Waterproof Fabric with Soap. Forgotten knowledge that was once used as a scam

I fell for a 200-year-old chemistry scam. But even knowing that it's a scam, I still wonder if there might be something to it. Take a look at this. A piece of cotton fabric that is full of holes. And yet, like magic, it can hold water. Kind of a lot of it. I've investigated a lot of waterproofing methods from silicone coatings to wax, plastics, and shellac. And one thing that keeps coming up in my reading is metal soap. A coating invented accidentally about 200 years ago which resists water like magic. The story is that in the early 1800s a piece of new fabric was sent off to be dyed. But the manufacturer of this fabric failed to rinse it properly and so it was still covered in soap. When the dyer prepared the fabric to receive color by soaking it in a bath of an aluminum salt called alum, the water turned cloudy, but otherwise the process went according to plan. A few days later, the fabric had dried and was ready for the final step of being soaked in dye. But the fabric refused to become wet. It would not absorb the color or even the water from the basin. And a new waterproofing technology was created, aluminum soap. The chemical reactions behind this story are fairly straightforward. The natural soaps used in the 1800s were made by reacting animal fat or oils with lie, which is sodium hydroxide. This forms a lot of different things, but we'll focus on one thing in particular. Stic acid is a natural fatty acid which makes up a large part of many fats and oils. And sodium hydroxide is a strong base. When you mix these two together, the fatty acid neutralizes the base, forming water and sodium sterate, which is the most common soap still in use today. This is one of the reasons why lie is still sold as a drain cleaner. If your drain is clogged with fats or oils, this will turn them into soap, which dissolves in water and is easily rinsed away. This is actually a little bit weird, though. Sterates and fats are generally not water soluble, but sodium is a metal that is particularly good at forming chemicals that like to dissolve. If we used almost any other metal besides the sodium in this sodium hydroxide, it forms something very different. In this container, I have made some sodium sterate soap by reacting pure steric acid with lie. The solution is currently clear because the soap is dissolved. To convert this into a soap of a different metal, I'll just add a solution of dissolved alum. And this will look quite different. Running out of space in my container. We have just made aluminum soap. Now, watch what happens if I take some of this soap that is gathering towards the top of the container, rub it into a piece of fabric, and let it dry. This can be a really easy way to add waterproofing to fabric. One method I've seen mentioned to make this work is to just throw a bar of soap, which contains sodium sterate, into the washing machine and add a scoop of alum with it. Now, I don't recommend doing experimental chemistry in your washing machine, but it is an interesting idea maybe to try in a bucket outdoors. If you don't want to use aluminum, you can use Epsom salt, zinc, or iron sulfate, or calcium chloride instead to make the respective metal sterate right there in your bucket. This coats your clothing with a waterproof powder that is locked into the fibers when it dries. Hey, future Ben here. I have learned since filming that last segment several weeks ago that there is a much better method to apply a metal sterate coating to a piece of fabric. It just came to me a little too late to make it into the main body of the video. If you stick around till the very end, I'll give you an update on my best methods. Okay, back at it. These results are pretty impressive for such an easy process. In a previous video where we explored how to waterproof cardboard, I spent a significant amount of time off camera pursuing this method to make waterproof coatings. In fact, for the final cardboard waterproofing recipes, I used a metal steroid, but not for its waterproofing ability. Instead, I used it for UV resistance. So, what gives? This looks awesome. It's easy to apply and you can make it with very common metal salts and a bar of soap. Well, here's the problem. Have you

