The reports of myriad uses from all latitudes and longitudes did not surprise Vaseline’s inventor, Robert Augustus Chesebrough, a Brooklyn chemist, who lived to the age of ninety-six and attributed his longevity to Vaseline. He himself ate a spoonful of it every day.
In 1859, Robert Chesebrough was searching not for a new pharmaceutical unguent but for a way to stave off bankruptcy. At a time when kerosene was a major source of home and industrial power, his Brooklyn-based kerosene business was threatened by the prospect of cheaper petroleum fuel from an oil boom in Pennsylvania.
The young Brooklyn chemist journeyed to Titusville, Pennsylvania, heart of the oil strike, with the intention of entering the petroleum business. His chemist’s curiosity, though, was piqued by a pasty paraffin-like residue that stuck annoyingly to drilling rods, gumming them into inactivity. The field workers Chesebrough questioned had several unprintable names for the stuff that clogged their pumps, but no one had a hint as to its chemical nature. Workers had discovered one practical use for it: rubbed on a wound or burn, the paste accelerated healing.
Chesebrough returned to Brooklyn not with an oil partnership but with jars of the mysterious petroleum waste product. Months of experimentation followed, in which he attempted to extract and purify the paste’s essential ingredient.
That compound turned out to be a clear, smooth substance he called “petroleum jelly.” Chesebrough became his own guinea pig. To test the jelly’s healing properties, he inflicted various minor, and some major, cuts, scratches, and bums on his hands and arms. Covered with the paste extract, they seemed to heal quickly and without infection. By 1870, Chesebrough was manufacturing the world’s first Vaseline Petroleum Jelly.
There are two views on the origin of the name Vaseline, and Chesebrough seems to have discouraged neither. In the late 1800s, his friends maintained that he dreamed up the name, during the early days of purifying the substance, from the practice of using his wife’s flower vases as laboratory beakers. To “vase” he tagged on a popular medical suffix of that day, “line.” However, members of the production company he formed claimed that Chesebrough more scientifically compounded the word from the German wasser, “water,” and the Greek elaion, “olive oil.”
As he had been the product’s chief guinea pig, Robert Chesebrough also became its staunchest promoter. In a horse and buggy, he traveled the roads of upper New York State, dispensing free jars of Vaseline to anyone who promised to try it on a cut or burn. The public’s response was so favorable that within a half year Chesebrough employed twelve horse-and-buggy salesmen, offering the jelly for a penny an ounce.
New Englanders, though, were dabbing Vaseline on more than cuts and burns. Housewives claimed that the jelly removed stains and rings from wood furniture, and that it glisteningly polished and protected wood surfaces. They also reported that it gave a second life to dried leather goods. Farmers discovered that a liberal coating of Vaseline prevented outdoor machinery from rusting. Professional painters found that a thin spread of the jelly prevented paint splatters from sticking to floors. But the product was most popular with druggists, who used the pure, clean ointment as a base for their own brands of salves, creams, and cosmetics.
By the turn of the century, Vaseline was a staple of home medicine chests. Robert Chesebrough had transformed a gummy, irksome waste product into a million-dollar industry. In 1912, when a disastrous fire swept through the headquarters of a large New York insurance company, Chesebrough was proud to learn that the burn victims were treated with Vaseline. It became a hospital standard. And the then-burgeoning automobile industry discovered that a coating of the inert jelly applied to the terminals of a car battery prevented corrosion. It became an industry standard. And a sports standard too. Long-distance swimmers smeared it on their bodies, skiers coated their faces, and baseball players rubbed it into their gloves to soften the leather.
Throughout all these years of diverse application, Vaseline’s inventor never missed his daily spoonful of the jelly. In his late fifties, when stricken with pleurisy, Chesebrough instructed his private nurse to give him regular whole-body Vaseline rubdowns. He liked to believe that, as he joked, he “slipped from death’s grip” to live another forty years, dying in 1933.
