I know when I first heard many years ago that grease is made up of soap and oil, I jumped to the conclusion that the soap was the typical animal fat stuff that we like to slather on in the shower. Obviously, I must have slept through that part of chemistry class (probably did). Fact is, the lithium IS the soap. It is lithium soap and, as it turns out, lithium makes a darn good soap for the type of application that bicycle bearings are put to. I don't have any historical evidence related to Campy grease, only that I started using it in the early '70s. Still, I saw enough of it to come to a couple of hypotheses that have not yet been shaken. First is that Campy never owned a refinery and so bought the grease from one or more other manufacturers. Second, the grease varied from year to year, possibly due to the fact that it may have come from different suppliers. Most was almost snow white, some was much more brown. Some tended to separate like cheap peanut butter, while some did not. Also, the thickness of the grease varied noticeably.
All this leads me to conclude that Campy grease was just overpriced white lithium grease in a tub. It's way-cool, feels good, works well for the application and has mechanics' mojo up the ying-yang, but there's nothing really special about it, other than someone at Campy years ago dipped a finger into a bunch of different grease samples and said "Thisa feels good" in Italian and that's what they decided to slap in the little plastic tubs with the blue lids.
Some understandable info about grease, including its history, can be found
at http://www.blf.org.uk/
Steve Barner, who rebuilt a Campy front hub last night, using up some of that precious cache of white Campy lithium-until-proven-otherwise grease, Bolton, Vermont
> >When Record was first made, Campagnolo supplied a white grease that many
> >people still mistake for lithium, when in fact it was a mixture of soap
and
> >oil. The oil in the grease tended to separate out and dissipate over
time,
> >leaving a thick yellow residue, which could be reconstituted - via the
> >oilhole - by simply adding a few drops of oil from an oilcan.
> >
> >Campy grease WAS, not is, soap and oil. Nothing seemed to cling to
> >ball-bearing as well - I miss it. Nowadays their lubricants are
space-age
> >synthetic stuff, and very $$$.
> >
> >Mind you, Campy's old soap-and-oil grease was expensive too, but mostly
> >because it was filtered 4 times and was super clean.