A History of Soap

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.

00:00:14
Speaker 2: Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We got an email from listener Liz asking for an episode on the history of soap. That is something that I had on my list back when Holly and I first joined the show in twenty thirteen. Holly has thought about doing a soap episode. Also, it has never happened. It never happened, So I was like, why not.

00:00:38
Speaker 1: Why not?

00:00:38
Speaker 2: Now that someone has actually asked for something that I thought maybe no one would find interesting, we will do it.

00:00:45
Speaker 1: We'll do it now.

00:00:46
Speaker 2: This turned out to be tricky to do the research on because Holly's laughing. A lot of writing about soap is either really hyper specific, like the history of the soap industry in one particular city over a specific period, or it is so broad that it's hard.

00:01:11
Speaker 1: To pull details out of.

00:01:13
Speaker 2: And then there are also some details that just get repeated all over the place, but they don't really add up. A lot of the books that are connected to this history are really histories.

00:01:25
Speaker 1: Of cleanliness or hygiene, which is a slightly different thing. So in parts of this episode, we're going to be talking about a bunch of things that all happened in roughly the same period of history, but not necessarily in a specific order chronologically. And now you know why I never got an episode about soap turned out.

00:01:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, when I asked you about it, you said, I think I ran into some kind of problem, and I learned through experience what the problem was. Yeah.

00:02:00
Speaker 1: All over the world, for all of human history, and probably going back to our earliest hominin ancestors, people have found ways to try to keep themselves clean. Hygiene norms really vary from one society to another, but the existence of some kind of norm seems universal, or at least pretty close to it. People have washed or bathed in springs and ponds and rivers. They have used sand or pummice or brushes or corn cobs to scour the skin. They have applied oils to their bodies and then scraped it off with a blade or some other tool. Saunas, sweat lodges, and sweat houses go back thousands of years in multiple parts of the world. A lot of these practices combine cleanliness and hygiene with some kind of spiritual or religious ritual, and some of them also help build community. People have also used a lot of different plants as part of this, specifically plants that are high in sapnans, which are naturally occurring molecules that foam in water. Sapinins have a range of uses and effects, and some of the plants they are found in are edible, although if you eat too much sapinin that can make your tummy heart High sapinin plants include the genus Sapinaria, or the soap warts, which are native to Asia and Europe, as well as the Sependacea, or the soap berries, which are native to tropical regions in most of the world. Multiple species of soap weed, yucca and soap bark tree are native to the Americas. Common ivy, which is native to Europe and Western Asia, and Chinese honeylocust, which is native to East Asia are other examples of these plants that can produce this foamy kind of soapy substance. People around the world have used these and other high sapinin plants to make preparations to clean their skin and hair, to soothe and treat skin conditions and injuries, and to wash clothing and other items. These range from the simple, like boiling soap berries and then using the water to wash your hair, to the complex, like multi step processes involving grinding, burning, steeping, and mixing with other substances. In some parts of the world, today's word for soap comes from the name for one of these traditional preparations or the plants used to make them. In others, the word for soap is just a local variant of soap, or of the word for soap In another language. One step of the soap making process is called saponification, and the words saponification and sappanin both trace back to the Latin word for soap, which was sapo. I'm just gonna say one.

00:04:53
Speaker 2: Of the resources we've been using for pronunciation lookups has been down for more than a week, so I apologize if we se say any of these things wrong. These plant preparations can produce a lather, and they help keep things clean, but they are not exactly the same thing as soap. Soap is a substance that's formed through a chemical reaction between alkalis and fats. So if somebody added soapberries to a fat like tallow and they mixed that with an alkali like lye that would be considered soap, but soapberries by themselves steeped in water would not. Since soap comes from the interaction between alkalis and fat, it seems reasonably likely that in the ancient past people all around the world discovered a sort of proto soap as they cooked meat over a fire and the fat dripped into the ashes, or as they used ashes to scour pots that had been used to cook or store oils or fatty foods. But intentionally made soap has a somewhat narrower early hit, one that's focused primarily on Western Asia, northern Africa, and southern Europe, basically all around the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. At the same time, tracing the details even of this narrow history can be tricky. While there are ancient documents that have been translated with the word soap, it's not necessarily clear whether the original word referred to actual soap or to some other substance that was being used for cleaning. The earliest known written references to soap are probably found in Sumerian Cuneiform tablets from southern Mesopotamia in what's now Iraq. These tablets date back about four thousand, five hundred years. A Time magazine article from twenty twenty points specifically to a tablet describing the use of wet ashes to remove the lanolin from wool, saying that the ash would combine with the lanolin to make soap. Wet ashes are an alkali that would have helped remove the lanolin from the wool, but lanolin contains mostly waxy esters rather than the fats that are needed for subpotification, so it does not seem like this process would have produced.

