ABSTRACT
Surfactants are an enormously important group of chemicals and have been known for thousands of years. The earliest surfactant-like compounds were, of course, not synthetic but of natural origin, found by careful observations of situations happening in daily life. Although several thousand years passed without real progress, modern chemistry accelerated this development, and the time of understanding the rst studied natural surface active compounds such as fatty acids and fatty alcohols until the most modern special surfactants of these days has been less than a century.
