>> Speaker A: I have drank drinks with a higher viscosity than what's coming out of the gym. Shower soap tap. Welcome back to privy. Privy is a podcast about bathrooms recorded this week again from my home bathroom. I'm your host, hunter hoover, and I love bathrooms. Thank you so much for being here to start the show. I want to just share a brief story here, and it's going to introduce us to what we're going to do this week. But I took a shower at the gym
this week. Normally, uh, my gymming routine, I'm able to go to the gym, get full randy, uh, and then just return home to my family and kind of stand and exist in filth until I shower the following morning. I know it is what it is. It's the system I'm on, and that's okay. But the circumstances on this one is I had to use the gym, uh, before I went to work this day because I knew I was going to have to jet to my other job in the evening. And so
I knew I wasn't going to be able to do the gym after work. And so I went to gym before work, and I'm sitting here going, I can kind of exist in gym sweat for two to 3 hours of awake time. After the gym, it's more like four. Uh, but I was not thinking that I was going to be able to do a full work day and a half after I go to work at my first job, then going to my second job. I thought that certainly I would be far too randy to exist, um, for that long without a shower.
So, um, I gymed hard, and then I did what needed to happen. I used the gym shower, and using the gym shower is always something special. We talked in shower etiquette, some of this stuff, but, man, there's some blokes that are just getting some foul mess in the shower, and I'm not bringing probably proper foot attire for this shower situation. So I'm just firmly planting my bare hoofies straight into the just pool of cess that is at the bottom of the men's room shower. But sometimes
that's what you have to do. I'm not transporting flip flops and sandals around. I don't have that in me at this point. Uh, but I will say this. I always bring my own soap. I have my own soap and shampoo and stuff. Uh, and I grabbed that and I had it ready for use. But, like me being cheap, I get all set up in the bathroom, man. I am a creature of particular habits. When I'm setting up in the gym shower, it takes me a hot minute because I take my underpants and my shirt for when I am done to
the shower area to hang up. And I have it hung up in stages. So that way it's in order of order that I will need it when I get out of the shower. And then in the shower, you've got it laid out just so that way everything can go as quickly as possible. Because again, you don't want your hoofies sitting in the cess too long. And they're not very big showers. It's like if you bend over, sometimes your butt hits the wall and you're like, oh, gosh, no. But I got my soap set up on the floor of the
shower there. And me being cheap, I see that they have the complimentary soap dispenser. Uh, and I decide, you know what? I'm going to save my soap and I'm going to go for the soap they have on tap here at the gym. And so I'm just like, just getting that soap. And I have drank drinks with a higher viscosity than what's coming out of the gym shower soap tap. Like, good lord. It hit my rag and just disappeared into oblivion. Instantly vaporized straight down the drain. The thinnest soap in the
universe at the gym. So I used my own. Uh, and this is going to bring us into the topic this week and something that's been at the back of my brain for a while to talk about on the show. It's kind of related to the rotation of questions that we ask everyone. We ask all our guests. And so maybe we should have done this work of figuring out the backstory of what is in many ways a mainstay of most bathrooms. But this week on the pod, we're discussing soap and more importantly, the history of
soap. Where'd it come from? It gets you clean. It goes where no man should ever go or probably will ever go before. I don't know, but it does a lot of heavy lifting. Soap. But how did we get this stuff and where did it come from? So I perused the interwebs, and the earliest mentions of soap come from about 2800 BC, Babylon. Now, that's about 5000 years
ago, which is quite a long time ago. And this is both the earliest record of soap being made and probably about the time where everyone quit smelling like dog poop. Uh, I'm trying to imagine. So I work with people, and sometimes people need to shower more than they do. And that's not a judgment thing. It's just a hygienic posit that I'm putting forth as a person who tries to
shower more than he should. And the earliest mentions of this, if they didn't have soap before here, you're just wetting, and when you're just wetting, you're just giving bacteria a, uh, flipping, uh, dance club to just start making more bacterial buddies. But this early babylonian soap, it Defo did not look like what we squirt out of the hand dispensers, or in my case, the shower dispenser, uh, onto our hands and into our heads. Not into our heads. Don't squirt soap into your
head in any way. But it didn't look like that. It is guessed that, uh, this, okay, this soap was probably developed on accident. And what they guess happened here is some Babylonian bloke, we'll call him Chad, because one of the best jokes in the bible, so. Bible joke. Um, not even a bible joke, but there's this character called Nebuchadnezzar. But his name sucks to spell. And so if you ever want to remember how to spell Nebuchadnezzar,
it's Nebuchadnezzar. Once you know that, you just call him old Nebu or Big Chad. So you got big Chad, and he's just squatting over the know, cooking his meat. And as the fire burned down, the ash in the bottom would have settled. And for me, I always stir that ash up and it gets all up on my hut dog. And you're just like, trying to blow that ash off your hut dog, but it settles. And then animal fats from cooked meat, cooked meat
drip onto the ash. When this was left to harden, this new fatty ash fat, uh, ash, get it? Because of the ash in the thing. But when this was left to harden, it formed a kind of waxy looking substance. Perhaps then at this time, it also could have been raining. And they noticed a sudsy look as the water interacted with the fat and the ash, and they tried to then use it. Um, but we're going to see that the primary use of this new
soap was not for them. That's why I say they probably still smelled like a dog dookie out here. Who knows? But what we do know was that from this soap, uh, was born, and they began to make it. It probably wasn't even for washing people. So they probably just, again, continued to smell like ancient Mediterranean dumpster. But the primary use of this new soap, which they began adding salts and other oils to, uh, in order to change the quality.
