History of bleach
Bleach was first discovered in 5000 B.C by Egyptians who discovered that washing and sun-drying their garments would eventually turn them white. In 3000 B.C, bleaches were made by mixing wood ashes and water together to make lye solutions. People would soak their clothes in the solution for a short amount of time before leaving them in the sun. The only problem with this was that the clothes had a tendency to disintegrate when left in the solution for too long (Mulrooney, 2013).
Between 1000 and 1200 A.D, the Dutch, decided to come up with a better solution to dying clothes. To soften the harsh effects, they added sour milk which meant that the process of dying clothes could be repeated more times without the clothes deteriorating overtime. Unfortunately, this process takes eight weeks and a lot of space to allow any fabrics to dry. By 1756, a scientist named Francis Home discovered that adding a weak sulphuric acid instead of sour milk would reduce the bleaching to twelve hours (Mulrooney, 2013).
In 1772, Carl Wilhelm Scheete had discovered chlorine, which became an essential component to bleach in 1792, when Claude Louis Bethollet added it to potash to create a more powerful bleach. The only problem was that potash was expensive, and getting the exact amounts needed for the solution was hard. In 1799, Charles Tennant decided to use limestone instead of potash, making a bleaching powder known as calcium hypochlorite. It wasn't until 1913 that a company named "The Electro-Alkaline Co", started to make a sodium hypochlorite bleach by chlorinating a solution of caustic soda, also known as sodium hydroxide (Mulrooney, 2013).