Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (29 page)

Linoleum: 1860, England

We tend to take decorative and protective floor coverings in the home for granted; few people, except by choice or poverty, walk on bare boards. But if we examine paintings, drawings, and the written record back to as recently as the middle of the eighteenth century, it becomes apparent that except in the wealthiest of homes, families walked only on bare floors.

Carpets and rugs had of course existed for centuries. Mats made of dry stalks and tendrils covered the dirt and stone floors of Sumerian homes five thousand years ago. The Egyptians wove carpets of linen, ornamented by brightly colored sewn-on patches of wool. The Chinese perfected a knotted silk-pile carpet backed by cotton. And before the eighth century
B.C
., elaborately patterned Oriental carpets decorated the royal palaces of central and western Asia.

What did not exist until the 1860s was a cheap, hard-wearing, mass-produced, easy-to-clean floor covering. Specifically, one made from flax (
linum
in Latin) and oil (
oleum
). Today linoleum has been relegated largely to bathroom and kitchen floors, but that was not always its place in the home.

Inventors had been searching for an inexpensive floor covering. In 1847, Scottish chemist Michael Narin mixed oily paint with cork fibers and produced a slick linoleum-like product, but his process was lengthy and costly. Around the same time, British chemist Elijah Galloway cooked cork powder and shreds of rubber, which yielded a hard but somewhat sticky rubber flooring he named “kamptulicon.” In the 1860s, kamptulicon was laid in selected rooms of the British House of Parliament, but its cost and consistency could not compete with another British inventor’s creation. By oxidizing linseed oil with resin and cork dust on a flax backing, Frederick Walton produced history’s first successful synthetic floor covering, known then as a “resilient floor.”

A Briton had invented linoleum. But it took an American to introduce it into every room in the home.

In 1860, Frederick Walton obtained a British patent for his linoleum-making process. The same year, an industrious twenty-four-year-old American, Thomas Armstrong, decided to supplement his meager wages as a shipping clerk in a Pittsburgh glass plant by investing his savings of three hundred dollars in a machine that cut cork stoppers for bottles.

Shaving corks for various-size bottles generated huge mounds of cork dust, which the frugal Armstrong hated to waste. When he heard that a new floor covering, which was rapidly gaining in popularity in England, was manufactured from cork dust and often backed with sheets of cork, Armstrong revamped his business. By 1908, he was selling Armstrong linoleum. But unlike its forerunner, available in a few somber, solid colors, Armstrong linoleum offered home owners a spectrum of hues and patterns that rivaled those found in woven carpets. And unlike linoleum’s British inventor, who saw only the utilitarian side of his creation, Armstrong promoted his bright, cheery patterns as a way to “beautify the home.”

The “linoleum carpet,” as the wall-to-wall coverings were called, became the new desideratum for the modern American home. An early advertisement summed up both the manufacturer’s and the public’s sentiment: “In many of the finest homes, you will find linoleum in every room. Not gaudy oil cloth, but rich, polished linoleum carpets.”

Detergent: 1890s, Germany

All detergents are soaps, but not all soaps are detergents. That distinction is not trifling but paramount at a practical level to anyone who has, in a pinch, laundered clothes or washed his or her hair with a bar of hand soap.

Soap forms a precipitate in water that leaves a ring around the bathtub, a whitish residue on glassware, a sticky curd in the washing machine’s rinse water, and a dull, lusterless plaque on hair. Furthermore, clothes washed in ordinary soap often develop yellow stains when ironed.

These undesirable properties occur because soap, which has been in use for 3,500 years, reacts with minerals and acids naturally present in water to form insoluble molecules that refuse to be rinsed away. Synthetic detergents were specifically engineered in the 1890s to overcome this problem. They were first produced in quantity by the Germans during World War I. This was done for a practical, wartime reason: so that the precious fats that go into making ordinary soap could be used as lubricants for military vehicles and weapons.

A selection of medicinal and toilet soaps available in the nineteenth century. Soap changed little from Phoenician times until the invention of detergents
.

To understand the revolution caused by detergents, it is necessary to examine the evolution and importance of soap as a world commodity.

Soap has always been made with fats. The Phoenicians in 600
B.C
. concocted the world’s first soap by blending goat fat with wood ash. Inveterate traders who sailed the Mediterranean, the Phoenicians introduced soap to the Greeks and the Romans, and according to the Roman writer Pliny the Elder, sold it as a laxative to the Gauls.

Soap manufacturing was a flourishing business in eleventh-century Venice, and at one point in history the tax on soap was so high that people secretly manufactured their own bars in the darkness of night. The nineteenth-century German chemist Baron Justus von Liebig argued that the wealth of a nation and its degree of civilization could be measured by the quantity of soap it consumed.

It was during von Liebig’s time that the first commercial
cleanser
appeared. Adding to soap abrasive, nondissolving substances—something as fine as talc or chalk, or as coarse as pumice or ground quartz—produced an excellent scouring material. With a chick on the front of a red-and-yellow wrapper, Bon Ami, invented in 1886, became one of the most popular of the early heavy-duty cleansers.

Chemists by then had begun to unravel the mystery of how soap cleans. Soap is composed of molecules with two distinctly different arms: one arm “loves” to grasp onto water molecules, while the other arm “fears” water and latches onto molecules of dirt or grease. Thus, when rinse water is washed away, it takes with it dirt and grease. Chemists dubbed soap’s water-loving arm “hydrophilic” and its water-fearing arm “hydrophobic.” But soap’s preeminence as an all-purpose cleansing agent was about to be challenged.