It was primarily used for cleaning, cooking and medical instruments, or to try and disinfect surfaces and dishes. Got to get a big slurp. Oh, yeah, you really hear the Abdullam ablam gata just cranking that water down your gullet. Um, but then what ancient Babylon came up with, ancient Egypt also used. We learned that the ancient Egyptians used animal fats and oils mixed with salts and ash
to form cleaning products. And we learned from none other than our favorite medical papyrus, the Ebers medical papyrus. If you want to know more on that, go check out our episode on, like, rub some poop on it. But, yeah, you've been warned. Um, that episode contains material, uh, describing ways that people used to use poop. And one of them was to rub it onto and into your human body. You've been warned. So soap is a thing primarily made with animal fats
and ash or salts. But it wasn't until the Romans that, according to the Romans, the Romans began to call soap soap pliny the Elder, which, in case you didn't know, Pliny the Elder is an excellent dungeons and dragons name, if it weren't already just a real person. Can you believe that Pliny the elder is a real person? It's true. And Pliny wrote in his historian Naturalis about Sappo, which he says was
the first time the word was used. It was called sappo, roughly translated, and big leap here, uh, it means soap. Now, Sapo was a name of a mountain in Rome. And here's the deal. Pliny, if I may, Pliny, it wasn't probably real. And if it was, archaeology has not been able to locate this mountain in the degree to which Pliny describes
it. And also, uh, archaeology has just proven Pliny mega wrong, because in old Pliny's account of the invention and naming of soap, it was on the slopes of Mount Sappo. So Mount Sappo was a place in his retelling where people would go to offer animal sacrifices. Now, I grew up, uh, in a religious system and in a culture that didn't do animal sacrifices, but it was talked about in the context of scripture, in the Bible and stuff. And so I take for granted that this was a
facet. Um, but essentially, if animal sacrifices, there used to be this belief that cultures would need to appease a God or gods, and to do so, you would offer sacrifice and to either make things right or whatever. And so in the story, Mount Sappo would have been the hill on which they did this. They would have gone up to the summit of Mount Sappo to offer these sacrifices.
This act was a pretty common thing to go up on a mountain or up on a high place to do this, the sacrifices and the mixing of, you guessed it, ash and animal fats was drained off, settled into clay beds where nearby people would clean their clothes. And they noticed that things in this area got a little cleaner.
So here's the deal. This is Pliny's version, uh, of this is full of hot air, because first, most Romans took the meat and fat of the animals for themselves and burned the portions that were not usable. So as a result, this would have produced little to no tallow or animal fat byproduct, and as a further result, very little soap. Also, as I noted, Mount Sappo, very likely not even real. And third nail in this coffin for you there. Pliny. Archaeology has shown that this.
If Rome was trying to claim credit for this, that Defoe took credit for something that the Babylonians were using and had come up with also Sappo. The place in Rome is not even where the word soap actually comes from. It's true, however, the Romans did use soap primarily for cleaning instruments and dishes, much like their egyptian and babylonian predecessors.
They may have even tried to use some soap on that ye oldie communal wiping wand that Dave so graciously yoinked down his backside and then passed off to the next guy. You know, shared wiping sticks probably didn't lend to health and well being, and that's all you need to know. The Romans also began using an extra compound in their soap urine. We discussed that already, and again, it's weird. The term actually has. The term soap actually has germanic or celtic origins from the word saipo or sipo.
The Celts would mix plant ash and animal fat together for the saves and to clean things with these savs. As time moved into the middle and dark ages, there was this pendulum swing away from the cleanliness practices found in antiquity. And as such things got both stinky and dirty. Soap would be used primarily for dishes and instruments as a way to clean, and sometimes to be used in medicine for cleaning wounds.