00:07:17
Speaker 1: Much actual soap.

00:07:19
Speaker 2: So many other articles just refer obliquely to Somerian tablets as giving recipes for soap, but they don't go into detail about what the recipe actually says or which specific their tablet they are talking about. Trying to track down the details on this had me going in a bunch of very annoying circles.

00:07:43
Speaker 1: Another early written reference to soap dates back to the Babylonians, who also lived in ancient Mesopotamia. This reference is in the form of clay cylinders with an inscription that translates to fats boiled with ashes. This suggests that the Babylonians were intentionally making soap and then storing it for later use.

00:08:05
Speaker 2: The Ebers Papyrus has made a lot of appearances on the show. This Egyptian medical text dates back about thirty five hundred years, and among other things, it contains references to using mixtures of oils and alkaline salts to wash and to treat skin diseases. There is an incredibly widely repeated story that the word soap comes from an ancient Roman legend about Mount Sappo. According to this purported legend, Mount Sapo was the site of animal sacrifices to the gods. Animals were slaughtered and burned at the top of the mountain, and then, according to the tail, after it rained, women washing their clothes in the Tiber River at the foot of the mountain found that their laundry got extra clean. This is a fun story. On the surface, it seems like it should make some reasonable amount of sense. The ash from the burn process would have combined with the fat from the animals to make a simple soap, and then rain would have washed that into the Tiber. But Mount Sappo is not a real place, and this legend only seems to show up in articles about the history of soap. I could not find anything that pointed back to an original Roman document that references this story, And it seems like any soap that could have been created as a byproduct of burned animal sacrifices would have been really heavily diluted by the time it was washed all the way down a mountain side by the rain, and then once it was in the river, it would have been washed downstream really quickly. It does not really take that much soap to clean things, like a lot of people put way too much detergent in their laundry. But this all just seems like kind of a stretch. Also, while a lot of words related to soap do trace back to Latin, that word made its way into Latin from elsewhere, which we will be getting to.

00:10:05
Speaker 1: Roman author Pliny the Elder, who lived in the first century CE, gave a very different explanation for where soap came from than this purported Roman legend. This is in a section of his Natural History on the treatment of scrofula, which is a form of tuberculosis. We talked about scrofula in an episode that ran as a Saturday Classic in November of twenty twenty three, Specifically, Pliny wrote about how to treat ulcerated source from scrofula. He listed a series of unpleasant sounding treatments, many of which involved dung, vinegar, animal parts, or even urine, one of the many historical uses for urine, including its being used as a cleansing agent. After all of this probably less than appealing treatment option list, Pliny wrote, quote, soap too, is very useful for this purpose, an invention of the Gauls for giving a reddish tint to the hair. This substance is prepared from tallow and ashes, the best ashes for the purpose being those of the beech and yoke elm. There are two kinds of it, the hard soap and the liquid, both of them much used by the people of Germany, the men in particular, more than the women. Pliny the Elder died in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which also destroyed the Roman city of Pompeii, and a lot of sources claim that Pompei had a soap factory. This soap factory is mentioned in pieces about soap about as often as that story of Mount Sappo is. There is a room in the ruins of Pompeii that has often been called the soap factory, but that Moniker seems to trace back to a letter that was written in the late eighteenth century. There was something that had seemed kind of soap like that had been discovered in this room, but later testing that it was some kind of clay like Fuller's Earth. Other evidence of soap has not been found at Pompeii like. There's been a lot of cosmetics that have been found, things that are probably make up, but not things that are confirmed.

00:12:13
Speaker 2: To be soap. And it's possible that this space was really for doing laundry or for some kind of industrial production of something that you would need big vats for. A work attributed to Greek physician Galen, written roughly one hundred years after the destruction of Pompeii, describe soap as being made from the tallow of oxen goats or sheep and a lie of ashes strengthened with quicklime. Galen describes the best soaps is coming from Germany and the second best is coming from the Gauls. So Pliny and Galen's descriptions of soap feedback into the origins of the term. As we said earlier, the Latin word for soap is sappo, and then that feeds into a lot of other words that are related to soap. But the word sappo probably had Germanic origins, and there are also some similar words in Turkic languages. So this suggests, but doesn't conclusively prove, that the Romans learned about soap from the Germanic peoples of northern Europe or the Turkic peoples of western and Central Asia, or maybe some combination of both.