Listerine: 1880, St. Louis, Missouri
Developed by a Missouri physician, Joseph Lawrence, Listerine was named in honor of Sir Joseph Lister, the nineteenth-century British surgeon who pioneered sanitary operating room procedures. Shortly after its debut in 1880, the product became one of America’s most successful and trusted commercial mouthwashes and gargles.
In the 1860s, when the science of bacteriology was still in its infancy, Lister campaigned against the appalling medical hygiene of surgeons. They operated with bare hands and in street clothes, wearing shoes that had trekked over public roads and hospital corridors. They permitted spectators to gather around an operating table and observe surgery in progress. And as surgical dressings, they used pads of pressed sawdust, a waste product from mill floors. Although surgical instruments were washed in soapy water, they were not heat-sterilized or chemically disinfected. In many hospitals, postoperative mortality was as high as 90 percent.
Before Lister pioneered sanitary operating conditions, postoperative mortality in many hospitals ran as high as 90 percent.
The majority of doctors, in England and America, scoffed at Lister’s plea for “antiseptic surgery.” When he addressed the Philadelphia Medical Congress in 1876, his speech received a lukewarm reception. But Lister’s views on germs impressed Dr. Joseph Lawrence. In his St. Louis laboratory, Lawrence developed an antibacterial liquid, which was manufactured locally by the Lambert Pharmacal Company (later to become the drug giant Warner-Lambert).
In 1880, to give the product an appropriately antiseptic image, the company decided to use the name of Sir Joseph Lister, then the focus of controversy on two continents. Surgeons, employing many of Lister’s hygienic ideas, were beginning to report fewer postoperative infections and complications, as well as higher survival rates. “Listerism” was being hotly debated in medical journals and the popular press. Listerine arrived on the scene at the right time and bearing the best possible name.
The mouthwash and gargle was alleged to “Kill Germs By Millions On Contact.” And Americans, by millions, bought the product. Early advertisements pictured a bachelor, Herb, “an awfully nice fellow, with some money,” who also “plays a swell game of bridge.” But Herb’s problem, according to the copy, was that “he’s that way.”
Halitosis, not homosexuality, was Herb’s problem. But in the early years of this century, it was equally unspeakable. Americans began the Listerine habit for sweetening their breath, to the extent that as late as the mid-1970s, with scores of competing breath-freshening sprays, mints, gargles, and gums on the market, Listerine still accounted for the preponderance of breath-freshener sales in the United States.
Then Joseph Lawrence’s early belief in the potency of his product was medically challenged. A 1970s court order compelled Warner-Lambert to spend ten million dollars in advertising a disclaimer that Listerine could not prevent a cold or a sore throat, or lessen its severity.
Band-Aid: 1921, New Brunswick, New Jersey
At the 1876 Philadelphia Medical Congress, Dr. Joseph Lawrence was not the only American health worker impressed with Sir Joseph Lister’s germ-disease theory. A thirty-one-year-old pharmacist from Brooklyn, Robert Johnson, had his life changed by the eminent British surgeon’s lecture.
Lister deplored the use of pressed sawdust surgical dressings made from wood-mill wastes. He himself disinfected every bandage he used in surgery by soaking it in an aqueous solution of carbolic acid.
Johnson, a partner in the Brooklyn pharmaceutical supply firm of Seabury & Johnson, was acquainted with the sawdust dressings, as well as with an array of other nonsterile paraphernalia used in American hospitals. He persuaded his two brothers—James, a civil engineer, and Edward, an attorney—to join him in his
attempt to develop and market a dry, prepackaged, antiseptic surgical dressing along the lines that Lister had theoretically outlined at the congress.
By the mid-1880s, the brothers had formed their own company, Johnson & Johnson, and produced a large dry cotton-and-gauze dressing. Individually sealed in germ-resistant packages, the bandages could be shipped to hospitals in remote areas and to doctors on military battlefields, with sterility guaranteed.
The Johnson brothers prospered in the health care field. In 1893, they introduced American mothers to the fresh scent of Johnson’s Baby Powder, including it as a giveaway item in the multipurpose Maternity Packets sold to midwives.
On the horizon, though, was the sterile product that soon would appear in home medicine chests worldwide.
