Humans have instinctively discovered for a long time that clothes can be cleaned again after being washed with clear water. The oldest known laundry record appeared on murals of ancient Egyptian tombs, about 2000 BC.
In ancient China, working people often used the pestle to wash clothes, also known as the pestle anvil. It is made of wood, shaped like a baseball bat and about 30 cm long. When slapping clothes, dirt is carried out by water through the power of pestle. Therefore, washing clothes was called "smashing clothes" in ancient China.
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2. plant ash became the earliest "washing powder"
"Book of Rites" says: "The crown is dirty and the ash is clear." It means that the strap of the hat is dirty. Wash it with plant ash. This is because potassium carbonate in plant ash can remove oil pollution.
During this period, in addition to plant ash, people also used animal oil, vegetable oil, saponin and alkali salt to clean clothes. In the Han dynasty, people already knew to wash clothes with natural caustic soda. In the Jin Dynasty, starch and spices were added to caustic soda to make ingots for sale. At the end of the Ming Dynasty, there was a shop specializing in selling artificial perfume in Beijing.
3. The era of chemical synthesis laundry
From the development history, chemical synthetic laundry detergent is mainly divided into three generations. Laundry soap is the first generation of laundry detergent, washing powder is the second generation, laundry detergent is the third generation, and aerobic washing is the fourth generation.
Laundry soap: Early soap was a luxury. It was not until 179 1 that Lubran, a French chemist, succeeded in producing caustic soda cheaply from electrolytic salt. Since then, the ancient method of making caustic soda with plant ash has ended, and it has become a daily necessity for ordinary people.
Washing powder: 1907 Henkel first discovered washing powder with borate and silicic acid as the main raw materials, and the cleaning effect at this time was not as good as that of soap. After 1950, people found a suitable additive-sodium tripolyphosphate, which greatly improved the decontamination ability of synthetic detergent, namely washing powder, and since then washing powder has developed by leaps and bounds.
Laundry liquid: Laundry liquid is a new generation of fabric washing products, which only appeared in the 1980s. It can be divided into structured and unstructured categories. The formula of laundry detergent is much softer than washing powder. The most important thing is that it doesn't hurt hands, and there is little liquid left in clothes, which is very popular with housewives.
Aerobic washing: Aerobic washing is a new cleaning method at present, and it is an environmentally friendly cleaning method that decomposes various stains with new ecological oxygen, which is essentially different from traditional cleaning methods such as soap, washing powder and laundry detergent.
The decontamination principle of traditional washing products is to combine grease or surfactant with stains by "physical pulling" and then peel off clothes. This method of pulling through hydrophilic groups and lipophilic groups will inevitably lead to the aggregation of stain molecules, which will become hard and yellow after being displayed on the fabric for a long time.
Aerobic washing is a "chemical process", and its decontamination principle is: using oxygen to destroy the molecular chain of stains, breaking the stains into small molecules soluble in water, and the stains no longer exist.
It is precisely because of the unique decontamination principle of aerobic washing that people can free their hands without rubbing when using aerobic washing products.