![]() ![]() In 1873, an agreement was reached with Colgate & Company for it to distribute Vaseline nationwide in the United States. ![]() Two early commercial customers appear to have been the Edmond Fougera and Caswell-Massey drug stores.Ībove: Caswell-Massey Drug Store on the corner of 25th Street and Fifth Avenue, New York. The free distribution was later replaced by sample packs sold at a nominal charge and sent postage free to customers who wrote in for it. The free samples were made possible in part by Vaseline’s low cost. Chesebrough was the first company to distribute free samples on such a massive scale and others learnt from its success. Wholesale and retail druggists were largely disinterested in it and sales were low until he began sending out employees with carts to hand out free samples to housewives and doctors – it is estimated that over half-a-million such samples were distributed by 1873 (Williamson, Andreano, Daum & Klose, 1959, p. SalesĬhesebrough promoted Vaseline as a curative and soothing agent, as well as a base for ointments and salves. Vaseline was trademarked in Britain (1887), the United States (1878) and in a few other places such as Australia and New Zealand but similar applications failed in Germany, France, Spain, Latin America, Japan, China and elsewhere as authorities there considered that the name was too generic. In the twentieth century, this idea lost ground to the Geological Theory but by then the word had stuck. Like many other chemists of the time, Chesebrough would have believed that petroleum oil was formed by a chemical action between carbon and hydrogen in water. ![]() Chesebrough derived the name ‘Vaseline’ from a combination of ‘wasser’ (German for water) and ‘elaion’ (Greek for oil) – it was a ‘water-oil’. In 1870, he added facilities to manufacture Vaseline to his factory in Red Hook with Vaseline becoming available in 1871 (Chesebrough Manufacturing Company, 1885, p. Perfecting the method to commercially extract Vaseline from rod wax took Chesebrough a decade to develop and was not accomplished until 1869. In 1860, he had tried to patent a method using bone black to purify petroleum or coal oil.Ībove: 1860 Patent application for purifying petroleum or coal oils. … n the manufacture of “Vaseline” no acids are used, the petroleum being simply concentrated by dry heat to a jelly, and repeatedly filtered through animal charcoal, substantially as white sugar is made, and is perfectly harmless.Ĭhesebrough had been experimenting with bone black for some time. The process by which “Vaseline” is made is the only known process of deodorizing petroleum without impairing its properties for medicinal, pharmaceutical, and toilet purposes. The process Chesebrough developed for extracting Vaseline started with a careful distillation of the source material using vacuum stills to remove the light oils followed by filtering the remaining mass through bone black. It was from this material that Chesebrough eventually extracted what came to be known as Vaseline, a name he trademarked in 1872. There, according to tradition, he came across ‘rod wax’ a refuse material obtained from the tubing and rods of pumping wells. Hearing news of the strike, Robert Chesebrough visited Titusville to see for himself what prospects were available. In 1859, ‘Colonel’ Edwin Drake successfully drilled for oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania. At a factory in Red Hook, Brooklyn, he produced a range of products from the coal-oil including lighting oil – also known as paraffin oil or kerosene – which he sold under his Luxor Oil brand from his depot at 112 John Street, New York. In 1858, Robert Chesebrough went into the coal-oil business using coal-oil he purchased from the Aladdin Oil Works in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. ![]()
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