An Accident That Changed How America Dressed
The dry cleaning industry was born, as many great inventions are, from a spill. Around 1825, a Parisian dye-works operator named Jean-Baptiste Jolly noticed that a kerosene lamp accidentally overturned onto a tablecloth had left the fabric not ruined, but cleaner. The petroleum solvent had dissolved grease and dirt that water would have set permanently. Jolly, an entrepreneur with a tailor's eye for an opportunity, began offering a cleaning service using turpentine and other petroleum-based liquids — and a global industry quietly began.
Across the Atlantic, the story had already started. In 1821, a New York tailor and businessman named Thomas L. Jennings received a United States patent for a process he called dry scouring — a method of cleaning garments without water that predated the European discovery by four years. His patent made him the first African American to hold a U.S. patent in recorded history, and the business it launched would fund one of the most remarkable stories of early American entrepreneurship.
What united these two pioneers was a simple insight: water, the universal cleaner, was also a universal destroyer of fine fabric. Wool shrank. Silk warped. Embroidery bled. The delicate garments of the well-dressed required something gentler — and petroleum, it turned out, could dissolve fat-based stains that water could never touch.
Thomas L. Jennings: America's First Dry Cleaning Pioneer
Thomas L. Jennings was thirty years old when he received U.S. Patent No. 3306X on March 3, 1821. He operated a thriving tailoring and dry-scouring shop on Church Street in lower Manhattan, catering to New York's middle and upper classes who needed their fine wool coats and silk gowns cleaned without risking damage from water and lye soap.
What makes Jennings remarkable — beyond the technical ingenuity of his invention — is what he did with the financial reward. Bound by the constraints of a country where his freedom was never fully guaranteed, Jennings used the proceeds from his patent and business to purchase the freedom of his wife and children, who were enslaved. He went on to become a leading abolitionist and a key figure in the First Colored Presbyterian Church of New York, funding legal challenges to racial discrimination in public transportation decades before the Civil War.
His patent document was destroyed in a government fire and has never been recovered, leaving historians to piece together his story from court records, newspaper accounts, and community archives. But his legacy is unambiguous: he built a profitable business on a genuinely novel cleaning process, secured intellectual property rights in a country that would not grant him full citizenship, and channeled that success toward the freedom and dignity of his community. The dry cleaning industry in America did not begin in Paris. It began in New York, with a Black man who refused to accept the limits others set for him.
The Gasoline Era: Remarkable Results, Deadly Risks (1850s–1920s)
Through the latter half of the nineteenth century, dry cleaning shops proliferated in American cities under names like French laundry, dye house, or simply scouring establishment. The solvents in use — gasoline, benzene, carbon tetrachloride, and turpentine — were spectacularly effective at lifting grease, wax, and oil-based stains from delicate fabrics. They were also spectacularly dangerous.
Gasoline vapor is heavier than air. It pools along floors and collects in basements. A single spark from a boiler, a dropped lantern, or even static electricity from the fabric itself could ignite an entire shop in seconds. Newspaper accounts from the 1880s and 1890s document a grim procession of dry cleaning fires that killed workers and destroyed city blocks. In Chicago alone, the fire department recorded dozens of dry cleaner-related fires annually by 1900. Workers, many of them recent immigrants and women, absorbed benzene vapors daily in poorly ventilated back rooms, developing chronic health conditions that had no name yet in medical literature.
Despite the hazards, the industry grew because demand was real and urgent. The Gilded Age had produced a vast new middle class that dressed to signal its status. A wool suit represented weeks of wages; having it cleaned rather than replaced was an economic necessity. As the railroads spread and American cities swelled, the corner dry cleaner became as essential to urban life as the pharmacy or the grocery.
The Stoddard Solvent Breakthrough and Industry Growth (1920s–1940s)
The safety crisis of the gasoline era finally produced a serious industry response in 1924, when Atlanta dry cleaner William J. Stoddard worked with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research to develop a petroleum distillate with a much higher flash point than gasoline. Stoddard solvent — mineral spirits refined to a specific boiling range — was still flammable, but far less explosively so than the fuels that had burned down hundreds of shops. The National Institute of Dry Cleaning adopted it as the industry standard, and Stoddard's name became permanently attached to the product he helped create.
The timing was significant. The 1920s and 1930s brought mass-market prosperity to American consumers and, briefly, mass-market devastation in the Depression. Dry cleaning shops weathered the Depression better than many businesses — people still needed their good clothes maintained, and having a suit cleaned remained cheaper than buying a new one. By the late 1930s, coin-operated dry cleaning machines had appeared in storefronts, allowing customers to clean garments themselves, a precursor to today's coin laundry model.
