IT FLOATS

In the days of the cattle drives, a soap bar was a luxury. Cowboys worked the herds of cattle along dusty trails only to wipe off the dust with the wetting of their bandana. Day to day, the hygiene more often was not so pleasant except when resting the herd along one of the many river banks crossed as they made their way to market.

On those occasion, the cowboy could strip down to his yankee suit and scrub the miles of dust from his body. As well, take the liberty to clean his clothes and gear removing the sweat from saddle blankets and the dinge of his garments.

Most manufactured soaps were sold by the keg until the mid-19th century when soap bars began being marketed. Before the mid-nineteenth century, Americans seldom bathed for personal cleanliness. Many considered bathing to be unhealthy, believing it removed a “protective” layer of oil and dirt and exposed the body to unclean water and dangerous “miasmas,” or diseased air. Although great effort went into washing clothes, Americans associated the bathing of the body with negative stereotypes of European excess, luxury, and moral and physical softness.

After the Civil War, attitudes toward hygiene and bathing began to change. As an understanding of germ theory—the idea that microbes cause illness—came to be increasingly widespread, Americans began to place a greater emphasis on the role of sanitation in preventing disease and infection. By the 1880s, growing numbers of doctors promoted personal cleanliness as one of the most important factors in stopping disease.

In 1840 the J.B. Williams Company in Glastonbury, Connecticut, manufactured soap under the name Ivorine. Williams decided to focus on its shaving soap and sold

Ivorine to Procter & Gamble, . American multinational consumer goods corporation headquartered in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio, founded in 1837 by English American William Procter and Irish American James Gamble who would later rename the product to Ivory.

By 1874 Procter & Gamble trademarked "Ivory", as the name of its new soap product. The name was created by Harley Procter, the founder's son, who was inspired by Psalms 45:8 in the Bible: "All thy garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of the ivory palaces whereby they have made thee glad."

As Ivory is one of P&G's older products (first sold in 1879), P&G is sometimes called "Ivory Towers" and its factory and research center in St. Bernard, Ohio, is named "Ivorydale".


Ivory's first slogan, "It Floats!", was introduced at the end of the trail drives in 1891. The product's other well-known slogan,"Pure" (was also in use by 1895), was based on the
results of an analysis by an independent laboratory that Harley Procter hired to demonstrate that Ivory was purer than the castile soap then available.

In the P&G company archives, documentation was found that revealed that chemist James N. Gamble, son of the other founder, had discovered how to make the soap float and noted the result in his writings. When mixing the soap, whipping air into the substance allowed for the bonding ingredients to float on water surface. It is believed that this may have been from accident leaving the mixing machine on far too long, but became a normal practice. This allowed to use the soap whether in a wash tub, river or bowl and not losing the bar to sinking.

Yet hygiene in the Americas was in the making. For the Cowboy, the river worked as his tub and running water was decades away. Civic and governmental organizations pushed for access to plumbing and bathing for the poorer classes. In “A Nation that Bathes Together,” Andrea Renner notes that these organizations equated unassimilated immigrants and poverty with a lack of hygiene. For many reformers, “poor working-class hygiene was viewed as a sign of moral failure as well as a threat to public health.” To address this problem, New York City built free public bath houses to encourage bathing. In 1891, New Yorkers were each given a free cake of Colgate soap as they waited their turn to try out the city’s first public bath.

Good personal hygiene now became synonymous with being a good American. By 1890, soap manufacturers, such as Colgate, Proctor and Gamble, Palmolive, Mennen Company, Bristol-Meyers, and Johnson & Johnson, had proliferated. Soap companies used the perceived connection between Americanness and cleanliness to their advantage. Advertisements showed soaps as products of progress, able to wash away foreignness, ignorance, poverty, lawlessness, and general immorality.