00:13:21
Speaker 1: It gets much easier to trace the development and manufacture of soap a bit later in history, and we're going to get into that after we pause for a sponsor break.

00:13:40
Speaker 2: Soap making started to become a more established craft in parts of the world in the seventh and eighth centuries, and at that point it does get easier to trace its history. Although this is a section of the episode, it's not completely chronological in.

00:13:55
Speaker 1: What we're talking about.

00:13:56
Speaker 2: Stuff is happening at some points roughly the same time, sometimes in sequence, but generally all in the same period of history. Before we get to that, though, we are going to talk a little bit how about how soap works very quickly, because that is connected to how soap making evolved as a trade. Soap is a type of surfectant or surface active agent, which lowers the surface tension of water. Surfactant molecules have two parts. One is hydrophobic, meaning it repels water, and the other is hydrophilic, meaning that it's attracted to water. Sometimes the hydrophobic end is described as lipophilic, or attracted to lipids. So in soapy water, the lipophilic end of the surfactant molecule attracts fats and oils and other lipids, while the hydrophilic end keeps it suspended in the water, so the surfactant and the lipids it's attracted to can be washed away. Actions like agitation and scrubbing help this process. As we said earlier, soap forms when an alkali like lye interacts with a fat like tallow, and this reaction is called subponification. It produces a fatty acid salt, that being the soap and glycerine. Tallo is rendered animal fat, and early soaps made with it probably didn't smell grate. The tallow was also used for other purposes, including cooking and candle making, and as people figured out how to use it to make soap, a lot of times, those and other applications were seen as a higher priority than soap was.

00:15:37
Speaker 1: But starting in the seventh and eighth centuries, Arab soap makers started using quicklime rather than lye, which produced a harder soap, and these harder soaps started to be made in places that also had an abundance of another fat. That fat was olive oil. Over the centuries, soap making centers were established all around the Mediterranean, including Aleppo in Syria, Marseille in France, Savona in Italy, and Castile in Spain, all names that are still associated with soap.

00:16:10
Speaker 2: While these soaps are all made from olive oil, they all have their own distinctions, including the addition of laurel oil or gar in Aleppo and the addition of almond oil in Savona. By the tenth century, the city of Nablis and Palestine was becoming known for its Niblsi soap, which is also made from olive oil. At some point, people in Morocco started making a black soap from olive oil, with the soap getting that black color from macerated olives.

00:16:41
Speaker 1: Also. Although olive oil soaps became particularly widespread, not all soaps are being made from olive oil. Another black soap developed by the Yoruba people and what's now Nigeria, is made from shay butter also pronounced sheea butter, and sometimes that includes palm oil as well. At first, these soaps were mostly made by families or members of the community for their own use, and they were and continue to be culturally important in a lot of places. For example, Nabulsi and Aleppo soaps both continue to be made through traditional methods today, although sometimes on a much larger scale than they were in earlier centuries. In twenty twenty four, the making of Aleppo gar soap in Syria and Nabulsi soap and Palestine were both inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

00:17:35
Speaker 2: Early soap formulations tended to have a fair amount of alkali left behind in the finished product, and a lot of times that made them too harsh to use on human skin, especially on a regular basis. It might be something you would use for a specific medical purpose, but like not for day to day washing and bathing. So during the medieval period, when this is the case, soaps were more often used for things like laundry or cleaning surfaces, and they had other uses as well. For example, the collection of medieval manuscripts known as the Mape Calovicula, which is sometimes translated as the Little Key to Everything, includes numerous recipes and instructions that incorporate soap for things that aren't cleaning. This includes making a rural green dye, which involved smearing pure copper with the best soap, making azure dye, which involved violet flowers and soap, and making a gold solder, which required copper oxide, olive oil, soap, and calcothar, which is an iron oxide.

00:18:45
Speaker 1: The Mape Clavicula also includes a process for making soap. Burn some good logs and spread the ashes over a fine wickerwork or a thin mesh strong sieve. Pour hot water over the ashes so it drips through the wickerwork or the sieve. What comes out on the other side is lye. Repeat this process, pouring the lye through the ashes and collecting it again until it's very strong. Boil it until it starts to thicken, and then add oil or tellow and add lime if desired. Allow this mixture to cool, and pour off any liquid. After the soap solids coagulate. According to this recipe, you can take this poured off liquid and add salt to produce afronitrum, which is used in soldering. Also during the.

