This week, Breanne, our Registrar, unboxed a whole assortment of “whites” (literally just things made out of white fabric) so that we could hang them in the Augustine Room. There was an assortment of garments including a variety of nightgowns (which we will discuss more shortly), a heavily starched tuxedo shirt, and some nursing uniforms from McKellar Hospital, among others. All of these white garments in one place made me ask - how did people in the past keep whites white?
The concept of bleach as a whitening agent or a whitening process was invented as long ago as 5000 BC when Egyptians discovered that if they washed their fabrics and left them outside, the sun would bleach them white. Raw linen, cotton, and wool fibers were not naturally white but required some sort of bleaching process to remove the natural off-white or yellowish tinge that was present in newly woven fabrics. This system of sun bleaching was used during the textile production process for centuries and in Great Britain, large patches of grass used specifically for the bleaching of fabric could be found in mill towns and were referred to as bleachfields or bleaching greens. The process took a long time but by laying a length of washed fabric out in the sun on a grassy patch for four to eight weeks a dazzling white was achievable.
Another process that was used primarily for woolen fabrics was fulling. This process was used as far back as the Roman era and continued into and beyond the medieval period. One form of the process required woolen fabric to be squashed and worked by Roman slaves in a tub ankle full of urine. The ammonia salts in the stale urine, called wash, were so important to the fulling process which would result in thicker and whiter fabrics that it was collected by fullers and launderers from public urinals. So much urine was collected for its various uses that eventually a tax was placed on the collection of the substance for commercial use. Urine continued to be used by commercial and home textile producers and launderers for centuries as a method of whitening fabrics.
For hundreds of years, the commercial bleaching of fabrics was separate from the laundering process although there were plenty of home remedies to remove stains and odors from garments. In the medieval period, typically, it was the underclothes that would receive these types of treatments as they were worn close to the body underneath the outer clothes to prevent sweat and grime rubbing off onto the finer outer fabrics. Usually, an individual with some social status would have enough underclothes to last about a month with a few repeated wears or perfuming between washing. As launderers were still waiting on the invention of chemical bleach they used a variety of substances including lye, soda, ox gallum, allum, vinegar, and lemon juice along with plenty of pounding and scrubbing to remove stains from white clothing. Clothes were also hung to dry outside so that the sun could work at least some of its bleaching magic.
Most laundry processes for many hundreds of years required boiling water and plenty of scrubbing to loosen stains and odors. Even up into the Victorian times, laundry was a difficult and multi-step project. Instructions suggested leaving clothes to soak in water overnight and to follow up the next day by using soap (and elbow grease), then boiling, rinsing, wringing, drying, starching, and finally, ironing. Could you imagine having so many steps to do laundry!? It seems that despite the invention of chlorine bleach (chloride of lime) in 1799 it wasn’t a catch-all product for keeping whites white. This is likely because too frequent bleaching (as is still the case) could deteriorate clothing more quickly. Instead, Victorian women (frequently the laundry doers) had many home remedies for keeping their clothes white and stain free. Sour milk could apparently be used to remove rust stains and ink could be removed with just a touch of oxalic acid or salts of sorrel. Chlorine bleach was recommended for bleaching muslin and for removing wine and fruit stains.
Finally, to keep out that pesky yellow tinge that seems to plague all whites past and present, Victorian and contemporary laundry processes often involved a blueing agent. The blueing agent was particularly helpful when all-over bleaching was not recommended or in between bleaches to keep fabrics strong. Because blue is complementary to yellow (on the opposite side of the colour wheel) gently dying yellowed clothing blue would remove those yellow tones and leave us seeing bright whites! This is the same principle that is applied to bleach blonde or grey hair when purple/blue shampoo is used to keep away those bronzy tones. The blueing agent would be added to every white wash cycle (ie: every soak, boil, rinse, wring, dry, starch, iron cycle) to keep those whites looking their best. The bluing agent actually continued to be used throughout the 20th century and if you want some you can still pick it up at your local department store or online. You may have noticed, however, that most detergents today are already blue or purple - this is the reason for that!
As we moved into the era of mechanized washing machines bleaching as a separate or additional process to washing began to become a thing of the past with the introduction of washing powders like Persil, Fairy Snow, and Tide. All of these products contained sodium perborate which, when dissolved in water, created hydrogen peroxide. Hydrogen peroxide is a wonderful bleaching product but only works well in temperatures above 60 degrees Celsius, so fairly hot water. This was fine throughout the beginning of the 20th century until the shortages and rationing of the Second World War began encouraging everyone to save as much energy as they could. In 1973, after a tumultuous few decades, the Canadian Office of Energy Conservation was created and the Science Council of Canada began to recommend that Canadians transition to a “conserver society” to reduce energy consumption. Since then, more and more regulations, advertising campaigns, and products have been introduced to encourage reduced energy consumption. However, if our bleaching agents only worked at temperatures over 60 degrees Celsius, how are we supposed to keep our whites white while reducing energy usage?
Most of this problem was solved by the increased popularity of coloured clothing from the 50’s onwards, but it was still important and desirable to be able to keep your whites gleaming. However, over the years an enormous amount of chemistry has been done to find environmentally sound and functional solutions to this problem. One solution was the addition of tetraacetylethylenediamine (TAED) in powdered detergents. This substance works well at removing stains from both coloured and white clothing all while at lower temperatures. It is also biodegradable (to a degree) and therefore more environmentally friendly. No longer did launderers have to sacrifice stain removal power in favour of energy consumption or environmentalism. Today, TAED is the main bleach booster used in European laundry detergents. In North America, nonanoyloxybenzenesulfonate is the most common bleach booster and is more effective and more biodegradable than TAED at lower temperatures. Some products use different colour safe bleach boosters all together, Tide Coldwater, for example, uses borax and includes Liquitint™ Blue to keep those pesky whites looking sharp.
While today our laundry process is greatly reduced by fancy high-efficiency washing machines and carefully engineered stain removal products, we do sometimes still have to put a little extra effort into our whites to keep them looking fresh. Not to mention that the newfangled processes come with their own (albeit minor) difficulties and maintenance routines (don’t forget to wash your HE washing machine!). There is a lot to think about when purchasing detergent as well; how environmentally friendly is it really? Will it even work in your washing machine? All this said, in this modern age, what do you do to keep your whites dazzling? Do you wash in cold or hot water? Are you concerned with the environmental rating of your detergent? Do you use the blueing agent or toss some bleach in once in a while? Or do you not even bother and just wash everything together? Maybe you just avoid wearing white at all costs! No matter how you look at it, keeping our white fabrics sparkling is still a fairly complex process even if it isn’t quite so labour intensive, time-consuming, or as stinky as it once was.