Comment by culi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by culi | Hacker News Reader

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I think it's incredibly silly how tied we are to the idea that something was invented once and then spread. Soap is literally just a fatty acid salt with some phytochemicals that have antimicrobial properties (extremely easy to come by considering most secondary metabolites of plants are specifically produced to keep them from succumbing to bacterial/fungal degradation).

Soap has probably been "invented" a million times in thousands of different cultures around the globe

Paper was invented in pre-Columbian Americas (look up amate). The earliest evidence of metallurgy (smelting, soldering, annealing, electroplating, sintering, alloying, etc) was by the Moche of the Andes who seem to eventually have went "meh" and got tired of it. Prior to Edison, there was at least 20 other inventors who "invented" incandescent lightbulbs.

We like to think of inventions as some strokes of genius that come along in a semi-random way. When in reality inventions are born to meet particular needs and those needs are caused by environmental conditions. Charles Babbage designed the first real computer (see "analytical engine") based on steam power back in 1837 but never built it out. We could've had steampunk computers back in the 19th century but it wasn't until WW1 provided a real need for it that we saw real advancements

Soap was likely "invented" and even forgotten over and over again by whoever needed and stopped needing it

> Soap is literally just a fatty acid salt with some phytochemicals that have antimicrobial properties

It sounds literally like: "monad is just monoid in category of endofunctors, what is so hard to understand?"

I think a better example would be bread. Nearly every culture observed has independently created something like bread, which is just flour and water that is kneaded and baked, and if they don't have bread they probably have noodles, which is just flour and water that is kneaded, stretched and cut into strips.

Ok what if I had said "soap is literally just a fat (e.g. deer fat) combined with a plant that, when placed in water, will kill fish."

It's almost equivalent but told through a different cosmology/epistemology

Nah it would be pretty easy to discover soap accidentally. People have been using ash to scour metal for ages. Someone scours a plate or bowl with some leftover fat or oil or grease in it and it cleans really well, because it makes a kind of soap. It only takes one person to notice this fact, and the idea catches on.

> Soap was likely "invented" and even forgotten over and over again by whoever needed and stopped needing it

At least with the Sapindus family, and probably a few other plants (like lepisanthes) that produce naturally surfactant properties, nature itself provides something akin to "soap", and has been used in bathing for long enough that we're not even sure when it even began.

Yup! Sapindus (aka Soapberries) is actually a genus... in the family Sapindaceae... in the order Sapindales. Same etymology as the phytochemical "saponins" which, besides making soap, has a ton of uses and is easy to identify

One very common use of saponin-containing plants is for stupefying fish. Get some fish in a pond, add some saponins, and dinner just floats right up to you. Although saponins are toxic humans have specifically evolved a mechanism to not digest saponins so we can safely eat them (but your dog can't!). Saponins also play a really important role in modern medicine

Saponins are quite common across many unrelated plant species. Ginseng, soapworts, horse chestnut, sapodillas, oleander, soap bark tree, and even spinach are some examples

Because of their myriad uses (as well as their particular taste) and ways to identify saponin-containing plants it's easy to imagine that, regardless of whatever cosmology some culture used to ascribe these properties, most people could easily identify these plants

OMG this, so hard. This idea is tied to the "genius" myth where we think had people like Mark Zuckerberg not come around we wouldn't have social media, or had Einstein not been born nobody else could have conceived of relativity. No, the advancement of humanity itself creates the conditions for "new" ideas to be discovered/rediscovered, and these "geniuses" are simply the individuals who, by no small achievement, pushed the idea forward.

The time creates a vacuum.

I used to think that the printing press has been invented once and then spread, how many times has the printing press with movable types been invented?

History does not repeat but it does rhyme. Afaik as I know, two people invented the press at the same time. Before people where using woodblocks to copy works. So basically the invention was : use metal instead of wood, make enough letters so you can press anything you want.

The "printing press" was invented multiple times in multiple locations.

Cast movable type was invented once and spread like wild fire.

The largest innovation from Gutenberg was finding an alloy that could withstand printing pressure and be dimensionally stable when it solidifies.

I can just imagine the reaction of a stone-ager being berated because they hadn't come up with "literally just a fatty acid salt with some phytochemicals that have antimicrobial properties". I suspect you could pick just about any tech invented in the last decade and describe it as "literally just a pick-your-adjective noun with some other random nouns that have something-or-another properties"...

Explain again why anyone would stop needing soap? (other than having departed this world...)

Turns out soap is not THAT essential to personal hygiene, if you have running water.

The point of bathing is to rub off dead skin cells, excess oil off your skin (note that I said excess). And you can actually do all that without soap.

Also note that sweat it's not that stinky when it evaporates quickly (for example, behind loose non-western clothes in a hot environment)

Soap helps a lot, of course, but the usual stench of being dirty is more because we use really tight clothes that keep sweat from evaporating

yeah for most cultures soap was probably used for cleaning other things first. In general it's a good way to loosen bits of dirt off of something. Very useful in making and maintaining fabrics. The idea to use them on our own skin likely came as a secondary innovation

Obviously it's not strictly essential at all, given how many 10s of 1000s of years humanity survived without it - but once invented among a particular population I would think its usefulness (for various purposes) would be obvious enough that unless the raw materials become impossible to obtain, production would continue.

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