It's one of those wonderful quirks of history that many of the innovations we rely on daily were never actually intended to be invented. Sometimes a failed experiment yields an unexpected breakthrough. Sometimes the person responsible isn't even an inventor at all — just someone going about their ordinary business. That's precisely what happened on December 28, 1849, when a lamp was accidentally knocked over, sending its reservoir of kerosene cascading across a tablecloth. As the kerosene slowly evaporated, those watching were surprised to see that stains on the fabric disappeared right along with it.
Nobody knows for certain the precise date when this serendipitous moment occurred — that detail has been lost to the passage of time. What we do know is that Jean Baptiste Jolly receives credit for establishing the very first commercial dry cleaning business, a shop in Paris he named "Teinturerie Jolly Bellin," back in 1845.
The term "dry cleaning" came about simply because the process didn't involve water. While most modern fabrics hold up just fine when washed with water, that wasn't the reality in the nineteenth century. Wealthy individuals who owned fine garments couldn't risk submerging them in water without potentially ruining the delicate fabric. Around this same period, petroleum producers made a convenient discovery of their own — the kerosene they had been discarding as a mere byproduct of gasoline turned out to be an excellent lamp oil.
By the 1840s, people had begun bringing their finest garments to be cleaned using kerosene as a solvent. The obvious problem, as you might imagine, is that kerosene is highly flammable — making dry cleaning shops genuinely hazardous places. Explosions and accidents occurred with alarming regularity, which drove an urgent search for alternative chemicals that could match kerosene's cleaning power without the fire risk. The biggest leap forward in dry cleaning history arrived in the 1940s, when a chemist discovered perchloroethylene, commonly known as "perc." To this day, perc remains the most widely used solvent in the dry cleaning industry.