00:19:30
Speaker 2: Medieval period, Muslim chemists were working on formulations for soap that would be gentle enough for regular use on the human body. The ritual washing that Muslims perform before prayer typically involves only water or something like clean sand if there's no water available, and in most cases soap is used for this only when it is needed, but cleanliness is also one of the core teachings of Islam. Philosopher and alchemist Abu Baker Mohammad ibn Zachariah al Razi, also called Roses, lived during this period that is known today as the Islamic Golden Age, and he developed recipes for gentle, pleasant smelling soaps and the olive oil that was needed to make it in the tenth century.

00:20:20
Speaker 1: By that point, guild systems had started to develop in the Byzantine Empire and in northern and western Europe, including soap making guilds, and in much of Europe, two modes of soap making evolved. Women were often making the soap that their household would use, often in a big batch once a year, either after the harvest and processing of whatever plant the oil came from, or after the period of slaughter, so that they would have the necessary animal fat. And guilds produced soap for industrial use or for use as a trade good. Guilds often had a monopoly on any soap that was being sold, and soap making guilds tended to be closely associated with the guilds that could provide them with the tallow oil and lye or other alkali that they needed to do it. This also meant that soap making became interconnected with the economies of the places where these guilds operated. Yeah a lot of times it was not just soap. It was soap and also candles, and also butchers, and like all of them interconnected together into one big system. By the sixteenth century, soap making was well established in northern and western Africa and in much of Europe and Asia, including soaps for personal hygiene also called toilet soaps, and soaps for household cleaning, and an assortment of industrial uses. People in various parts of the world were also making soaps out of other ingredients, including palm oil, cottonseed, oil, canola oil, and whale blubber, along with using an assortment of fragrances and dyes in the soap. But even as the soap making industry expanded and there were more soaps meant for use on people's bodies in Europe in particular, the practice of bathing started to go into decline, and there were a lot of reasons for this. A lot of people did not have a room for bathing in their homes, so they used public bathhouses instead, and these bathhouses started to be associated with the spread of disease, including syphilis. Europe saw its first major syphilis outbreak at the end of the fifteenth century. People probably were not getting syphilists from bathwater, but by today's standards, these bathhouses were not particularly sanitary. Various writers on health and medicine also started to speculate that soaking in bathwater weakened people's bodies. Some of this was also just connected to bigotry and religious persecution. As Christian communities wanted to distance themselves from the ritual bathing and hygiene practices of Judaism and Islam, Christians in your became more focused on clean clothes than on washing their bodies, especially when they visibly appeared clean.

00:23:08
Speaker 2: This continued for a couple hundred years, and it makes it a little ironic that European influence became a huge factor in the spread of soap and bathing culture a few centuries later, which we will get to after a sponsor break. As we've said, by the eighteenth century, soap making was well established as an industry in parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa. European colonists had also introduced soaps to the Americas, where it quickly grew into an industry there. But it could be difficult to make soap at a really large scale in a lot of places. The limiting factor was the alkali needed to start the pontification process. Making lye from ashes and water was time consuming and it required a lot of ash. Other sources of alkali, like limestone, were also in demand for other purposes like making plaster and mortar. Then, in seventeen seventy five, the French Academy of Science offered a cash prize for the development of a process to manufacture sodium carbonate, also called washing soda or soda ash. French surgeon Nicola le Blanc created an inexpensive method for doing this fifteen years later. It involved sodium chloride or common table salt, along with sulfuric acid and limestone, and this development affected so many industries. In addition to its use in suponification, soda ash was used in making things like paper, glass and porcelain. Belgian scientists Ernest Solvee later built on LeBlanc's discovery to make a commercially viable process for making soda ash at scale. People also started to figure out exactly what was going on during the process of subpodification, beyond just turning fat and alkali into soap. French chemists and soap maker Michel Eugene Chevau started studying soaps and the fats that they were made from in the eighteen teens. He was building on the work of earlier scientists, including French Apothecary Clause Joseph Geoffrey, who had discovered that subpotified fat was soluble in alcohol, while the fat that the soap had originally been made from was not. Chevro figured out that the subpotification process split a fat into two components. Those were the organic acid salt that we call soap and glycerine from there he started to isolate and name individual fatty acids and to study how they behaved when they were used to make both soap and candles. The isolation of glycerin from soap making also made it possible for Alfred Nobel to refine nitroglycerin into a commercial explosive that was dynamite in eighteen sixty seven. The isolation of different fatty acids and the ability to make inexpensive soda ash made it easier to make soaps at scale and to make a more consistent end product. Advances in transportation, including steamships and railroads, also made it possible to transport large amounts of raw materials to places that did not have an abundant supply of olive oil or shade butter or some other ingredient. This wasn't completely new. England had an established soap industry by the thirteenth century, including in Bristol, Coventry, and London, with soaps made from tallow as well as imported olive oil. But steamships and railroads made it much easier to move raw materials and finished products. All of that progress or developments, combined with industrial techniques that had been in progress since the eighteenth century, including the discovery of steam power and a renewed focus on cleanliness and personal hygiene in Europe and North America. That included the germ theory of disease becoming more widely known and accepted, and all of that came together to turn soap into an enormous business. Most of these commercially made soaps were sold in bar form, but the first liquid soaps hit the market in the mid nineteenth century, and there were powdered and flaked versions by the early twentieth century. The soap industry that evolved in the nineteenth century included a whole lot of names that are still around today. Many of them got their start producing both soap and candles, or by making candles before moving into soap. Soap and candlemaker William Colgate established his company in New York in eighteen oh seven. Three decades later, Cincinnati candlemaker William Proctor formed a partnership with Irish soapmaker James Gamble. British brothers William and James Lever established a business to make soaps from vegetable oils. In eighteen eighty five, bj Johnson created a soap made of palm and olive oils, calling it Paul Molive.