In 1890, a German research chemist, A. Krafft, observed that certain short-chained molecules, themselves not soapy substances, when coupled with alcohol, lathered up like soap. Krafft had produced the world’s first detergent, but at that time the discovery excited no one and remained merely a chemical curiosity.

Then came World War I. The Allied blockade cut off Germany’s supply of natural fats used to manufacture lubricants. Soap’s fats were substituted, and soap itself became a scarce commodity in the country. Two German chemists, H. Gunther and M. Hetzer, recalled Krafft’s chemical curiosity and concocted the first commercial detergent, Nekal, which they believed would serve only as a wartime substitute for soap. But the detergent’s advantages over soap quickly became apparent. By 1930, much of the industrialized world was manufacturing a wide range of synthetic detergents that left no scum, no residue, and were far superior in many respects to soap.

A very popular all-purpose household detergent of that period was Spic-and-Span. Though a thoroughly modern product, it derived its name from a sixteenth-century Dutch expression used by sailors in speaking of a new ship:
Spiksplinternieuw
, meaning the ship was new in every spike and splinter of wood. The British later Anglicized the phrase to “Spick and Spannew,” and U.S. sailors Americanized it to “spic and span.” The sailor’s expression “spic and span” entered the vernacular once it became a trade name, and has since applied to anything spotlessly clean or brand new.

In 1946, the first successful clothes-washing detergent for the home debuted. Trade named Tide, it appeared just when every housewife in America was deciding she could not live without an automatic washing machine. Tide’s success was rapid and it became the forerunner of the many delicate detergents that would soon crowd supermarket shelves.

Whiteners and Brighteners
. Although it did not require arm-twisting advertising to convince homemakers that for many jobs detergent was superior to soap, one factor that helped launch early detergents was the addition of fluorescent brightening agents that were supposed to get a garment “whiter than white.”

It was another German chemist, Hans Krais, who in 1929 conceived the idea of combining tiny trace quantities of fluorescent substances, actually dyes, into detergents.

These chemicals enter a garment’s fibers during a wash and do not pull free during rinsing. They become part of the body of the fabric. And they produce their brightening magic through a simple chemical process. When the garment is worn in sunlight, the fluorescent substances convert the sun’s invisible ultraviolet rays into slightly bluish visible light. This causes the garment to reflect more light than it otherwise would. The net effect is that the garment appears brighter, though it is no cleaner.

Hans Krais recognized an additional advantage to the fluorescent chemicals. The tone of the extra light reflected from them lies toward the blue
side of the spectrum, and thus complements any natural yellowishness present in the fibers, making them look not only brighter but also whiter. The German chemical company I. G. Farben—which had manufactured Nekal—received the first patents for “optical brighteners” as well.

Detergents have by no means ousted soap from the field of personal hygiene, but in industrialized countries, consumption of detergents exceeds that of soaps three to one. Today the country with the highest per capita consumption of soap and detergents is the United States; it is followed closely by Switzerland and West Germany. The countries with the lowest soap consumption are Finland, Greece, and Ireland. (See also “Soap,” page 217.)

Chlorine Bleach: 1744, Sweden

From the earliest written records, there is evidence that people bleached their clothing five thousand years ago, although the process was tedious and protracted and required considerable space—often entire fields, where clothes were laid out in the sun to whiten and dry.

The Egyptians, in 3000
B.C
., produced—and highly prized—white linen goods; the naturally brownish fabric was soaked in harsh alkaline lyes. Timing was critical to prevent the garment from decomposing into shreds.

In the thirteenth century, the Dutch emerged as the leading exponents of the bleaching craft, retaining a near monopoly of the industry until the eighteenth century. Most European fabric that was to be used in making white garments was first sent to Holland to be bleached. The Dutch method was only slightly more sophisticated than the one employed by the ancient Egyptians.

Dutch dyers soaked fabric in alkaline lyes for up to five days. They then washed it clean and spread it on the ground to dry and sun-fade for two to three weeks. The entire process was repeated five or six times; then, to permanently halt the “eating” effect of the alkaline lye, the chemical was neutralized by soaking the fabric in a bath of buttermilk or sour milk, both being acidic. The complete process occupied entire fields and ran on for several months.

By the early eighteenth century, the British were bleaching bolts of fabric themselves. The only real difference in their method was that dilute sulfuric acid was substituted for buttermilk. A new and simple chemical bleaching compound was needed and many chemists attempted to produce it. In 1774, Swedish researcher Karl Wilhelm Scheel found the base chemical when he discovered chlorine gas, but it took another chemist, Count Claude Louis Berthollet, who two decades later would be appointed scientific adviser to Napoleon, to realize that the gas dissolved in water to produce a powerful bleach.

In 1785, Berthollet announced the creation of
eau de Javel
, a pungent solution he perfected by passing chlorine gas through a mixture of lime,
potash, and water. But
eau de Javel
was never bottled and sold; instead, every professional bleacher of that era had to combine his own ingredients from scratch, and the chlorine gas was highly irritating to the tissues of the eyes, nose, and lungs. Bleaching now required less time and space, but it involved an occupational hazard.

The situation was improved in 1799. A Scottish chemist from Glasgow, Charles Tennant, discovered a way to transform
eau de Javel
into a dry powder, ushering in the era of bleaching powders that could simply be poured into a wash. The powders not only revolutionized the bleaching industry; they also transformed ordinary writing paper: For centuries it had been a muddy yellowish-brown in color; Tennant’s chlorine bleach produced the first pure-white sheets of paper. By 1830, Britain alone was producing 1,500 tons of powdered bleach a year. Whites had never been whiter.

Glass Window:
A.D
. 600, Germany