In the past, it was common for people to use urine to clean their clothes.
Historically, urine has had many uses, and washing clothes is just one of them. People use the urine for general bleaching and washing, and the urine is also used for stuffing, a process used to treat wool before it is sold. In addition to being used as a laundry cleaner, urine was also historically used in toothpaste, which may seem unattractive in the modern world.
The trick to using urine for bleaching is to let it sit, encouraging ammonia development by allowing the urine to react with air. The resulting ammonia is the cleaning agent, not the urine itself. Once the ammonia has developed, the clothes can be soaked in the urine or small amounts of the liquid can be used to treat stains and stains. For full wool, people traditionally poured old urine over the wool in a large tank, and people walked over the wool, shaking it off and allowing the urine to soak in to clean it.
When laundries used urine for bleaching, it was a pretty smelly process. The urine had to be left in vats for weeks to develop the necessary ammonia levels and could leave an unpleasant odor after being used as a cleaner. In ancient Rome, urine was taxed because people considered it very valuable and was collected in various public places for sale in laundromats. Well, during the Tudor era in England, urine was used for bleaching; those white thugs associated with the Tudors would not have been possible without a little piss.
You may not find a situation where people use urine for whitening in the modern world, but the legacy of this cleaning tradition lives on in the form of many products. Many cleaners today continue to use ammonia-based products, even though they are not usually derived from urine. You might even have some ammonia under the sink; In that case, you may be familiar with the cleaning power of this chemical.
Historical novels set in a time when people used urine to whiten often include a reference to this tradition, because people find it interesting and perhaps a little morbidly fascinating. Urine was sometimes called “chamber lye,” a polite euphemism referring to the cleansing power of urine and its source, the humble chamber pot. In addition to urine, people also used things like wood ash as a stain remover, taking advantage of the natural caustic soda in the ash.
By the way, the ammonia in the urine will react with the actual bleach.