00:28:27
Speaker 1: In eighteen ninety eight. Colgate and pal Malive merged. In nineteen twenty eight, and a year later, Lever merged with Margarine Uni NV, which had formed through the merger of two Dutch margarine manufacturers and that formed Unilever. Back at the beginning of the show, we talked about how peoples and cultures all over the world for essentially all of human history, have had ways to clean their bodies and their clothes and their environment, and have had various norms for cleanliness and hygiene. But as the soap industry industrialized and soap became widely available as a consumer product, and as social reformers focused on hygiene and cleanliness, all kinds of people started to think of soap as the only acceptable way to be clean. That included politicians, church leaders, social workers, missionaries, and soap marketers. Soap ads equated cleanliness with purity and wholesomeness, especially if that cleanliness came through the use of soap. In the eighteen eighties, British firm Pairs Soap, which would later be acquired by Unilever, quoted the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher in its advertisements quote, if cleanliness is next to godliness, soap must be considered a means of grace, and a clergyman who recommends moral things should be willing to recommend soap. Soap makers also equated soap with civilization and whiteness. For soaps like Ivory, this tied the color of the soap itself to the idea that it was ninety nine point four to four percent pure. As big soap manufacturers in the US and Europe started selling their products in places like the Pacific Islands and Africa, they ran advertisements rooted in the idea that soap would bring civilization to these places. Ads like these ran within the US as well, framing soap as civilizing indigenous communities and as washing the color from black people's skin, as though it would be preferable for their skin to be white, and as though using this soap would help them assimilate to white society.