However, this, coupled with the fact that at the time, uh, animal fats were costly and other plant fats could not be found in some parts of the world. As such, soap making became somewhat of a trade, with there being monopoly on soaps in certain areas. At one point in Europe, there were so many trees harvested for the production of ash for the soaps, that the following winter, they had chopped down and burned so many trees out of season that the area, the people in this area, almost
froze to death. But at least their hands and bowls were super clean. Can you imagine being an archaeologist who has to give that report? What's the cause of death? Uh, they froze to death, but, my goodness, their bowls were. Know, soap making has its start in Italy, France, and Spain. Uh, note that these are where those natural like plant with fatty oil resources, um, are more plentiful by way of lots of oil producing plants. Again, for most, making your soap was one of the many household chores
of the early thousands. Into the 16 and 17 hundreds, the traditional practices of animal or plant fats mixed with ash and salt were used. You'd wake up for the day, and on the list of chores would be to render ash and mix with rendered animal and plant fats to make soap for your household use. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. You know what I'm saying? Like, if that clean stuff, uh, why change it? And the answer is, sometimes what isn't broke is worth making
better. And that's just what french chemist Nicholas Leblanc did. Nicholas Leblanc was the son of a director of an ironworks company, and he was educated, um, under. He received medical education, and about 1780, he became a private surgeon. And five years prior to this, he was offered a prize for the process to convert salt into soda ash. Extracted at the time by crude methods from wood or seaweed ash. Soda ash was used again in making, in our purposes today,
soap. And so if those soap industries and others that relied on this ash were to expand, a cheaper process was needed. So in LeBlanc's process, salt was treated with sulfuric acid. Here we are. Chemistry lesson again this week. Um, they're going to start calling me pig sty, the chemist dude. To obtain. So they mix salt with sulfuric acid. Son of a gun. To obtain salt cake, which is
sodium sulfate. This salt cake, which could be an excellent thing to call somebody after they've eaten any amount of taco bell salt cake. It's roasted with limestone or chalk and coal to produce black ash, which consisted primarily of sodium carbonate and calcium sulfite. The sodium carbonate was dissolved in water and then later crystallized. This process was simple, cheap, and direct. The trifecta of money making goodness. But the French Revolution had begun.
So Leblanc completes his experiments in the 1790s, and he never received the prize. Uh, and the National assembly awarded him a 15 year patent, but confiscated the patent and the factory with barely any compensation. So Napoleon returned the factory in about 1800. But Leblanc was never able to raise enough money to reopen it. And he, uh, took his own life years later. But his development of soda ash, though he was never properly awarded or recognized
in his time for it. This development would go on to change the way that we make soap. What once relied on right location and resources and burning wood could now be made from salt and a simple chemical reaction. And as such, the cost to make soap decreased and the demand of soap increased. And if you're an economist, you know that that means one thing. You're fixing to make yourself some money. Upon its commercial success, soap was viewed as a luxury item and heavily
taxed. However, as folks began to take a new look at cleanliness in the 18 hundreds, it began to be more widely viewed as a hygiene item. Can you imagine prior to that, being viewed as some fancy lad, bourgeoisie boy, because you use soap like, for goodness sakes, in these early days of like, from now on, tell yourself you're fancy and just soap up, kids. Just lather it right up. But in these days of soap production, a household name came into being.
A, uh, lad by the name of William Proctor. And who was a local candle maker. And his friend, or at least business partner, James Gamble, a soap maker, went into business together to form what was called Procter gamble, or p g. The taxes that I mentioned began to be levied on the sale of soap. Were so significant at the time that the people began to lock up their soap for fear of it being stolen.
It's estimated taxes generated from soap during those days are an equivalent amount to the taxes rendered from liquor tax today. As procter and gamble, these local household names began to develop. And into the 1850s, these advancements would bring soap to be one of America's leading industries. Factories in the mass production assembly line grew and developed and business was booming. And at the end, uh, so you have these procter and gamble lads at the end of the 18
hundreds. A few years after them, America con artist, gangster and crime boss Jefferson Randolph Smith earned the nickname Soapy after cleaning up big time with his prize soap cell. Con. It was a simple crime, and it was designed to swindle vulnerable passersby by. By wrapping bars of soaps in notes of, uh, varying denominations, covering them with plain paper, depending, to mix them in with bars devoid of any money. And then selling off these ladder bars at an inflated
price. While maintaining the facade that some of the packages contain money. So he essentially was trying to put like money inside the soap bars to convince people to buy them and scamming them all the same. In reality, it was the only member of Smith's notorious soap gang, strategically planted in the crowd to masquerade as honest, ordinary folks who received the money for purpose of diminishing potential suspicion. It's a classic
plant. He's got his cronies, and they're the ones that are walking away with the soap filled with cash to get other people to spend astronomical amounts of money on these bars of soap in order to hopefully get some sort of willy Wonka golden $40 bill inside their soap bar. Like, come on. Frankly, yeah. Unfortunately, his reputation grew on his crimes became more violent. Um, but if soapy Randolph Smith had just kept to this soap scam that's on these people, you don't do a game on the street.
