Ricky asked: How do you wash clothes at the dry cleaners? ”
What happens to clothes after they drop off the shelves at the dry cleaners is a mystery to most of us. We know our clothes are much cleaner than when we dropped them, but how is that possible? Who’s First How about washing clothes without water? ”
The earliest records of professional dry cleaning can be traced back to the ancient Romans. For example, dry cleaners were found in the ruins of Pompeii, a Roman city buried when Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, using a type of clay called fullerite, plus lye and ammonia (from urine liquid) to remove dirt and sweat stains from clothing. This process has proven to be very effective on any fabric that is too delicate to wash properly or a stain that refuses to budge. (In fact, the industry is so prominent that it has a urine tax. Fullers often uses animal urine and also maintains urine collection tanks in public bathrooms.)
As for the more modern The biggest revolution in dry cleaning methods occurred in the early 19th century. Traditionally, Jean Baptiste Jolly of France is generally known as the father of modern dry cleaning. It is said that in 1825, a careless maid knocked over a lamp and spilled turpentine on a dirty tablecloth. Jolly noticed that once the turpentine dried, the stain that stained the fabric disappeared. He did an experiment and bathed the entire tablecloth in a bathtub filled with turpentine and found that it came clean as soon as it dried. Whether or not the maid actually had anything to do with the accident, Jolly used this method in Paris when he opened the first oft-remembered modern dry cleaning shop, Teinturerier Jolly Belin.
However, a patent for a process called "dry cleaning" was filed with the U.S. Patent Office in 1821, four years before Jolly discovered it. A man named Thomas Jennings was a clothier and tailor in New York, and soon he became the first African American to receive a patent in the United States. (Prior to this, it had been ruled that slave owners were the legal owners of slave inventions and could then patent those inventions in their own names. Jennings, however, was a free man.)
So when During his time as a garment worker, he, like many others in his industry, was familiar with a regular customer who complained that they could not clean their more delicate garments once they became stained because the fabric did not stand up to traditional of washing and scrubbing. So Jennings began experimenting with different cleaning methods and processes before discovering a process he named "dry cleaning." His methods were successful, not only making him extremely wealthy, but also allowing him to buy his wife and children back from slavery, in addition to funding the efforts of countless abolitionists,
As for the exact method he used, this has been lost in history since his patent (US Patent 3306x) was destroyed in a fire in 1836. What we do know is that following Jennings, other dry cleaners in the 19th century used turpentine, benzene, kerosene, gasoline, and petrol as solvents in the process of dry cleaning clothes. These solvents make dry cleaning a dangerous job. Turpentine can cause clothes to still smell after cleaning, and benzene can be toxic to dry cleaners or customers if left on clothes. But all of these solvents present the larger problem of being highly flammable. The risk of clothes and even buildings catching fire is so great that most cities refuse to allow dry cleaning in commercial areas. In the UK, for example, dry cleaners have smaller satellite stores in cities where they receive customers' clothes, which are then shipped to "factories" outside the city limits for dry cleaning.
The major risk of flammable solvents causing clothes and buildings to catch fire has led to dry cleaners searching for safer options. Chlorinated solvents gai again (they needed a change in the wind to get out safely), he died and was left behind in the end. It's thought he died from some kind of asthma attack or cardiovascular disease, possibly caused by the smoke and heat of the volcano. His body was buried under pumice three days later but otherwise showed no apparent trauma. He is approximately 56 years old. At temperatures in excess of 600 degrees Fahrenheit, perc oxidizes into the highly toxic phosgene, which was widely used in chemical weapons during World War I. The first widely used chlorine-based solvent was carbon tetrachloride, commonly known as "tetrachloromethane," which worked much better than gasoline. However, dry cleaning machines were both highly toxic and corrosive, leading to their elimination in the late 1950s.
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