Dry cleaning with solvents
Lavado en seco con disolventes
- Date
- 1845 · confidence medium
- Place
- Paris, Île-de-France, France
- Credited to
- Jean-Baptiste Jolly Belin (with Thomas Jennings's 1821 antecedent)
- Field
- Tools
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
Cleaning of clothes with organic solvents (turpentine, later benzine and perchloroethylene) without water, which spares delicate fabrics that shrink or bleed. It gave rise to the professional dry-cleaning trade and to new treatments for silk and wool.
Tradition credits Jolly Belin (a spilled turpentine lamp on a tablecloth, 1845); Thomas L. Jennings, an African American, patented a 'dry scouring' process in 1821 and was the first African American patentee. Priority is disputed.
What it led to
- commercial dry cleaning from the 1850s
- cleaning of silk, wool and fabrics with unstable dyes
- use of perchloroethylene and its environmental health problems