I have in my little collection of historic textile care objects and memorabilia, a beautiful little postcard from the United States of America from the mid- 19th century. It extols the virtues of ‘French Dry Cleaning’ in keeping clothes clean and fresh. Many people outside the industry will never have heard of French drycleaning and many who have joined the industry, say, in the past 25 years, might also have never heard of it.
Sadly, the details of this industry’s history, such as French drycleaning, is fast becoming lost in the mists of time. The number of drycleaning training schools has hit an all -time low. I believe that there is just one left in the UK.
Training budgets are always one of the first things to take a hit, and the interesting and important knowledge base of how our industry developed, which can create real interest in those learning the art of textile cleaning and can help in a career and spark an interest in it, have all but gone.
French drycleaning was the name given to the method of cleaning textiles discovered in about 1825 by Jean-Baptiste Jolly in Paris, when he found that when a maidservant had caused an accidental spillage of kerosene from an oil lamp, onto a table cloth, the area where the kerosene spilt dissolved the fats and grease in that area.
This discovery eventually led to the opening of the world’s first specialised drycleaning business, Jolly-Belin. This accidental discovery also sparked the development of using volatile organic liquids to clean fabrics. Jolly had realised that a solvent-based cleaning process could be used to remove stains from fabrics without the need to use water.
That was important given the fragility of some of the fabrics at the time and the value of the items.
In my opinion, Jean-Baptiste Jolly does deserve the title of ‘Founding Father’ of the drycleaning process but not the title of inventor.
Personally, I have always had questions relating to details in the story of how drycleaning was founded. Many Google search results (text books in my day) will bring up the incident with the spilt Kerosene onto the table cloth, but Kerosene was not invented until 1846, by a Canadian geologist and physician by the name of Abraham Pineo Gesner.
So exactly what did Jolly’s table lamp contain as it was 20 or so years earlier than the invention of Kerosene?
Much further back in time, it is known that the Romans used a combination of ammonia from urine and fullers earth to clean garments. They used a clever system of flushing away the dirt via large tubs which had ingress for clean water and an outlet for the dirty water.
The Romans were highly advanced in the field of sanitation, and did have industrial-sized laundries, where the people who operated them were known as fullers and it was looked upon as a very good job to have.
However, let’s jump back in time yet again, a mere 13,000 years, to Haifa in Israel where trace remnants of ethanol have been found in an old brewery. As meat eating has been a feature through the ages, why is it that that nobody until the 19th century ever accidentally spilled solvent onto a grease stained item and had that lightbulb moment as the fats dissolved before their eyes? We will never know.
Personally, I suspect that, taking into consideration man’s inquisitive nature, solvent drycleaning has been done for millennia, but that it took the mindset of the Industrial Revolution before people such as Jolly thought about making money from creating processes that worked on an industrial scale.
