Textile Bleaching

Textile bleaching is the process of removing natural coloring and impurities from cloth or fiber to produce a clean white or evenly dyeable material. Before industrialization, cloth was traditionally bleached by spreading it out on grass fields for weeks or months so that sunlight and moisture would slowly lighten it, a slow, land-intensive method known as grass bleaching or crofting. Scottish chemist Charles Tennant patented bleaching powder, calcium hypochlorite, in 1799, giving textile mills a fast chemical bleaching agent that reduced bleaching time from months to hours and became one of the essential chemical inputs of the industrialized textile trade.