A Barber Pole At Home

In 1919 Indianapolis, MIT Professor Frank Shields set out to create a less irritating shave. The result was the invention of Barbasol, a shaving cream that was ready to apply, no working into a lather needed. It became a very popular shaving cream after its introduction. Barbasol was first manufactured under the Napco Corporation name, a company Frank Shields started before inventing Barbasol. After the shaving cream sales increased, they outgrew Napco, and The Barbasol Company was created in 1920.

Some provocative advertisements and noted celebrities endorsed Barbasol during the 1920s and 1930s. For the 1938 Indianapolis 500, Barbasol sponsored a car painted to look like a tube of shaving cream. It completed only 166 laps, but the Barbasol car finished tenth the following year. By the mid-1950s, design engineer Robert P. Kaplan of Rochester, NY, invented and patented the first aerosol shaving cream can, and the Barbasol Company changed the formula from a thick cream in a tube to a soft, fluffy foam. The longevity of the barberpole-designed aerosol cans continues to be an unmistakable icon for razor shaving.

Pfizer bought The Barbasol Company in 1962. They developed a wide variety of Barbasol products and options to complement the original formula. Interestingly, the original cream in the tube was still manufactured until 2019. The "Barbasol 1919" Classic Shaving Cream was for the brand's 100th anniversary. Barbasol has been owned by Perio, Inc. of Dublin, Ohio since 2001.

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in a 1930 Barbasol advertisement.

Sulfa-thiazole For Me

The Band-Aid was invented in 1920 by a Johnson & Johnson employee, Earle Dickson, for his wife who often cut or burned herself while cooking. It was dangerous back then. The prototype allowed her to dress her wounds without assistance. Dickson passed the idea on to his employer, who went on to produce and market the product as the Band-Aid. By 1924, Johnson & Johnson introduced machine-made Band-Aids. Two years later, the iconic tin packaging debuted. Once people used all the contents, the empty tins became popular canisters to hold everything from nails and buttons to marbles and baseball cards. The sale of sterilized Band-Aids began in 1939 with a little red string in the packaging to easily tear it open. 

Today, the Band-Aid brand of adhesive bandages is distributed by the consumer health company Kenvue, spun off from Johnson & Johnson in 2023. The brand has become a generic term for adhesive bandages in many countries. Well over one billion Band-Aid brand adhesive bandages have been produced.

The above illustration is from 1943

Indianapolis Movers

Headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, Bekins Van Lines, Inc. is the oldest, currently operating, and the first to specialize in moving household goods in the United States and North America. Founded by brothers John Bekius and Martin (Bekius) Bekins in 1891, Bekins began operations in Sioux City, Iowa, with just three horse-drawn vans and twelve employees. In 1894, Martin Bekins brought the business to Los Angeles.  Bekins also offers special commodities and logistic services with the United States Military being one of their largest customers. In 2012, Wheaton Van Lines became the parent company of Bekins.

Mayflower was founded in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1927 by trucker Conrad M. Gentry, formerly of Red Ball Transit Company, and International Harvester truck salesman Don F. Kenworthy. Starting with only two trucks, the business topped $500,000 by 1932 despite the Great Depression. Mayflower became the first trucking company in the industry to receive operating rights in all forty-eight states in 1940. Mayflower emerged from a 1991 bankruptcy one year later. The Unigroup, an American moving company based in Fenton, Missouri, purchased Mayflower in 1995 and moved its headquarters to the St. Louis suburb.

The Nutty Putty Story

Silly Putty was introduced to the public in 1950. Initially, the substance was an attempt to create a synthetic rubber substitute during World War II. While working for General Electric in 1943, James Wright combined boric acid and silicone oil in a test tube to create a new rubbery substance, an intriguing “nutty putty.” As he began to play with it, his accidental discovery bounced higher than rubber, stretched to great distances, snapped with sharp tugs, and could pick up ink from any printed matter. 

Without a practical purpose, the putty was passed around among friends. In 1949, it eventually found its way into the hands of a toy store owner whose marketing consultant, Peter Hodgson, identified the putty potential and purchased the rights from General Electric to sell the stuff himself. Hodgson packaged it in small plastic eggs and named it Silly Putty. After being featured in a New Yorker article, sales surged to 250,000 in just three days. Since its introduction, more than 300 million Silly Putty eggs have been sold.

