Persuasive Essay Topics on the best garbage for great soap!
By Norman Morrison                      

Persuasive Essay Topics of Today and Yesterday: Kitchen Garbage Makes The Best Soap

Were the softball player to put a little study into the matter, perhaps he would be a bit more shy about selecting his choice of delicious smelling manly soaps.

Modern bath soap is a modern triumph of engineering. Just as the lowly organ grinder's organ, once a simple instrument, slowly but surely grew into the Cray Mainframe computer, the most powerful computer on earth, so did soaps become ever more complicated. Once little more than the result of mixing a little pig lard with some hardwood ashes, today, the chemical list in some soaps could might some day create living protoplasm, if left undisturbed at the bottom of some forgotten landfill, long after mankind has been forced to take to rocket ships to leave this poor planet due to global warming.

This article does not presume to tell you, the dear reader, to abandon soap. Far from it. In some cases, due to its ever increasing components, always evolving, changing, and getting more expensive, it might actually spur beneficial mutations. In the meantime, have you ever wondered what our distant walking, talking, animated kith and kin used to make their soap? Surely, you don't think they used only lard and wood ashes...

Along about October of 1903 prosperous folks were just arising from their nightly slumbers to read of the marvelous new inventions coming their way. It must have been very exciting to know that the whole world was in front of them! Typhus, earthquakes, influenza. Stuff like that. But there was also the Ford, aeroplanes, and World War I. Yes, it was a very exciting time to be walking, talking, and being animated and vertical. That being the case, consider the strange case soap presented below. Let's take a peek back. Shall we?

The housewife hears the janitor's "Hello!" up the dumbwaiter shaft. Dinner is over, and, with the aid of Jennie, the twelve-year-old daughter, she has washed and wiped the dishes. Jennie was so anxious to go down to the Sullivans's flat to see Mary Sullivan's new hat that she even hurried her mother through the evening task.

"Hello, fourth floor, front:" re-echoes up the shaft- There i.s the slapping sound of pulley ropes as they sway back and forth in hoist in the dumbwaiter. Presently the "silent monitor,'" as Boston flat dwellers are said to call it, emerged from the depths of its seclusion and stopped opposite the opened tin door.

"I'm glad that's out of the way," said the daughter, as she placed a pail of kitchen refuse on the shelf of the dumbwaiter and slammed the door "That's what I hate about housekeeping; I just hate cleaning up. I don't mind cooking and marketing, but the dirt and the grease-- oh! I'll never get married. No; not unless I can live in a hotel and unless"---
The mother interrupted the girl to tell her she might change her opinions later in life, but Jennie began again:
"Just look at my hands," as she began to scrub them in the suds of some colored soap, she continued;
"What will Tim Sullivan think of my hands anyway? The old dishwater makes them red, and I have to scrub and scrub to get the grease off. Mamma, we must get some more of this violet colored soap. It smells so sweet!"

Little does Jennie know, nor many another girl with decided views on marriage and house keeping know, that the grease from the kitchen comes back to them after many days as dainty toilet soaps. One they say they "hate the sight of." The other is "just lovely." One is an expense to get rid of. for the rent includes what the real estate man euphoniously calls 'hall service.- The other is an expense to buy.

Man in imitating nature is more and more exceeding in utilizing what a spendthrift calls waste. Invention is economizing to-day what yesterday was thrown into the garbage pail or the sewer. The by-products of ore and oil, of wood and coal, are becoming more and more numerous. The crude petroleum oil nowadays not only furnishes kerosene,
naphtha, tar, vaseline and many more commercially important articles, but, as one grammar school boy said recently: The by-product of universities is obtained nowadays from oil."

In the evolution of soap making it has been discovered that grease from kitchens can be refined and clarified to as high a degree as any other animal fat. Soaps made from such humble ingredients, manufacturers, say, are as clean and wholesome as other soaps, if the refining process is carried on long enough and thoroughly.

It is for this reason that the kitchen cleanings of the larger cities of the United States are no longer thrown away to become a menace to health, but are "utilized," as the man of the trade terms it.

