THE TIDE TURNS FOR SOAP

by David M. Kiefer

It was heralded as a "washday miracle." That may have been, indeed, no more than a bit of promotional hyperbole. Nevertheless, a new product launched fifty years ago did, in fact, have a profound effect on the way housewives handled their laundry. At the same time, it had a marked impact on the chemical industry.

During its peak growth years immediately following World War II, the chemical industry owed much of its success to making products that improved on and replaced long-established materials sold by other industries: metals with plastics, natural fibers with synthetics, natural rubber with synthetic, paper products with plastic packaging, and the like. Probably there is no more dramatic example than the way synthetic detergents rapidly captured a market long dominated by soap. Companies making soap started with such basic raw materials as tallow or vegetable oils. By offering synthetic detergents (syndets), chemical producers won an intermediary role as suppliers of petroleum-based ingredients such as alkyl benzene sulfonates (ABS).

In October 1946, Procter & Gamble (P&G), the leading US producer of soap products, introduced into six test markets a product named Tide for heavy-duty washing. It was the first such laundry product to be formulated with synthetic surface-active agents. A far-reaching, $21 million marketing campaign accompanied the rollout; advertising trumpeted the "washday miracle of Procter & Gamble's wartime research," with its "oceans of suds." The slogan, "Tide's In, Dirt's Out" soon echoed from radios and television sets (which were still uncommon in those days). Tide was entered into direct competition with many long-established soap powders and flakes, such as Lever Brothers' Rinso, Fels Naptha, and P&G's own Oxydol, Duz, and Chipso.

The time was ripe. Soap prices were high because of a postwar shortage of raw materials. The new product was especially suited to the automatic washers that were just appearing on the market to replace washboards and wringer washers. The new syndet also had several advantages. It did not combine with the calcium and magnesium ions found in hard water to form an insoluble curd that turned clothes gray or yellow, spot dishes, or leave an ugly ring around bathtubs. It was easier to rinse from clothes or dishware. It formed more suds, even in cool water, and housewives tended to equate suds with cleaning power. Not to be overlooked were the advertising opportunities offered, in a cutthroat competitive market, by a brand new product.

Tide hit the market running. Demand was so great, in fact, that P&G did not have enough manufacturing capacity to distribute it nationwide until 1949. Then, it soon captured nearly a 30 percent slice of laundry product sales.

Tide was not the first synthetic detergent, to be sure. Short-chain alkyl naphthalene sulfonates were developed when Germany was faced with a shortage of fats during World War I. They were not very effective. In the late 1920s, German chemists also synthsized long-chain fatty alcohol sulfates for use as detergents. DuPont began producing similar materials at Deepwater, NJ, by 1933. In the same year, P&G introduced Dreft, a syndet-based product for washing slightly soiled fabrics such as silk, linen, or wool. The following year it brought out Drene, a synthetic hair shampoo.

During the mid-1930s, alkyl aryl sulfonates were first produced in the US by the National Aniline subsidiary of Allied Chemical & Dye (now AlliedSignal). They would prove to be the workhorse raw material for syndets. Initially, they were used primarily in industrial applications, such as textile finishing and dyeing. During World War II, the US armed forces formulated an all-purpose laundry syndet that could be used even in salt water. In 1940, however, only about 30,000 pounds of synthetic detergents were produced in the US — a negligible amount compared with the 3.2 million pounds of soap products made that year.

Tide changed all that. Although one soaper (as members of the industry refer to themselves) was heard to complain in 1947 that "we've been dragged into this. It is certainly too bad we could not have been left alone to market 'good old soap,'" hundreds of companies were making or marketing syndets by 1948. US output that year soared to 400,000 pounds, nearly three times what had been turned out three years earlier. Soap production, meanwhile, had begun a steady decline from the highs of close to 4 million pounds a year in the mid-1940s. Syndet output topped 1 million pounds by 1950 and reached 2 million pounds by 1953, when it exceeded soap for the first time. When syndet production reached 4 million pounds in 1960, soapmaking had fallen to just under 1 million pounds, most of it for hand bars.

Soap had long been the dominant substance for washing. A mixture of fatty acid salts, obtained by reacting glycerides from animal fats (tallow) or vegetable oils with an alkali, it had been known from antiquity. The Roman author Pliny described making soap by boiling goat tallow with causticized wood ashes. Until about 1,000 years ago, however, it was a luxury used largely as a cosmetic or a medicine. Clothes were washed by beating, stomping, or rubbing them in water. Not until the 1790s, when the French chemist Nicolas LeBlanc invented a process based on chalk, salt, sulfuric acid, and coal for making soda ash (sodium carbonate), did an adequate source of relatively low-cost alkali for saponifying fats become available, and thus soap became common. Even then, in many rural areas such as the American frontier, soap continued to be produced largely at home from meat fats and lye leached from wood ashes.