It was in 1920 that James Johnson, the firm’s president, heard of a small homemade bandage created by one of his employees, Earle Dickson. A cotton buyer in the company’s purchasing department, Dickson had recently married a young woman who was accident-prone, frequently cutting or burning herself in the kitchen. The injuries were too small and minor to benefit from the company’s large surgical dressings. As Earle Dickson later wrote of the Band-Aid: “I was determined to devise some manner of bandage that would stay in place, be easily applied and still retain its sterility.”
To treat each of his wife’s injuries, Dickson took a small wad of the company’s sterile cotton and gauze, placing it at the center of an adhesive strip. Tiring of making individual bandages as they were needed, Dickson conceived of producing them in quantity, and of using a crinoline fabric to temporarily cover the bandages’ sticky portions. When James Johnson watched his employee strip off two pieces of crinoline and easily affix the bandage to his own finger, Johnson knew the firm had a new first-aid product.
The name Band-Aid, which would eventually become a generic term for small dressings, was suggested by a superintendent at the company’s New Brunswick plant, W. Johnson Kenyon. And those first adhesive bandages were made by hand, under sterile conditions, in assembly line fashion.
Sales were initially poor. One of the company’s strongest promoters of the Band-Aid Brand Adhesive Bandage was Dr. Frederick Kilmer, head of the company’s research department (and father of the poet Joyce Kilmer). Kilmer had been responsible for the development and marketing of Johnson’s Baby Powder in the 1890s, and in the 1920s he joined the campaign to promote Band-Aids. He published medical and popular articles on the product’s ability to prevent infection and accelerate healing of minor cuts and burns. One of the company’s cleverest advertising ploys was to distribute an unlimited number of free Band-Aids to Boy Scout troops across the country, as well as to local butchers.
The popularity of Band-Aids steadily increased. By 1924, they were being machine-produced, measuring three inches long by three quarters of an inch wide. Four years later, Americans could buy Band-Aids with aeration holes in the gauze pad to increase airflow and accelerate healing.
Band-Aids’ inventor, Earle Dickson, went on to enjoy a long and productive career with Johnson & Johnson, becoming a vice president and a member of the board of directors. As for his invention, the company estimates that since the product was introduced in 1921, people around the world have bandaged themselves with more than one hundred billion Band-Aids.
Witch Hazel: Post-7th Century, England
A mild alcoholic astringent applied to cleanse cuts, witch hazel was made from the leaves and bark of the witch hazel plant, Hamamelis. The shrub, whose pods explode when ripe, was used both practically and superstitiously in Anglo-Saxon times.
Because the plant’s yellow flowers appear in late autumn, after the branches are bare of leaves and the bush is seemingly dead, the inhabitants of the British Isles ascribed supernatural powers to the witch hazel tree. They believed, for instance, that a witch hazel twig, in a high priest’s skilled hands, could single out a criminal in a crowd.
A more practical application of a pliant witch hazel twig was as a divining rod to locate underground water in order to sink wells. In fact, the word “witch” in the plant’s name comes from the Anglo-Saxon wice, designating a tree with pliant branches.
The Anglo-Saxons’ interest in the witch hazel plant led to the assumption that they developed the first witch hazel preparation. What is known with greater confidence is that American Indian tribes taught the Pilgrims how to brew witch hazel bark as a lotion for soothing aches, bruises, and abrasions.
For the next two hundred years, families prepared their own supplies of the lotion. Its uses in America were numerous: as an antiseptic, a facial cleanser and astringent, a topical painkiller, a deodorant, a base for cosmetic lotions, and as a cooling liquid (similar to today’s splashes) in hot weather, for the rapid evaporation of witch hazel’s alcohol stimulates the cooling effect of sweating.
In 1866, a New England clergyman, Thomas Newton Dickinson, realized that a profitable market existed for a commercial preparation. He located his distilling plant in Essex, Connecticut, on the banks of the Connecticut River, adjacent to fields of high-quality American witch hazel shrubs, Hamamelis virginiana.
