Ancient Origins

It may surprise you to learn that drycleaning was practiced in ancient Greece. This knowledge comes from the inclusion of “dry cleaner” in a list of over 100 occupations inscribed on Mycenaean clay tablets dated 1600 - 100 BC.

In those days, textile workers who washed and brushed newly woven cloth to clean it, swell the fibers and “fill in” the weave were known as “fullers.”
These tradesmen also knew how to remove stains from textiles by applying lye, ammonia, or any one of a number of grease-absorbing clays and soils known as “fuller’s earth.”

As the only other method of cleaning textiles in those days was washing them in water, any method which did not use water became known as “drycleaning.”

Non-Aqueous Solvents

For centuries, the methods of drycleaners were closely guarded trade secrets. Then in 1716, a French book listed turpentine as a “...special secret for removing grease and oil spots from silk...”†. Though the secret was out, the use of organic, non-aqueous solvents for removing spots did not become widespread until the 1800’s, when rise of the chemical industry made solvents such as camphene, benzene, naphtha and gasoline available.

Legend has it that drycleaning became an industry when Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Jolly found that the camphene from an overturned lantern removed grease spots from a tablecloth. Whether the legend is 100% accurate or not, Jolly did open the first drycleaning plant in Paris about 1845. Plants soon opened throughout Europe and at least one American plant was operating as early as 1879. Using the highly flammable solvents of the day, the greatest challenges faced by the fledgling industry were explosion and fire.

First Drycleaning Machines

In response to the growing popularity of drycleaning, the first power machinery for drycleaning was introduced by the Scottish firm, Fullers of Perth, in 1869. This innovation made drycleaning so much faster and so much more efficient that it quickly became the method of choice for the general cleaning of certain garments, not just for removing spots and stains.

Prior to this time, cleaning fine garments meant completely disassembling the garments, washing each piece in hot water, dying each piece to replace the watersoluble color that had been washed, blocking each piece, then reassembling the entire garment. As a result of the expense of this time-consuming process, some garments were only cleaned once a year. But now, through drycleaning, the same garments could be cleaned many times for a fraction of the cost -- and drycleaning did not fade water-soluble dyes or weaken fabrics the way washing in hot water did. It made pressing and finishing easier as well. So, not surprisingly, the popularity of drycleaning increased dramatically.

Non-flammable Solvents

In 1920, the first non-flammable cleaning solvent, trichloroethylene, was introduced in Germany and the drycleaning profession became a lot safer. Trichloroethylene is a very powerful solvent that can damage synthetic fibers, but is still suitable for degreasing industrial overalls, machinery and wool.
In the 1930’s tetrachloroethylene was introduced. Commonly known as perchloroethylene or “perc,” tetrachloroethylene was much gentler on synthetic fabrics and quickly became the industry standard.

More recently, new silicon solvents have started to be introduced. These new processes will provide all the benefits of dry cleaning in a world of increasing environmental awareness.