noticed how gently I've been dropping water onto these surfaces? Let's try it with a spray bottle. No. Do you detect the problem? The spray bottle sends out droplets at a much higher speed. And with that added pressure, the water has no trouble overcoming the water repellent coating and soaking right in. When you encounter a problem like this, as an inventor, it can take a long time to realize it. When I started testing aluminum soap and then other metal sterates after it, for my first samples, I simply poured water on them gently from a bottle, which worked incredibly well. For later tests, I switched to using a spray bottle and without realizing what made the difference, it seemed like everything was suddenly broken. I spent several days on this before going back to one of the places where I knew I had seen aluminum sterate mentioned some years prior, but I didn't remember what was said about it. To remove your personal information from the internet, my sponsor, delete me, can really help you out. Telemarketers, scammers, and identity thieves all have a much easier time taking advantage of you thanks to companies called data brokers who compile your personal information and offer it for sale all over the internet. Legally, data brokers have to stop selling your information if you ask them to, but there are thousands of them and you might spend 20 minutes on each site figuring out how to fill out a takeown request. Delete Me scans the internet for you, digging up data brokers that have your information and submitting takedowns on your behalf. This list is just some of the sites that they submitted takedowns for in the first few weeks that I used them. If you'd like to make it a lot harder on telemarketers, scammers, and identity thieves to get your information and that of those you care about, check out Delete Me. You can get a 20% discount on a US consumer plan by using my link jointme. com/nighthawk and using the code nighthawk on checkout. In the back of a book I purchased some years ago when I was consumed by the effort to recreate an original carbon filament light bulb. There was a list of other manufacturing related books from the early 1930s and one in particular called Waterproofing of Fabrics caught my eye. Now, I didn't purchase a hard copy of this particular book, but I did find a scanned version on Google Books which I could read for free. This has a section about metal soaps for waterproofing. However, trying to look this book up by memory, I accidentally pulled up something else. A different book with almost the same name from just 3 years later. Waterproofing textile fabrics by H. Pearson. To my surprise, in this book, I found much less was said on the topic of aluminum sterate than I expected. It's mentioned here and there as a minor additive to other waterproof coatings, but only in one place is it talked about for its own waterproof properties. Allow me to read from a section titled in regards to the soap and alum process. In recent years, a revival of this ancient process secured the backing of Wall Street financeers with the aid of the ancient but to the uninitiated startling demonstration made by pouring water gently onto a piece of cotton mosquito netting without any of it running through the holes in the fabric. The inventor had a wonderful theory of osmotic pressure and an elaborate apparatus, but it has never made any headway because of the fact that in order to obtain adequate water resistance, it is necessary to so load the fabric as to interfere with the finish and tailoring properties of the cloth. The mosquito netting demonstration is frequently employed in promoting so-called waterproofing processes. The reader can produce it for himself by dissolving one part by volume of molten paraffin wax in 20 parts of gasoline, soaking the netting in the solution, and evaporating off the solvent. The chances are that the resulting test will be more striking than that demonstrated to him from page 40 of waterproofing textile fabrics. So from this little section, we have learned that a book from a hundred years ago had already confirmed this technique to be basically useless for everything except tricking Wall Street execs into giving you funding. You need so much aluminum soap in the fabric to obtain strong waterproofing that it's no longer a workable cloth. And a simple coating of wax apparently gives results that are even more impressive anyway. Well, that's something we have to try, right? Now, I've used Napa as a solvent for

silicone in a past video, which is close to gasoline. I wouldn't use actual gasoline as a solvent, as this book from the 1920s suggests. Napla is sketchy enough. We'll dissolve a little wax in here, dip in a piece of cheesecloth, and let it dry. Sure enough, that works pretty good. Of course, I knew that this would work because I have a whole video about wax waterproofing, which does not use gasoline, by the way, or other dangerous solvents in the process. Maybe check that video out next. So now, even knowing that my work in testing metal sterates was shown not to be so commercially viable over a hundred years ago, I'm still conflicted. On the one hand, a wax coating seems to probably be better than metal steroids, both in terms of water tightness and longevity. However, isn't the ease of application for the soap method still a little bit tempting? Just throw a bar of soap into a bucket with your clothes, add some zinc sulfate or alum, and you get clothes that are at least moderately waterresistant for almost no effort and very little cost. Now, before I heard about this method anywhere else, I heard about it from you commenters on my videos who are using this technique in their washing machine. Again, I think if you're going to try this yourself, it should be in a bucket until you know what you're doing at least. But I would love to hear more accounts of real experiences with metal sterates for waterproofing. Although this technology may have been ruled inferior to other methods 100 years ago, I'm reminded of an excellent quote actually from the introduction of this original book on the development of electric lighting on the topic of how invention works in general. Listen to this. A point which is here worthy of notice and which curiously enough has not received that attention from the student or indeed from the inventor which it merits is that there is a strong tendency on the part of the human brain to think in grooves. In some way or other a discovery is made and an invention by means of which some pressing need of mankind can be filled is devised. At once, the whole army of what may be termed improvers abandon their previous studies and rush to the new line of investigation. The methods they have been following are abandoned and eventually forgotten and a new groove is laid down. Possibly some student years afterwards turns back to the point where the previous rut came to a dead end and gives his attention to the old and abandoned experiments, sees that some good may result from carrying them further and meets with some degree of success. The development of the incandescent electric lamp, pages three and four. The point of that quote is that when some invention is discovered that is superior to other technologies, everyone abandons their current research to focus on the new and superior thing. But eventually the new thing hits a limit in its usefulness and can no longer be improved further. Or it's found to have serious downsides like in the realm of waterproofing technologies where Teflon PTFE has been dominant. But it turns out that the byproducts have poisoned us all. The author of this book suggests that when a technology has hit its limits, look back to before it set its rut, and perhaps you'll find an idea that was abandoned a little too soon. Maybe let me go back to where this divergence first started. I mistakenly looked up the wrong book and in doing so became a bit disillusioned even if I remain hopeful about these metallic steroids. But perhaps the book waterproofing textile fabrics gives an explanation of its cynicism right in the title. It's about textiles clothing. Let's read one more section from the book I intended to pull up in the first place and maybe we'll get some ideas worth considering. Pay special attention to this first line. For waterproofing, sailcloths, etc., two solutions are required. The first is made by dissolving 100 lb of soap in 100 g of hot water. And to facilitate its solution, the soap should be cut into thin shavings. The second solution consists in dissolving 50 lb of alum in 100 gall of warm water. The cloth to be treated is first passed into the soap bath and padded about till it becomes saturated. It is then run through a mangle and passed into the alum bath whereupon immediately a precipitate of insoluble alum soap is formed within and upon the fibers. If a thicker coating is required, the

