1935 Grocery Store

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Freddy the Oxydol was the first detergent made by P&G.  They bought it in 1927 and put it on the market.

 

Oxydol is the name of a laundry detergent sold in the United States and in the United Kingdom. It was created in 1914. Purchased by Procter & Gamble in 1927, it was P&G's first detergent. In the 1930s, Oxydol was the sponsor of the Ma Perkins radio show, considered the first soap opera. As Oxydol sponsorship put the soap in "soap opera". P&G sold the brand in 2000 to Redox Brands, a marketing company founded by former Procter & Gamble employees.<sup id="cite_ref-0" class="reference"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span>[</span>1<span>]</span></span></sup> Redox Brands was merged into CR Brands in 2006.<sup id="cite_ref-1" class="reference"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span>[</span>2<span>]</span></span></sup>

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Old Grocery stores

My mothers parents owned 5 or  6 grocery stores in the 1920 through my grandmothers retirement in 1965.  The posted store was very much like the eraly ones they owned and operated up until the late 40' eary 50's when they did go to self service type stores.  Their stores were in small towns and they were more of a General store from farmsupplies to nust and bolts to buying mik and eggs to the grocery's.   The stores were all in about 40 mioles of each other in SW Oklahoma and my grand father would do the weekly rounds to check on all of them had managers at each and 22 to 4 workers.  They did the credit tabs for all of the folks,  Ony way most could eat.  Lots of times they got paid right after a harvest like wheat harvest or cotton harvest.  Sometimes a farmer would give them a steer to have for part of the payment which they would have slaughtered and he would then cut it up in his market they lived behind and sell.  I  remember on delivery days my mother helping out at our local store with the unloading and pricing suing the old black grease pencil.  My grand did di all the fancy hand done signs like you see in these pictures.  I do remember that Ladies Unmemtionables (pads) were paced in a plain brown bag that they could take off the shelf and not be embaressed having it in their cart.  They were appilated with IGA and were the first to do so in the early 1930's in Oklahoma.  The strores they had were in Jester, OK, Mangum, Fredrick, Hobart, Rocky, and Carnigie, Oklahoma. 
 
My understanding

is that Oxydol was a "soap" and that the first "detergent" here in the U.S was Dreft (a P&G product)

From what I have read, the concept of a synthetic detergent came from something the Germans were working on during, and after WWI because of the shortage of fats available.

A process engineer from P&G, Robert Duncan was visiting a Soap factory in Germany I think it was Hydrierwerk and or Ludwigsshaften? and by accident, discovered compounds they had been working on, to replace soap use for laundry, but had not finished.

The Germans agreed to let him take these back to the states to have P&G study them. After years of working with them Dreft was created, but did not clean or suds very well. WWII put thing on hold for this, but on and off during the war, a chemist at P&G eventually created
"product X" that later became Tide.

As I say this is my 'understanding'! Laundress my have more info the subject.

HTH
 
Stan, got it.

Oh Okay I've understand your speech, you refer to detergents to the synthetic ones, while soaps for the others...

I think to remember that oxydol was named this way because of sodium percarbonate or anyway oxy bleaching agents were added in the formula along with granulated soap and other things...  if so,  a detergent.

I knew the same thing as you about  Dreft being the first having syntethic detergents ingredients.

Synthetic  detergent or not or just soap bars or powdered I think was not anyway a god deal to keep them near food and especially  flour, I would not have a pancake tasting like a soap bar...and you? LOL

Thanks all!

 

 
 
Dreft

Orignally was a light duty non-soap surfactant (want to say SLS) detergent. While it was good for laundering ladies danties, woolens and perhaps dishes it lacked the cleaning power of the best soap based products for laundry, so it had nothing more than that niche.

Somewhere around the 1950's or 1960's (not sure) Dreft was repositioned as a detergent for baby's laundry. The stuff is actually quite powerful especially once enzymes were added, but had the advantage of supposedly rinsing cleanly not leaving residue behind to affect baby's skin.

Oxydol and Chipso were laundry soaps and P&G's best sellers for that purpose until Tide came along. Indeed some at P&G were worried that sales of Tide would kill off Oxydol (and it did after awhile along with every other laundry soap), at the time but once the genie was out of the bottle that was that. Chipso would be discontinued (not sure of the last year), and Oxydol was remade into a detergent using some but not all the technology found in Tide. Later Oxydol became the first American detergent with a built in oxygen bleaching system (Europe long had Persil from both Henkel and Lever Bros. (now Uniliver).

P&G took things further when they developed an activated oxygen bleaching system (using NBOS) that first was tried out in Biz (which came out as an enzyme pre-soak, later an oxygen bleach), then became Tide with Bleach. Later this same system would trickle down to Oxydol, Gain and other "with bleach" detergents offered by P&G.