In this city, as in Philadelphia, Boston and Baltimore, the vast amount of garbage is carried away to "conversion plants" and transformed into marketable products. The business employs as skilful methods as it does euphonious terms. There is as little odor of what the vulgar call garbage in a "conversion plant" as there is any suggestion of unpleasantness in the words "utilization," the name of the process; "digesters," the huge vats in which the refuse is boiled, or "screenings," the name applied to hairpins, sails, corset steels, watch springs, pieces of old bottles, or other stray relics of civilization, which may have escaped detection until this final stage.

In the winter eight hundred thousand tons of garbage are removed from the houses in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and in the summer, when New-Yorkers buy and take home the season's produce of fruits, melons and vegetables the kitchens of these boroughs cast out 1,800,000 tons. All this vast output is cared for by one company, whose scows take it at the various dumping places along the North and East rivers and carry it away to its plant at Barren Island. The utilization of the garbage of the other boroughs will soon be conducted in the same manner. The city pays $1132,000 a year for the disposal of the Manhattan garbage, $47,000 for that of Brooklyn and $54 a day for that of The Bronx. The garbage of Richmond and Queens boroughs is reduced to asses at the present time in crematories, but will soon be utilized as soon a plants are perfected.

Should one visit the utilization at Barren Island, New York, or on the east bank of the Schuylkill River, Philadelphia, he would find that it is not the ill smelling place he had anticipated. The air, instead, is filled with an odor a little like licorice, a little like caramel. A scow unloads on tho shore and its contents are carried up a long incline, by means of the ever ascending cross arms of two endless chains. At the top of the building it slides along a conveyer, to be dumped into long rows of cylindrical vats with conical bases. Each is called a "digester," and holds eight to ten tons. When partly filled water is added and the chamber is closed tight. At the same time steam is turned on, and the watery mass is permitted to boil for six hours.

The cooking completed, a workman turns a stopcock at tho bottom of tho digester, and the boiling contents drop into a receptacle below. This is not seen, and only a few sports of steam show where the connecting chambers are not wholly airtight. The receivers have bottoms that slant in toward the bottom, where through holes much of the water is drained off. This is collected in tanks and the grease is skimmed off. It is now called "stick water."

The solid mass is carried away on another set of conveyors to presses. It is squeezed until the last drop runs out of the "cheeses." From this liquid arises a great amount of grease, which is also drained off. The residue is then dried, broken up into line particles, screened and sold as fertilizer, if a high grade of fertilizer is wanted, the fluffy, brown product, which is called tankage, is soaked in the stick water, and then dried again. This final product is back, and contains considerably more ammonia and potash than the brown product. It has smell like burnt sugar. From 100 tons taken from the scow, 70 per cent is water, 3 per cent is grease and 25 per cent is fertilizer. The coarser tankage, which is about - per cent of the total product, and which cannot be used to enrich the soil of orchard or pasture, is used as fuel to furnish the plant with power.

In such a soap factory the oil is mixed with an alkali, together with tallow, cocoa oil, linseed oil and perfumery, in a tank holding about forty thousand pounds. It is boiled every other day for a week. only a skilled soap maker, who has watched these alternate boilings and coolings, can tell when this stage of the process is complete. Then the fluid is pumped into crotching machines, consisting of iron cylinders with pockets of cold running water, where the soap is hardened. The manufacturer now dries his product, cuts it by machinery, which will crate a hundred cakes with one stroke, stamps it with his brand, wraps it with a covering, either of paper or tinfoil, as becomes its quality, and ships it to all parts of the world. Thus many a ton of soap comes back to this port from across the sea which might say, had it speech and sentiment, "Behold the land of my an ancestors!"

Here at Persuasive Essay Topics of Today and Yesterday we're giddy with pleasure to bring you the great news about household soaps including the ever popular trash soap. The ancient peoples of 1903 may have been a bit dense about certain modern things like soap on a rope, but they knew the soap they had. They knew that with enough hard work, inventiveness, arm sweat, and perfume, they could turn garbage into a more or less great wash. The astronauts drink their own reprocessed urine. Have we actually come so far?

Persuasive Essay Topics of Today and Yesterday is written by the dynamic team of Norm and Vicky Morrison, miners of great stories from the past for the world of tomorrow. Their latest works include a poignant website about the common Dog Flea Treatment. It's a tear jerker and should not be missed! This is on the heels of their world famous and award winning Dog Flea Allergy web page.