Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Through the brains behind Brains On, this is the moment of them. The moment of them comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Blort the Laundry Goblin. Um...
I'm the friendly little monster that lives at the bottom of your clothes dryer. It's a great place to be. Warm, clean, and a never-ending buffet of all the socks and the dryer lint I can eat. If you're wondering where your other blue and yellow striped gym sock went, it was delicious. Not to brag, but I'm a pretty adventurous eater.
Sometimes I'll sample a pair of underpants or the crumpled up tissue that you left in your pocket. But you know what I really love?
When clothing shrinks in the wash. Human clothes are often so big that I can't finish the whole portion. Laundry goblins are small. That's why we usually stick to eating socks. One time, I tasted a wool sweater that shrunk in the dryer and oh, I tell you, I ate the whole thing. Ha ha.
I think about that sweater all the time. How did it shrink? Why was it so delicious? Can I make it happen again? My friend Zoha was asking about this too. Why do clothes shrink in the wash? I'm Professor Mark Lorch. I work at the University of Hull in the UK.
So why do clothes shrink in the wash? Well, we're going to talk specifically about wool and wool is basically hair. And the reason why they shrink is because it's part of the properties of hair. And you can do this sort of experiment if you like. If you pluck a hair from your head and you pinch it between your fingers and then drag your fingers, your pinched fingers along the
in one direction it'll feel smooth and if you drag your fingers in the other direction it'll feel a bit rough and that's because your hair is made it actually has these tiny tiny little scales on it so when you're pulling it along the scales one way you can't really feel them when you're pulling it the other way you're ruffling up those scales now wool has a similar thing or a similar sort of structure and when you
wash your clothes too hot or you spin them too vigorously all of those those fibers with those scales if you like start to lock up and you end up ratcheting them together and they just all those scales interlock with each other and um and then you can't really pull them apart very well
So it's simply a result of the mechanical properties of the hair getting caught up with each other and those scales interlocking on a microscopic level.
together they produce a huge force that you just can't pull apart we may have all said they're wrenching pulling on the arms of a sweater that you've you've shrunk but it depends on how much you've shrunk it to be honest you can probably you can stretch it back out a little bit but um best bet is just to not wash them too vigorously too hot or don't put them in a tumble dryer um um uh
So, fabrics like wool are made of tiny little hairs. And if you looked at those hairs under a microscope, you'd see that they have overlapping scales on them, almost like the scales on a fish. If wool gets too hot or tumbles around too much when you're washing and drying it, it messes up those microscopic scales on the wool. They can get locked up with one another and ta-da!
The clothing shrinks into a delicious and perfectly portioned morsel for a hungry little goblin like me.
So next time you wash your clothes, definitely don't use hot water. And don't set the dryer too hot. And definitely don't sprinkle on some of that spicy sauce. I mean detergent that I love on there because I sure don't want to eat all your sweaters.
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Knee socks? Delicious!