In the 1860s, Dickinson’s Witch Hazel was sold by the keg to pharmacists, who dispensed it in bottles to customers. The keg bore the now-familiar “bull’s-eye” trademark, and Dickinson’s formula for witch hazel proved so successful that it is basically unchanged to this day. It is one product that has been in medicine chests for at least three hundred years, if not longer.
Vick’s VapoRub: 1905, Selma, North Carolina
Before the turn of the century, the most popular treatments for chest and head colds were poultices and plasters. They were not all that different from the mint and mustard formulations used in the Near East five thousand years ago. Unfortunately, both the ancient and the modern preparations, which were rubbed on the chest and forehead, frequently resulted in rashes or blisters, for their active ingredients, which produced a tingling sensation of heat, often were skin irritants.
There was another popular cold remedy, but one potentially more dangerous. Physicians recommended, with caution, that children suffering from the croup or a cold inhale hot herbal vapors. These temporarily opened the nasal passages while a child’s head was over the steam, but many a child (and adult) received facial burns from overly hot water. Before gas and electric stoves would provide a measured and steady source of energy to boil water, coal or wood fires could abruptly vary in intensity, producing a sudden geyser of scalding steam.
Many a druggist sought to produce a skin-tingling, sinus-opening ointment that combined the best aspects of plasters and vapors with none of their drawbacks. For Lunsford Richardson, a druggist from Selma, North Carolina, two events occurred that led him to the perfect product. The first was the popularity of petroleum jelly as a safe, neutral base for salves and cosmetics. The second was the introduction in America of menthol, a waxy, crystalline alcohol extract from oil of peppermint, which released a pungent vapor.
Menthol had first caught the public’s attention in 1898 in the form of a sore-muscle balm named Ben-Gay. Developed by, and named after, a French pharmacist, Jules Bengué, the product combined menthol’s heat-producing effects with an analgesic pain reliever, salicylate of methyl, in a base of lanolin. Touted in Europe and America as a remedy for gout, rheumatoid arthritis, and neuralgia, Bengué’s balm was also reported to clear the sinuses during a head cold.
Richardson listened to testimonials for Ben-Gay from his own customers. In 1905, he blended menthol with other ingredients from the drugstore shelf into a base of petroleum jelly, producing Richardson’s Croup and Pneumonia Cure Salve, a forehead and chest rub. Vaporized by body heat, the chemicals opened blocked air passages at the same time they stimulated blood circulation through skin contact. That year, Richardson could not work fast enough to fill orders from cold sufferers and other druggists.
Searching for a catchier name for his already popular product, Richardson turned to his brother-in-law, a physician named Joshua Vi
ck. It was in Vick’s drugstore that Richardson had begun his career in pharmacology, and it was in Vick’s backroom laboratory that Richardson concocted his vapor rub. He named the product in honor of his relative and mentor.
Richardson advertised in newspapers, with coupons that could be redeemed for a trial jar of Vick’s VapoRub. And he persuaded the U.S. Post Office to allow him to institute a new mailing practice, one that has since kept home mailboxes full, if not overflowing: Advertisements for Vick’s VapoRub were addressed merely to “Boxholder,” the equivalent of today’s “Occupant.” Before then, all mail had to bear the receiver’s name.
Sales were strong. Then a tragic twist of fate caused them to skyrocket.
In the spring of 1918, a flu epidemic erupted in U.S. military bases. It was carried by troops to France, then to Spain, where the virus became more virulent, earning it the name Spanish Flu. It spread to China. By the fall of that year, an even deadlier strain broke out in Russia.
The death toll was enormous. The flu killed one half of one percent of the entire population of the United States and England, 60 percent of the Eskimos in Nome, Alaska. In just six weeks, 3.1 percent of the U.S. recruits at Camp Sherman died. Ocean liners docked with up to 7 percent fewer passengers than had embarked. The epidemic was characterized aptly by what fourteenth-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio said of an earlier scourge: “How many valiant men, how many fair ladies, breakfasted with their kinsfolk and that same night supped with their ancestors in the other world.”
Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things Page 33