Drycleaning Institute Of Australia
Clean in Cessnock

The BIA has a prime responsibility for assistance of its members in the various areas of trivial business and parched cleaning industry related matters. These include the concern labeling standards, environmental concerns, customer service, and training and education of parched cleaners, the public and the manufacturing sector.

Drycleaning is the process of washing fabrics with fluid other than water. These solvents do not swell automatic fibers as does water, one of the major causes of shrinkage. However, new cleaning was not known until the beginning of the chemical industry in the 1800s which introduced such solvents as benzene (from petroleum), benzol (from coal tar), naphtha and petrol. Legend says parched cleaning began in France in the 1840s with an spontaneous discovery that camphene turpentine spirits, a lamp fuel, had excellent cleansing powers. The accident involves a maid or quarreling lovers who tipped over a lamp onto a dirty table cloth. When the cloth dried, the soil was gone. Spirits of turpentine had lengthy been known as a good spotting agent for grease stains. In 1690 an anonymous writer said, oil of turpentine will make rosin crumble away. It said One rubs the spots on the silk with the spirits of turpentine, this spirit evaporates and takes with it the oil in the spot. The transition among cleaners in the mid 1800s from the spot cleaning to whole dry cleaning was not fast at minimum not until the more enterprising leaders of the craft showed by their successes that all solvent immersion cleaning was indeed a fresh and profitable technique. Garments could be cleaned complete without dismembering them as was the custom in wet cleaning methods. The time it took to perform the cleaning process was very much reduced, affording further savings in labor. Fugitive colors and finishing agents were not affected or removed by solvent as they were with water. Pressing or finishing operations were much easier to carry out. All accounts credit the cleaning and dyeing firm of J. Merry in Paris with being the leading proponent of the new solvent immersion system, a business that grew out of the dyeing establishment founded in 1794 by one M. How long camphene or benzene remained as a parched cleaning solvent is unknown, but a third kind of organic solvent became available in the late 1800s. It grew out of the great industrial developments which took store in the United States after Alfred Gesner's discovery in 1852 in Ontario, Canada, of a lamp fuel he called kerosene and derived from crude petroleum. Later a useless byproduct of kerosene refining called petrol found a trivial market among dyers and scourers in the United States who were impartial beginning to turn solvent immersion techniques introduced into Europe. Petrol was the main solvent used in the United States in the early twentieth century. But petrol and other petroleum derivatives old in dry cleaning were highly flammable and explosive. The solvent was named Stoddard Solvent in dignify of the Institute's President, W. Stoddard, who had been a prime mover in developing a safer solvent. It is wholly nonflammable and greatly helped the growth of parched cleaning plants into well populated areas such as shopping centers and housing developments.