More silly details at THOUGHTCO. and how to make it yourself.

Kutol-Dough

Kutol was founded in Louisville, Kentucky in 1912 and originally sold powdered hand cleaner and a few other cleaning products. Kutol was floundering during the next decade. Saving the company from failure, Cleo McVicker bought Kuto in 1927 and made it profitable. He then purchased the company from Precision Metal Workers, owners of Kutol, and worked with Kroger to manufacture the largest seller of wallpaper cleaner "putty" in the world. But time waits for no one. By the 1950s, the days of cleaning sooty build-up from walls came to an end. The coal-burning furnaces were being replaced by cleaner natural gas or electricity. 

As the saying goes, "It's not what you know but who you know." McVicker's sister-in-law, Kay Zufall, tested the nontoxic material for modeling projects on her kindergarten students and they loved molding it into all kinds of shapes. Zufall also suggested the Play-Doh name. The original odor might best be described as the comforting smell of vanilla wheat dough. The McVickers formed the Rainbow Crafts Company to make  Play-Doh Modeling Compound in 1956. After several buy-outs, Hasbro now owns the company. Play-Doh has grown into a worldwide franchise generating a lot of dough for selling over 3 billion cans since becoming a child’s toy.

Pulp Illusions

In 1911, Neil C. Ward, a California-born beverage chemist, perfected the blending process, making the drink palatable and commercially viable. Five years later Ward partnered with Clayton J. Howel to form the Orange Crush Company. Howel had previously developed "Howel's Orange Julep," an orange syrup. The headquarters for the company was in Chicago with laboratories in Los Angeles. Soft drinks of the time often carried the surname of the inventor along with the product name. Howel sold the rights to use his name in conjunction with his first brand so it premiered as Ward's Orange Crush. 

Originally, artificial orange pulp was added to their bottles creating an illusion of freshly squeezed juice. The pulp deception was soon removed from the bottles. Bottles were originally ribbed in clear glass but in 1937 the drink was bottled in brown glass. The bottle design eventually discontinued the amber glass and ribs for a larger clear bottle giving it a fresher, more modern appearance.

The single orange flavor was market-limiting and the name was changed to simply Crush, offering several flavors. Keurig Dr Pepper now owns the Crush brand.

Pictured is the clear bottle, circa 1920

Inkblots and Clouds

The Rorschach test, used for interpreting "ambiguous designs" to assess an individual's personality, goes back to Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli. However, Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922) was the first to establish a systematic approach to a psychometric examination in 1921. Rorschach's art education helped develop a set of patterned inkblots to determine an individual's perception of objects, shapes, or scenery into meaningful things. During testing the individual describes what they see in each one with a therapist interpreting the person's answers appropriately. The most common being faces or other pattern forms in nature that are not obvious at the outset. Trained artists or graphic designers may find it easier to guess a "hidden" picture. The interpretations of cloud formations might yield additional results of personality or creativity traits. Appropriate as weather permits.

The Rorschach test is best used for subjects aged five to adulthood. There are ten ambiguous inkblots, each printed on a separate white card, each near-perfect bilateral symmetry. Rorschach experimented with both asymmetric and symmetric images before choosing the latter. While symmetry has a disadvantage in that it may result in stereotypical answers, it also makes conditions the same for right and left-handed subjects and it facilitates interpretation for certain blocked subjects. Symmetry makes possible the interpretation of whole scenes.

Today, the Rorschach is merely a relic of psychology's past, simply pseudoscience, and its usefulness is debatable. Different psychologists might draw different findings from the same data suggesting the results are subjective rather than objective. Certain United States courts deem the test inadmissible. The controversy regarding the Rorschach test may center on the word "appropriate." Trained and skilled professionals must utilize the test in an appropriate manner, in the appropriate settings, and to answer appropriate clinical questions. It is still most useful for diagnosing schizophrenia, Hermann Rorschach's original intent.

See all 10 RORSCHACH inkblots.