00:30:42
Speaker 2: Since soaps were often marketed to women in women's magazines, this was also tied to ideas of femininity and womanhood, especially white women's purity. There are really whole books about this kind of stuff, including things like the general use of indigenous imagery and advertising, and the use of caricatures of black people to sell soap and other products. This is way more than we can cover every aspect of here. This also went beyond advertising. Nineteenth century German scientist Eustace von Liebeg claimed that soap consumption was an indicator of a nation's wealth and civilization. Teachers at mission schools told indigenous children around the world that they were dirty if they didn't use soap. An added layer to this was that some of the soaps they were advocating were made with culturally important oils extracted from these same communities to be sold to people living elsewhere. This nineteenth century globalization of soap and the soap industry circles back to something we said at the beginning of this show about the word for soap in different parts of the world and how in some places it's derived from the traditional preparations that soap was replacing. Into the twentieth century, new discoveries continued to affect the way soaps could be made, with a lot of those discoveries now coming from scientists who worked for major soap manufacturers. For example, Procter and Gamble patented processes for hydrogenating oils in nineteen oh nine. Today people probably think of hydrogenated oils in the context of food, but hydrogenation could help harden the fats that were used to make soap. There were multiple patents related to hydrogenation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and so this led to a whole series of legal battles over patents and licensing rights when it came to hydrogenation in soap making. When World War One started in nineteen sixteen, many of the raw materials used to make soap were needed for other wartime applications. This led to chemists developing synthetic surfectants as a replacement. The first synthetic surfactant predated this. It was sulfinated castor oil known as red turkey oil, and that had been discovered in eighteen fifty one, but the first intentionally developed synthetic surfactants are usually credited to German scientist Fritz Gunter, who worked for BASF during World War One. Synthetically made surfactants became known as detergents, and today a lot of things that people call soap are actually detergents. Yeah, they're still surfactants, they're still cleaning things, but they're not that technical definition of soap. Tangentially related, The first soap operas made their debuts in the nineteen thirties. Those, of course, are serialized dramas starting on the radio and then moving to television with soap companies as their major sponsors. That is another entirely different subject. Into the twentieth century, soap manufacturers started developing more specialty products with that it's meant to work on specific types of soil or to be used for specific tasks. This includes the first laundry and dishwasher detergents in the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties, which produce less foam so they don't cause the machines to overload with SuDS. The first household liquid soap meant specifically for hand washing was soft soap, and that debuted in nineteen eighty. The twentieth century also saw an assortment of additives to different soap and detergent products, like optical brighteners which make whites look whiter in the laundry, or enzymes meant to break down specific types of stains or oils. So, as we mentioned, there are connections between the globalization of soap and racism, colonization, and oppression. At the same time, washing your hands with soap and water really does help reduce the spread of numerous diseases. So a lack of access to soap and clean water can have a serious and damaging effect on public health. Research at places like refugee camps and communities that are facing widespread poverty have shown a measurable reduction in certain illnesses, especially diarrheal illnesses, when people have access to soap and water. These illnesses can be fatal in young children, elderly people, and people who have other illnesses or who are already facing malnutrition or dehydration. So this connection between soap availability and disease reduction has led to programs to distribute soaps in places that need it and to do things like recycle partially used hotel soaps to distribute.

00:35:45
Speaker 1: To poorer parts of the world. Soap.

00:35:50
Speaker 2: Uh, that's some stuff about soap, sometimes chronologically and sometimes not.

00:35:56
Speaker 1: I have listener mail about pens Love It from Ralph.

00:36:00
Speaker 2: Ralph wrote, Holly and Tracy, I really enjoyed your recent episode on the Ballpoint pen I also am very particular about the pens I use, but for a slightly different reason. I'm left handed, so I have problems with the ink in most pens smearing as I draw my left hand across it. However, I have found that the pilot V Ball pens with green ink don't smear. The red, black, and blue ones all smear, but for some reason, the green ones don't. So that is my go to pen of choice and has been for several years now. Plus green is one of my favorite colors, which is a bonus. In fact, people in my office know that if something is written in green ink, it's mine. I love your show and the wide variety of topics you cover. I've been listening since the beginning of the pandemic and usually listen to your episodes while I'm out cycling along our local bike trail along the river. I'm gonna pause and say that sounds lovely. M I have also attached my pet tax photos of my cat's Madison on the floor in Savannah on the sink. These photos are takes and on their seventeenth birthday on April fourth this year.

00:37:03
Speaker 1: Thanks again for all you do, Ralph. We do, indeed have a kitty cat with two front feet in the sink, two back feet on the edge of the counter. And then this kitty cat's sibling with very very similar face and coloring. They could almost be twins, I mean, like identical twins, not just cats born together in the same litter. The cat that is on the floor, named Madison looks very startled. They are both.

00:37:39
Speaker 2: They are both tabby cats with little white faces, like just little white right around their mouths and noses. Happy birthday Madison and Savannah just monthsly.

00:37:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is from July. The birthday happened. The email is from July. So thanks so much, Ralph.

00:37:59
Speaker 2: I just I'm technically a right handed person. I've always had questions about whether I ought to have learned to write with my left hand. I did not understand what the teacher meant when they said put it in the hand that it feels the most comfortable end. I was like, this feels bad in both my hands. What are you talking about? But my spouse is a lefty, and so I have seen his struggles with the world of things that are built for right handed people.

00:38:27
Speaker 1: Yep.

00:38:28
Speaker 2: Also, yeah, so thank you for this email. If you'd like to send us a note about this or any other podcast. We are at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com and you can subscribe to our show. I'm the iHeartRadio app, or wherever else you like to get your podcasts.

00:38:51
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