soap and balm shoppe

Who said, "true glory consists of doing what deserves to be written, and writing what
deserves to be read"? If you guessed Pliny the Elder (AD 23 to AD 79) you'd be correct. He
was also the first European to write about soap making. Ah, but do not fret, people did
bathe before the first century AD. In fact the Ebers Papyrus from 1500 BC describes mixing
animal fats and oils plus alkaline salts to form soap. This was recommended for skin
diseases as well as washing. The Romans loved to bath in their luxurious baths. Bathing
did decline after the fall of the Roman Empire, and no doubt contributed to the plagues of
the Middle Ages, including the Black Death of the 14th century. The soap making guilds of
these and later centuries guarded their recipes. Soap making was started in the 12th
century in England and was heavily taxed as a luxury well into the 19th century.
Commercial soap making in America started in 1608 with the arrival of several soap makers
from England on the second English ship to arrive a Jamestown, Virginia. However, most
soap making remained essentially a household chore.

William Hesketh Lever and his brother , sons of a wholesale grocer in Bolton, bought a small
soap works in Warrington, England in 1885. Using vegetable oils like palm oil, rather than
tallow, to manufacture soap and glycerin, they produced a good, free-lathering soap which
proved popular. By the mid-20th century soap manufacture in Britain had been substantially
consolidated by Lever Brothers into a modern, large-scale manufacturing industry. William
Hesketh Lever, the first Lord Leverhulme, died in 1925.

William Procter, a candlemaker, and James Gamble, a soapmaker, formed the company
known as Procter & Gamble in 1837. The two men, immigrants from England and Ireland
respectively, who had settled earlier in Cincinnati might never have met, had they not married
sisters, Olivia and Elizabeth Norris. The company prospered during the nineteenth century. In
1859, sales reached one million dollars. By this point, approximately eighty employees
worked for Procter & Gamble. During the American Civil War, the company won contracts to
supply the Union Army with soap and candles. Over time, the company began to focus most
of its attention on soap, producing more than thirty different types by the 1890s. As electricity
became more and more common, there was less need for the candles that Procter & Gamble
had made since its inception. Ultimately, the company chose to stop manufacturing candles
in 1920. Throughout the twentieth century, Procter & Gamble continued to prosper. The
company introduced Tide laundry detergent in 1946 and "Prell" shampoo in 1950. In 1955,
Procter & Gamble began selling the first toothpaste to contain fluoride, known as "Crest".