material may be passed alternately several times through the two solutions. The material will appear rough after this treatment. not good for clothing, but it can be much improved by running it between slightly heated rollers. The fabric may also be colored by using other metallic compounds in partial or entire replacement of alum. For instance, copper sulfate gives a blue or greenish soap. Iron a yellow one. A modification of this process which has been used in France is worthy of attention. In this method, the aluminous salt is illuminate of soda. Uh the modern name for that is sodium illuminate uh which can be mixed with a solution of soap without precipitating it. Other materials may also be employed for instance quin gelatin resins etc. and the cloth is passed through this combined liquid. It is then dried and afterwards run into a very dilute solution of formic or acetic acid which combines with the soda and leaves the aluminina soap precipitated on the fiber. And that is from waterproofing of fabrics page 55. That last section is what I find most interesting. It leaves open the possibility of combining these hydrophobic metal sterates with more durable materials like casein. And at least for heavy cloth, this book found waterproofing with metal sterates to be worth describing. In fact, looking back on my test in this video with the spray bottle, water didn't actually penetrate all the way through to the other side of the fabric, and I let it sit on the top for several hours. The failure was only surface deep. Now, that is not a perfect result, and it would probably fail completely if given more time, but it does demonstrate moderate effectiveness that could be worth more work. All right. Well, here is the promised update to this metal sterate waterproofing method. I've learned a lot in the last few weeks since filming the main body of this video. And the first thing that I've learned is that you should use two buckets for this process. As in the last book that we read, which had the account of using this process to treat sailcloth, the right way to do things is to pass the fabric back and forth between the solutions. Don't mix the solutions together into one bucket or else most of that waterproofing metal sterate will just precipitate into the liquid instead of actually forming in the fibers of the fabric which is where we want it. Uh this first one I have dissolved my soap into that is my sodium sterate which is just ordinary white unscented bar soap. Cut off a little piece, put it in a coffee mug with some water and put it in the microwave for about a minute. just enough to let that water get about up to its boiling point, which will melt the soap. You can then mix it in and then pour it into about a gallon of hot water in your bucket. Uh that's just the easiest way to distribute that soap without having to grate it or h get it to dissolve by stirring, which takes quite some time. Melt it in the microwave first. In this bucket, I have another gallon of water with my metal salt dissolved into it. In this case, I'm using zinc sulfate, but of course, you can use any of these ingredients that are on screen. Now, use about the same quantity by volume as the amount of soap that you use in the first bucket. So, a/4 of a bar is maybe a/4 of a cup worth of soap in this. So, I added 1/4 cup of zinc sulfate into this bucket. Now, we just need to take our fabric that is to be treated and pass it back and forth between these buckets. I'll start in the bucket with my sodium sterate soap. Let it soak into this fabric really well. And then the trick is to ring it out. This gets rid of all the excess soap. We just need enough to actually coat the fibers. And then move it over to the second bucket. As soon as I put this into this liquid, this dissolved zinc sulfate, it will start forming zinc sterate on the fibers. Ring out the excess liquid. And the more times we do this, the thicker a layer of that metal sterate we will build up and the more water repellent this will be. When we have built up a coating that is to our satisfaction, maybe going back and forth half a dozen times, rinse off the shirt or piece of fabric in pure water, the soap and excess soluble salts will rinse out of it, leaving behind the insoluble metal sterate embedded into and on the fibers, creating a very durable waterproof coating. As we've read, this might not be suitable for wearing directly against your skin. It might be a little bit uncomfortable, but by applying a hot iron, we can make this much more durable. And I've found that it actually works pretty well, maybe better than wax. That needs a little bit more rigorous scientific testing to be sure, but this seems like a very good

waterproofing method that I think deserves a closer look. You can see by the uh darker patch on this t-shirt where the water really soaked in. It's a really small spot compared to uh the actual wide area that I just poured water on. Very little water actually absorbed in compared to what rolled off. And that's a pretty good result. Maybe not as good as wax. One thing that I can definitely say about this coating is that although the book reported that this sort of waterproof layer would not be suitable for textiles, it's definitely more comfortable to wear against your skin than a wax and oil coating. That would not be comfortable. This it's not so bad. If you appreciate these videos and would like to see them keep coming, please support me on Patreon. Leave me comments below. I still read all of them and I would really love to hear what you have to say on this one. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you next time.