Soap Bubbles, Chapter 5

          Saturday morning came. It was a sparkling day, and sixty people - boys and girls, big brothers and sisters, and a few parents - were at the school door by nine o’clock.
          Miss Dean started her parade, as she called it, right on time. It was an hour’s journey to the factory, and a change of cars had to be made; but everyone knew just how to go, because Miss Dean had made sure of that beforehand.
          As soon as the factory was reached, the party was taken into a large room where there were a number of glass show cases. Under the bright lights in the cases there were soaps, soaps, soaps, and more soaps!
          There were yellow and white bars of laundry soaps.
          There were chipped soaps, flaked soaps, powdered soaps, and soap in grains.
          There were lovely toilet soaps in wrappings designed by artists.
          There were liquid soaps for shampooing, soaps in tubes for shaving, and special soaps for many uses.
          ”Phew!” said Jimmy. “Do we see all these soaps made?”
          ”Not unless you have come to stay a week or more,” laughed one of the guides who had joined the party. “It will take you two hours today to see how the laundry soaps alone are made. Now let us start in small groups, each group with a guide.”
          All took the elevator to the fourth floor.
          As they stepped out into a huge room, they saw on each side a row of kettles, each as big across as a fair-sized room, and so high that the boys and girls had to stand on stools to look in.
          The children thought of course that the kettles rested on the floor of the room, so they were amazed when the guides told them that the bottom of each kettle was on the ground, four floors below, and the sides came all the way up through the building to where they were. They began to realize how much soap a big factory makes when they heard that the largest kettles can hold a million pounds of soap.
          When the children peeped over the top of one of these big kettles they decided they did not wish to fall in! As Peter said, it would be like falling into the crater of an active volcano.
          Inside was a mass of melted soap that swirled and boiled and broke into waves as if a giant hand were pushing from below.
          And indeed it was a giant! For the guide said that the boiling was caused by live steam forced through coiled pipes in the kettle.
          ”We know what was put in that kettle to make the soap,” said one of the boys. “Fat, for one thing.”
          ”Right,” said the guide. “In that kettle we put some cottonseed oil and some hard fats.”
          ”And lye,” spoke up another boy.
          ”Right again,” said the guide. “After the fats were melted we pumped in plenty of soda lye solution. Now we are boiling the two together, and soap has formed, as you see.”
          ”Isn’t there some glycerin in there with the soap?” asked Jimmy. “The soap we made in school had glycerin in it.”
          ”Good for you,” the guide said. “Indeed there is. About all the glycerin the world uses is produced when soap is made, and the soap in that kettle still has the glycerin mixed with it.”
          ”How do you get it out of the soap?” asked George.
          ”Come to this kettle over here, where we are further along in the process. Do you see that stream of liquid being pumped in? It is a strong solution of salt. Now watch what is happening.”
          ”Why, the soap doesn’t look smooth any more. It is broken up into little bits,” said the children.
          ”Exactly,” said the guide. “You could do the same thing at home if you made a nice thick suds in a basin and then stirred salt into it.”
          ”You see,” went on the guide, “that when the soap separates in little grains as it has here, other things that were held in the smooth mass drop out. These other things are glycerin, the salt we are adding, and any lye which has not been used to make the soap. The soap grains float on top, and below is the glycerin lye, as we call it. This is drawn off at the bottom of the kettle, and it goes through pipes to another part of the factory, where pure glycerin is made from it.
          ”Now, in order to be sure that all the fat is changed into soap, we often pump in fresh lye, and repeat the whole process.”
          ”How do you get the soap back again into a smooth form after the salt has broken it up,” asked Miss Dean.
          ”You can see how we do that, if you will look into this kettle where some soap is being finished,” answered the guide. “We have pumped in water and boiled it with the soap grains. That washes the salt out and makes the grains close up, or come together, to look like smooth soap again. We let the soap cool a little and stand quietly after this until it makes a layer of finished soap above the water, the salt, and some lye below. This lye also contains a little glycerin.
          ”Before this top layer of soap has time to get hard, it is pumped off from the kettle and taken through pipes to the floor below. Let us follow it downstairs and see what happens next.”
          On the way down, the guide told the group that certain things were sometimes added to soaps for different reasons. These added things were called “builders.” Rosin was one of these, and that was boiled in with the soap made from fat and lye. But other builders, such as washing soda and borax, might be stirred into the finished soap, before it hardened. Miss Dean told the group that they would have a chance to talk about builders in their classroom.
          The rest of the journey through the soap factory was just one surprise after another. The most surprising thing of all was the wonderful machinery. Everywhere they went, the children saw machines doing in a few seconds what it would take hours of human labor to do. These machines seemed almost human. The children began to think how much work so common a thing as soap meant as they watched it go through the train of machines and processes which the brain of man had planned.
          First of all, as they entered the floor below, the group saw hundreds of deep boxes, or moulds, in each of which twelve hundred pounds of soap were becoming solid. They saw the sides taken from these boxes, and the big mould of soap run through machines with wires which, like a flash, cut the soap into slabs and then into bars, all of the same size. They saw the drying rooms, where more than a million pounds of soap were drying before being wrapped.
          In another place a wonderful process was going on. A thin sheet of white soap was passing over rollers and falling out at the last in the form of thin flakes, thinner than snowflakes. One of the girls said they looked like a new kind of breakfast cereal and good enough to eat!
          The flakes were carried through chutes to the floor below, and everybody was eager to follow them down to see what happened to them there.
          That was a wonderful place - the floor below. The thing that happened to those flakes was so fascinating that the children seemed glued to the floor while they watched. Down came the flakes through pipes from the ceiling. Beneath was a machine. This machine took a flat piece of cardboard which a girl fed to it, gave it a slap here and a paste in another place, and, behold, it was a box into which the flakes tumbled! Then the machine jiggled the flakes down in the box just as if a hand were doing it, filled up the box, pasted down the cover, and moved the finished boxes along to a girl who put them in a packing case just as fast as her hands could work.
          ”My!” said one of the boys, “what a machine! I shall think of it every time I see a box of soap flakes.”
          In another place the bar soaps were being carried steadily along a moving belt into a machine which wrapped them, sealed the wrapping, and moved the wrapped bars on to the packer.
          As the children left the factory, one of them said:

          ”Why, it seems to me we have seen enough soap for the whole world!”
          ”Well,” said Miss Dean, “you may have seen a million pounds or more. But how many people are there just in New York City alone to use up that soap?”
          As for Jimmy, he was already planning the story he would have for his father and mother that night.