Long years ago the Deutsche Hydriewerke started marketing non-soapy detergents of the cetyl or oleyl sulfate variety. Prior to World War II, the British textile industry was as dependent on German supplies of these materials as it had been on German dyestuffs prior to World War I.
Foreseeing what was going to happen, I started in 1936 to work out a process for making cetyl, stearyl and oleyl alcohols, taking the head oil of the sperm whale as a starting point. The sperm whale's body oil differs but little from that of any other whale. The so-called head oil, however, is not an oil at all but a liquid wax; that is to say an ester of a higher aliphatic alcohol with a higher aliphatic acid, cetyl oleate or oleyl pahnitate being typical components.
It sounds simple to hydrolyze such materials and extract the alcohols from the soaps with a ...
