The Need for Clean

People love to wash things. We wash our clothes, our hands, the dishes and our cars. We’ll even power-spray the deck. But when are we truly clean?

Have you noticed that laundry detergent technology continues to change? A hundred years ago, the charlady had a tub, washboard and bar of soap (which she might have made herself). The mechanization of laundry advanced quickly. Kids in the 1940s and 1950s might remember helping their moms with the laundry by feeding the wet, clean clothes through the wringer — a device with two revolving rollers that squeezed every last drop of moisture from the clothes as it passed through the rollers. You didn’t use a bar of soap, but instead threw a cup of white soap powder into the churning water. Sometimes it had green flecks in it that did wonders with dirt. To get whites whiter, you added bleach.

Today, the panels on many automatic washing machines look more complicated than a hi-tech microwave oven, connect to your Wi-Fi and can be controlled from your smartphone. Most suggest using the latest in washing technology: pods of liquid detergent encased in a membrane that dissolves when ...