This fit the the pattern long established by P&G in that Tide being it's top shelf laundry product was the first to get any new technology. Later this would pass onto the other brands such as Oxydol, Gain, etc... However as time went on P&G put more focus on Tide and the other brands began to languish. Hence Oxydol and a few others being sold off to Phoneix Brands.

Getting back to Dreft, one says it is SLS (sodium laureth sulfate) because have several vintage packets in the stash and when using one the dust got up one's nose. Reaction was the same as when using other pure SLS products (lots of sneezing, wheezing, etc...), so that was that. It does smell nice though.
 
IIRC, No.

Original Tide like many other detergents the world over to follow was based on alkylbenzene sulfonates.

SLS while having good cleansing properties tends to create tons of froth (one reason it is included in shampoos and body cleansers), but lacks the cleaning power of ABS surfactants for "heavy duty" laundry detergents especially in hard water.
 
Thank You Laundress

For giving the background of the Dreft, (knew you'd have more info about that than I )

Freddy,
sorry I'm unable to post a link, (just not computer savvy) but if your interested, you can Google "Robert A Duncan P&G"
This article explains the story I mentioned above, better than I did, and is a interesting read.

Robert A Duncan made the trip to Germany in 1931, the Germans had previously been working with a "wetting agent" that was obtained from the "bile' of slaughtered cattle. This was due to necessity, because of the food shortage, and shortage of fats.
They were using this "wetting" agent for the dying of textiles.

As for the "soaps" used prior to "detergents" that we see in the vintage photo, one must realize that there was much more involved in creating "laundry" soaps, be that bars, or powdered, than most people realize.

It was more than just grating up a bar of bath soap. Laundry soap was made totally different than bath soap.

For effective laundry soap, or what was considered in 1935 to be effective, was the important purification process that soap makers used at that time. P&G being one of those "soap makers"

First was the choice of fats, and fat percentages used to make the soap, and the percentage of the NaOH (lye) used for saponification of the selected fats. Second, was then the removal of the glycerine from the soap, and the "purification" of. Which was the neutralization of any left over NaOH, (sodium hydroxide) And removal of about two thirds of the remaining water.

After this process, they had something very different than bath or facial soap.

In the right water conditions (water conditions being the operative words here) this type of soap can be very effective for cleaning.

Here in the U.S, after the WWII, (1945) Tide was introduced, and as Laundress has explained that by the 1950's quite a few "soaps" were bumped by detergents, or remade into detergents, using the same name as there former.
 
Oh Okay thanks for all the info

You know, always thought and knew at Oxydol like a non Synthetic based "detergent" rather than a laundry soap and this because as you can read on their old ads they claimed many times about it's difference from soap flakes or any other granulated soap about needing less and washing whiter than any other granulates soap...so even if it was still made from soap guess it was anyway different from normal/regular laundry soap...

So guess something changed in the composition,  maybe it had something more than others? Maybe? I likely wrongly  knew it always had  oxy bleaching along...but at this point looks  it just was later when it turned into a synthetic detergent.... who knows?
As Stan says absolutely a laundry soap granulated and not  is very  different from a soap for bathing or beauty/personal care purposes....

And of course different recipes can make of a soap greater than another....so maybe Oxydol just had the greatest recipe of laundry soap.

About Dreft well, yes I did know the same that it was initially a "mild" detergent  suitable only  for lightly soiled and woollens and then it was changed in a more powerful formula and sold for babyes laundry, like it is today....

[this post was last edited: 9/30/2012-06:09]
 
Mr. Duncan came upon a substance long used in Europe for stain removal, ox gall (bile). Indeed one can still purchase oxgall soaps today all over the EU and UK, but in particuar Germany for use in laundry stain removal.

The German company that was doing experiments with oxgall and had isolated the key chemicals was I.G. Farben. They would later go on to develop Zyklon B orginally as a pesticide and rodentcide gas but later used by Nazi Germany to murder thousands by gasing them to death. I.G. Farben also requested and took delivery of hundreds of forced labour during the war to work in it's plants and to use as human experiments for various chemicals and other substances in development.
 
I found it interesting

the course of events that took place, that have led us now, to something we give no notice of, ordinary staple (TIDE)
Who would have ever thought that the old saying " necessity is the mother of invention" would have applied to something we all have sitting in our laundry rooms!
Starvation of one country, and 15 years of work, and testing by another, to make possible!
 
If It Hadn't Been One Thing Would Have Been Another

Face it, soap had been around for hundreds of years and was a *very* mature product for cleaning especially for laundry. Where that task came in unless one had vast amounts of clean, hot and soft water the stuff required quite allot of effort and even then results were uneven.

Henkel's Persil pushed the envelope and sooner or later someone would have invented heavy duty "detergents" and or at least surfactants capable of handling modern laundry problems.
 

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