Soapmaking was a thriving business by the early nineteenth century. P&G was founded in 1837 in Cincinnati by two young immigrants, William Procter from London and James Gamble from Ireland, who found the city's booming hog-butchering trade an ample source of raw material. It had been preceded in New York City by the company now known as Colgate-Palmolive — P&G's long-time arch rival — formed by William Colgate in 1806.

One of P&G's most notable developments took place in 1879, when a worker absentmindedly left his mixer running during during his lunch break, thereby incorporating more air than usual into the batch. The company originally considered scrapping the mixture, but then decided to be thrifty and ship it. After customers began to clamor for "the floating soap," P&G concluded it had inadvertently stumbled onto an effective promotional gimmick — Ivory soap. The twentieth century brought several advances by the soapers. The advent of washing machines led to the introduction of soap chips and flakes and, in the 1920s, to the development of spray drying for making powders, which were more effective for laundering.

The syndet's road to dominance in the laundry field was not without a few detours. In 1947, a couple of days after samples of a new laundry product were distributed door to door in the small residential town of Mt. Penn, near Reading, PA, the local sewage plant was engulfed with foam, a problem that continued for about a month. It was a transitory event but a harbinger of things to come. During the next few years, foam more and more frequently enveloped sewage plants, floated on the top of streams, or was visible in water from faucets. Although not toxic, it was decidedly unsightly — and even a threat to river navigation. At one time a wall of foam thirty-five feet wide, 300 feet long, and fifteen feet high was reported on the upper Mississippi River.

The foam resulted because microorganisms in sewage plants or living in streams or the soil find the ABS molecule, unlike soap, highly indigestible. Its alkyl chain typically is a nonbiodegradable, highly-branched propylene tetramer. Public concern grew to the point that, by the early 1960s, legislation was being considered to curtail, if not ban, nonbiodegradable detergents. Before it was enacted, US detergent manufacturers voluntarily agreed to replace the branched-chain ABS with a molecule having a long straight or linear alkyl chain. Petrochemical producers began making linear alkyl sulfonate (LAS) in 1964, and by mid-1965 the switch to LAS was complete, at an estimated cost of $150 million.

Soon, though, a less tractable problem raised concern. Packaged syndets contain, in addition to a surface-active agent such as LAS or sulfated fatty alcohol, chemicals called builders. These improve detergency by softening water and making it more alkaline and by inhibiting the redeposition of soil once it has been washed off. A typical laundry powder might contain 20-25 percent surface-active agent and 30-35 percent builder. The most commonly used builders initially were sodium tripolyphosphate and tetrasodium pyrophosphate. Phosphates, however, feed the growth of algae in streams and ponds. The resulting overfertilization or eutrophication increasingly became a problem in the late 1960s. Detergent companies, faced with legislation to ban phosphate-containing laundry products, sought a more benign replacement.

One of the first they came up with was nitritriacetic acid (NTA), which tests showed performed as well as the phosphate builders. NTA began to be substituted for phosphates in early 1970. Later that year, however, questions arose that it might be a health hazard, in part because it formed chelates with such heavy metals as mercury and cadmium. Although tests were inconclusive, the detergent industry decided to withdraw NTA at the end of 1970. Other builders have been introduced for detergents, such as zeolites, sodium citrate, sodium carbonate, and sodium silicates; but the phosphate builders continue to be widely used.

Another aborted product change took place in the late 1960s, when detergent companies started to mix enzymes in with their laundry products. These types of detergents were aggressively promoted as a way to remove protein and fat stains; such as blood, grass, lipstick, or chocolate; that resisted the other laundry methods. By 1970, sales of enzyme-containing detergents approached $1 billion. But again, questions arose regarding health hazards, ranging from dermatitis and allergies to cancer. At the same time, the Federal Trade Commission began investigating allegations that enzymes were nowhere near as effective as advertising claims indicated. Adverse public opinion and charges of false advertising led the major detergent makers to throw in the towel and remove the controversial substances from most of their products in 1971, although later that year a report from the National Academy of Sciences found that enzymes in detergents posed no significant threat to the public.

Tide, meanwhile, after fifty years, continues to be the leading heavy-duty laundry detergent, still marketed in an orange-and-yellow box not unlike that in which it was introduced. Its share of the $4 billion market remains at close to 30 percent, about what it had when it first went nationwide in 1949. Tide has gone through many reformulations and over the years has spun off variations such as Liquid Tide in 1984, Tide with Bleach in 1988, and a more concentrated Ultra Tide in 1990. All the while, its promotional message has remained remarkably — and successfully — the same, not only in the US, but increasingly worldwide.

There is a history of soapmaking at Redgum Soaps website. They even have a few recipes for making your own soap.