Dry Cleaning Origins

The founders of Simply Laundry were sitting around one day, discussing the business, when one of our marketing specialists asked us “who invented Dry Cleaning?”. Our curiosity piqued and we decided to Google exactly how dry cleaning came to be. We discovered that Thomas L. Jennings, an African American, was the first person to receive a patent on March 3rd, 1821 for his dry cleaning process called Dry Sourcing.  What is interesting, is that at that time, slavery hadn’t even been fully abolished in the state of New York. Nevertheless, Jennings was undeterred. So imagine how tough it would have been for him to receive a patent.

Please Click Here for a more chronological history of Dry Cleaning.