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 Soap Making History  Soap has been known for at least 2300 years. Indeed some authorities suggest that the Phoenician made soap in 600 B.C. and used it as an article of barter with the Gauls. It was prepared from goat’s tallow and wood ash. In the period of Roman Empire the use of soap became quite popular. They produce soap from animal fats and plant ashes which served as alkali .they gave this product the name “saipo” from which the word “soap” is derived.
The importance of soap as a means of washing and cleaning does not seem to have been recognized until the second century, it is the Greek physician Galen who mentioned soap as a medicament and means of cleansing the body. About 800 A.D the celebrated Arab chemist Jabir Ibn Hayyan the father of chemistry repeatedly mentions soap as an active means of cleansing in his writing.
Italy, Spain and France were early centers of soap manufacturing, due to their ready supply of raw material such as oil from olive trees. The first English soap maker probably lived at the end of the 12th century in Bristol. In the 13th and 14th centuries a small community of soap makers grew up in the neighborhood of London. In those days the soap makers had to pay a duty on every ton of soap they produced .After the Napoleonic wars the tax was as high as three pence on every pound of soap, and the soap boiler pans were fitted with lids that could be locked every night by the tax collector in order to prevent production under cover of darkness. It was not until 1853 that this high tax was finally abolished.
On the eve of French revolution the production of soap from Marseilles had already reached the figure of 3500 tons per year produced by thirty four small factories. Trademarks on the pieces of soap and on the packing cases date from the end of 18th. From this time onward the Marseilles industry began to export (chiefly to America) quantities of soap.
In the earlier times Marseilles soap was produced mainly from olive oil. In the time of restoration, about 1815, a number of poor olive harvests hampered the Marseilles soap industry, which had to look for other oils soap production .Soap makers were induced to use more and more seed oil, and the parallel development of steam navigation and improvements in colonial ports could provide oils in increasing quantities each year. This had the effect of changing the soap formulas.
A major step toward large –scale commercial soap making occurred in 1791 when a French chemist, Nicolas Leblanc, patented a process for
making soda, or sodium carbonate, from common salt. Soda ash is the alkali obtained from ashes that combines whit fat to form soap .The Leblanc process yielded quantities of good quality, inexpensive soda ash.
The science of modern soap making was improved 30 years later with the discovery by Michel Uegence Chevreul, another French chemist, of the chemical nature
and relationship of fats, glycerin and fatty acids. He proved that the process of saponification is the chemical process of splitting fat into the alkali salt of fatty acids (that is soap) and glycerin.
Many other developments of a technical nature also had a great influence on the industry as a whole:
• Introduction of rosin in the soap kettle about 1850
• The use of sodium silicate in England about 1870
• The hydrogenation of oil to suitable soap making fats early 19th century
• Technical development during world war I

Scientific discoveries together with the development of power to operate factories, made soap making one of the fastest growing industries by 1850. At the same time its broad availability changed soap from a luxury item to an everyday necessity.