That's just. Jeez. As the turn of the century happened into the 19 hundreds, uh, World War I brought a shortage of access to animal and plant fats, primarily due to the effects of war on the land, as well as people's ability to obtain those. But as a result, soap makers and manufacturers had to begin to synthetically produce oils and other things they needed to make soap. We have solved the problem of
ash. We no longer have to burn big tree to get ash, but now we're having a problem of all those fatty liquids, oils. Germany didn't have access to these things. And the synthesized products they produced at this time would go on to be used to make soap. Except it technically wasn't soap, because what they produced was technically called detergent.
And with the advent of detergents, as the world wars came to an end, many factories were converted to the further research, development, and production of these cleaning products. Like they had to figure out how to make many more of them more biodegradable. As time went on, more and more research was done in development to produce
fluid detergents. One of the companies that benefited greatly from these breakthroughs, and in addition of factory space, was the previously mentioned Procter and Gamble, who is still very much in business today. This company, in the 1950s, sponsored a daytime television drama, the genre of which became known as a soap opera. This new liquid detergent based soap was strange looking and could cost more to produce. And they began to produce
it. But another soap enthusiast was on the horizon to change soap as well. Robert Ridgley Taylor developed a thickened, pumped hand soap called creamed soap on tap. Now, my goodness, if I went to the Walmart or the Fred Meyer old Freddy's, and I walked down the soap aisle, and instead of calling it just soap or whatever they called it, they called it creamed soap on tap. You know, I'd buy one. Creamed soap on tap. This creamed soap on tap was a luxury item and hugely popular.
And so this creamed soap on tap, this thickened soapy mixture, is what has become used in most liquid soap and shower and hand soap friends. But here's the catch 47 of the whole thing. It's actually detergent. Soap is defined as a substance used with water for washing and cleaning. Made of a compound of natural oils or fats with sodium hydroxide or another strong alkali. The presence of animal or other naturally occurring oils seems to be, or maybe
even synthetic oils. I'll give you that. But it seems to be a requirement for it to be called soap. Detergent is a water soluble cleansing agent which combines with the impurities and dirt to make them more soluble along with the water, and differs from soap in that it does not form a scum with the salts and hard water deposits it interacts with. So here's the
deal. We use detergent because it is water soluble and reacts with the bad stuff when exposed to water, whereas soap is reacting to the water and helps move the bad stuff away. So detergent actually interacts with the physical grime on your hand, whereas water reacts, or, uh, soap reacts with water to help loosen that stuff,
but does not break it down. And so when they move it away, soap naturally then hardens and forms a scum that contains disinfect, that contains those things that once contaminated the surface, the soap gets covered with a layer of filth, and that's that nonsense. If you're using barred soap, that's the nonsense that gets left inside your shower ledge. It's not just soap. It's all of the freaky dudes that have been hanging out in your armpits and
your leg crevices. And now they have convalesced into a gelatinous pile of filth, and they're becoming like flubber. They're going to start moving, and they're going to start becoming more powerful if they build up. Soap is causing buildup. And so, to the age old question. If you drop a bar of soap in the bathtub, technically based on how soap works, the soap with that layer of buildup on the outside would make the bathtub, and as a result, the bar of
soap more dirty. And now, you know, because soap reacts with water, detergent is dissolved in water. And so most soap found in your bathroom, if it is liquid or creamed soap on tap, it is most likely a, uh, derivative of detergent. It's kind of like you are the laundry. And the way, you know is when you wash it, does it dissolve in water or does it just kind of like, loosey goosey with the water? That's how you know soap has a
weird history. And as with most things that have to do with hygiene and cleaning, it has ties to religious practice. Except what's interesting is that the history of soap seems to be a byproduct, or, if you will, a buildup left over from those religious practices, one used in cleaning. And that would later produce a different buildup for us to love or hate. Make sure you wash your hands, folks. Use some soap. This brings us to the end of another episode of
privy. Thank you all so much for listening. Uh, we're thankful that you're here. Just a reminder, we would love for, uh, you to submit another review, uh, on Apple podcasts. I, uh, know that Spotify, uh, has the review option. Feel free to leave us a review there. Um, five star options are preferred, and we thank you for that. Um, unfortunately, Spotify doesn't have a
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Connect with us on social media. We are at Privycast. Wherever social media is found, things are getting kind of wild and popping off over there. So, uh, yeah, join us there. We'd love for you to do that. As always, we want to thank Kevin McLeod for the use of barroom ballet as our intro and outro music. You can find Kevin's music at, uh, incompetent.com, and his music is licensed under Creative Commons license Attribution 40. Thanks, Kevin. This has been another episode of Privy. Thank you
all so much for joining us and listening. You mean a lot. We love you all. And now, as always, don't forget to flush you. Thank you.