An Improved Manufacture of Soap Tablets.
Year: 1898

page_text: An Improved Manufacture of Soap Tablets.
I, CHARLES BILLING, 136, Upper Frederick Street, City of Liverpool, County of
Lancaster, England, Chemist, do hereby declare the nature of this invention to
be as follows:
To render the reading matter usually put on soap conspicuous and legible at a
distance by stamping it with a stamp bearing the reading matter smeared with
colour, colour printing on soap, to do away with the common practice of im-
pregnating the whole body or mass of soap with pigment by stamping a variety of
soap with its particular name in the corresponding colour; thus rose soap instead
of having the red colour distributed through its mass shall be printed or stamped
with red lettering or mark, cucumber soap in the same way, but with a green
lettering or mark.
Date 1 J
1000
I, CHARLES BILLING, of 136, Upper Frederick Street, Liverpool, Chemist, do
hereby declare the nature of this invention and in what manner the same is to be
performed, to be particularly described and ascertained in and by the following
statement:-
In soap tablets as ordinarily manufactured, the name, trademark, and other
device stamped thereon are difficult to read, being in the same colour as the body
of the soap, while owing to fragility of soap the embossing is necessarily in very
low relief, and is very liable to be made illegible by accidental disfigurement.
Now by my invention I obtain a cake of soap in which the name, trademark,
etcetera, is very observable and readable, even when it has been subjected to undue
pressure, such as with ordinary soap tablets would make them utterly illegible.
The invention consists essentially in forming the lettering trademark or other
device, or ornamentation on or in the soap coloured differently from the body of
the soap. This can be done in a variety of ways. In the stamping machine a
system of inking the hollows in the die before each pressure can be employed, or
the embossing machine can have an arrangement of colouring pad to immediately
follow the die so that as the die rises after stamping a piece of soap, a colouring
roller or pad passes over the impression and colours the top of the letters or the die
can be formed as a thick stencil plate surmounted by a pad. As the die comes
D037

page_text: down on to the soap, the soap forced through the stencil plate is coloured by the
pad above. It will be obvious however that once give the idea of combined stamp-
ing and colouring pad, any number of ways can be devised for colouring the upper
surface of the embossed parts with colouring material. Another plan and equally
efficacious consists in having the design in intaglio instead of in relief, in which
case the die is inked on its protruding surfaces with any required colour by a roller
passing over it or otherwise before the die presses into the soap. A third plan for
performing the operation is to make the device in coloured soap on a card or other
medium in reverse, then press the card on the soap so that the device shall stick
to it, and then remove the card. For a long time past rose soaps have been
coloured a rose colour, cucumber soaps with a cucumber colour, and so on. Now
these colouring matters are deleterious to the soap, and are preferably avoided.
By my invention the lettering alone can be coloured with the requisite colour,
the remaining soap being white. In this way practically the same effect is pro-
duced as on the old plan without the deleterious effects of the colour.
Having now particularly described and ascertained the nature of my said in-
vention, and in what manner the same is to be performed, I declare that what I
claim is-
The herein described manufacture of soap tablets in which the trademark,
ornamentation, or other device, is printed, stamped, or formed, on the soup in a
different colour to the body of the soap, whereby all the advantages of colouring
are obtained without its deleterious effect on the body of the soap and the name,
trademark, ornamentation, etcetera, is much more legible.
Dated this 7th day of January 1899
.
CHARLES BILLING.