water. Today's episode was written by
me and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other topics, visit how stuffworks dot com. Brain Stuff is production of my heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.