World War II transformed the industry's scale entirely. The U.S. military required vast quantities of wool uniforms, officer's dress attire, and specialty fabrics cleaned to regulation standard. Industrial dry cleaning operations emerged near military bases across the country, and the workforce — heavily female for the duration of the war — gained technical expertise that they carried into the postwar consumer economy. By 1945, dry cleaning was no longer a luxury service for the prosperous. It was infrastructure.
The Perchloroethylene Revolution (1940s–1980s)
The chemical that would define American dry cleaning for the next eight decades arrived quietly in the 1930s and 1940s. Perchloroethylene — PERC, or tetrachloroethylene — had been known to chemists since the nineteenth century, but its commercial production became economically viable as the petrochemical industry scaled after the war. For dry cleaners, it was transformative: non-flammable, highly effective at dissolving a wide range of soils, fast-drying, and cheap to produce at industrial scale.
By the 1960s, PERC was used in an estimated 90 percent of American dry cleaning operations. The machines grew more sophisticated — closed-loop systems that recaptured and recycled solvent rather than venting it into the air — and the industry grew with the postwar economic boom that made suits, sport coats, and formal dresses the expected uniform of corporate America. The number of dry cleaning establishments in the United States peaked at roughly 35,000 by the mid-twentieth century.
The social context matters here. The postwar decades were the high-water mark of the dress culture that sustained dry cleaning. Men wore suits to offices, churches, and sporting events. Women maintained wardrobes of structured wool skirts and silk blouses that required professional care. Dry cleaning was not merely a convenience; it was a social obligation. The neighborhood dry cleaner occupied the same cultural position as the barber or the butcher — a specialist whose skill maintained the fabric of daily life.
The Environmental Reckoning: PERC Under Scrutiny (1980s–2010s)
The same chemical properties that made PERC ideal for dry cleaning — its chemical stability, its resistance to breakdown — made it a persistent environmental hazard when improperly disposed of. For decades, spent PERC had been poured down drains, into floor drains, and onto the ground behind shops. By the 1980s, the Environmental Protection Agency had begun finding PERC contamination in groundwater beneath dry cleaning establishments across the country. The chemical, it turned out, sank through soil in dense plumes that spread outward over decades, contaminating wells and aquifers sometimes blocks away from the original source.
In 1995, the EPA formally classified PERC as a likely human carcinogen. Long-term occupational exposure was linked to elevated rates of bladder cancer, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and esophageal cancer among dry cleaning workers. Residents living above contaminated groundwater faced elevated health risks they were often unaware of for years.
The regulatory response was aggressive but uneven. California led the nation, banning installation of new PERC machines in 2007 and mandating a complete phase-out by 2023 — the first such ban in the country. Other states imposed stricter emissions standards and required expensive vapor-recovery equipment. Small shop owners, many of them immigrant families who had purchased operations without understanding the liability they were inheriting, found themselves on the hook for six-figure site cleanup costs. The EPA's Superfund program listed dozens of former dry cleaning sites as contaminated properties requiring remediation.
The Modern Industry: Decline, Reinvention, and What Comes Next
The U.S. dry cleaning industry generated an estimated $11 billion in annual revenue at its peak in the early 2000s. By 2024, that figure had fallen to roughly $7 billion — a decline driven not by any single factor but by a convergence of forces that reshaped American dress culture. Business casual arrived in the 1990s and never left. Wash-and-wear synthetic fabrics reduced the cleaning burden on everyday clothing. Remote work, accelerated by the pandemic, collapsed demand for formal office attire almost overnight for a significant portion of the workforce.
The shops that have survived adapted. Green alternatives to PERC — liquid carbon dioxide cleaning, silicone-based solvents like D5, and professionally managed wet cleaning using computer-controlled aqueous processes — have given environmentally conscious consumers and regulators a viable path forward. On-demand pickup and delivery services, operated through apps, have brought dry cleaning into the platform economy and attracted younger customers who would never seek out a storefront. Boutique operators in major cities have built premium brands around sustainable cleaning practices, charging prices that would have seemed absurd to the neighborhood cleaners of the 1950s.
The arc from Thomas Jennings' 1821 patent to a smartphone-scheduled garment pickup is a two-hundred-year story of chemistry, labor, immigration, environmental consequence, and the enduring human desire to look presentable. The industry that accident-prone kerosene lamps built is smaller than it once was, but it is still here — still essential to anyone who owns a wool suit or a silk dress, still navigating the gap between what we wear and what our machines can safely clean.