The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [85]
Toilet soap and advertising grew up together. Both had existed in some form for centuries, but they emerged as mainstream, large-scale businesses at the end of the nineteenth century. In the case of soap, the new germ theory helped its popularity, although it took decades for the discovery of disease—causing microbes to percolate down to ordinary consumers. In fact, even sanitarians and public health experts were surprisingly reluctant to abandon the traditional belief that disease spread through decaying matter and bad smells. When the Viennese doctor Ignaz Semmelweis insisted that delivery room doctors and medical students wash their hands before attending their patients, he was ridiculed, even though the practice dramatically reduced death from puerperal sepsis. In 1865, when Semmelweis died, his simple but radical idea was still discounted. Only after Robert Koch in Germany and Louis Pasteur in France advanced the germ theory in the 1870s and ’80s was the work of Semmelweis and other hygienic pioneers, such as Joseph Lister of Glasgow, taken seriously by scientists. Even so, many public health administrators, doctors and visiting nurses continued to preach the old miasma theory, which concentrated on garbage, drains and ventilation. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the germ or contagionism theory had triumphed—a revolutionary concept but, until sulfa and antibiotics were developed in the 1930s and ’40s, a terrifying prospect. Almost the only way to fight microbes was by washing them off. As cleaning the body became more widespread and people began using soap as well as water, manufacturers on both sides of the Atlantic laboured to produced an affordable, gentle soap from vegetable oils.
HYGIENIC CRUELTY
In 1931, halitosis was cited as grounds for divorce.
Procter & Gamble, in Cincinnati, was typical, experimenting for years with various formulas involving palm oil, cottonseed oil and coconut oil. Finally, in 1878, the researchers had a recipe that pleased them, to be called P&G White Soap. Luckily for Procter & Gamble, Harley Procter, the company’s sales manager, declared the new name stunningly unappealing. One Sunday, at Mount Auburn Episcopal Church, he listened to the minister read from Psalm 45: “All thy garments smell like myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of the ivory palaces, whereby they have made thee glad.” Inspired, he christened the new hard, white soap Ivory.
A year later, Procter & Gamble had another piece of good fortune, when a worker left the new soap’s steam—powered mixing machine unattended for too long. The overflowing lather that resulted was presumed to be useless, but when hardened and cut into cakes, not only did it clean, but it floated. Thus was born Ivory’s enduring catchphrase, “It floats!” Together with its name and its other slogan, “99 and 44/100% pure,” it promised an airy, immaculate product.
KEEPING UP WITH THE EISENHOWERS
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the middle-class American family living in a large town or city either had a modern bathroom or expected to have one soon. The house of Ida and David Eisenhower, in Abilene, Kansas, was typical. Built in 1887 with six rooms, it had no bathroom. The Eisenhowers and their six sons (the third was Dwight, the future president) bathed in a galvanized washtub in the kitchen, several sharing the same water. In 1908, Abilene introduced a municipal water system, and the Eisenhowers converted a small bedroom into a three-piece bathroom, although water for the bath still had to be heated on the kitchen stove. In 1919, the installation of a gas hot-water heater made that