"... using gasoline as a household cleaning fluid (?!)"

My brother-in-law taught me to use lighter fluid to clean glue off floor tiles. My guess is gasoline, also being a petroleum-based product, is good at lifting oils or oil-based substances from a surface, so that's why they were using gasoline as a cleaning fluid.

My laundromat has stickers on the dryers warning not to dry anything that was cleaned in solvents!?! I've used solvents to clean spots, but always wash the new-fangled way afterwards. I love these old public service films...great music in the backround.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cleaning

Dry cleaning uses non-water-based solvents to remove dirt and stains from clothes. The potential for using petroleum based solvents in this manner was first discovered in the mid-19th century by French dye-works owner Jean Baptiste Jolly, who noticed that his tablecloth became cleaner after his maid spilled kerosene on it, and from this observation developed a service to clean other people's clothes in this manner, which he termed "nettoyage à sec," or "dry cleaning" in English.[1]

Early dry cleaners used petroleum-based solvents, such as gasoline and kerosene. Concerns over flammability led William Joseph Stoddard, a dry cleaner from Atlanta, to develop Stoddard solvent as a slightly less flammable alternative to gasoline-based solvents. The use of highly flammable petroleum solvents led to many fires and explosions, which resulted in heavy regulation of dry cleaners.

After World War I, dry cleaners began using various chlorinated solvents. These solvents were much less flammable than petroleum solvents and had much greater cleaning power. By the mid-1930s the dry cleaning industry had adopted tetrachloroethylene (perchloroethylene) as a standard, colloquially called "perc," as the ideal solvent. It is stable, nonflammable, and has excellent cleaning power and is gentle to most garments.

Expired in Queue - 4 day limit.