Slide Soap

Lava is a heavy-duty hand cleaner in soap bar developed in 1893 by the William Waltke Company of St. Louis, Missouri. Procter & Gamble acquired the Lava and Oxydol brands in 1927. In 1995, P&G sold the Lava brand to the Block Drug Company, a pharmaceutical company based in Jersey City, New Jersey, that specialized in dental care products. Its two most popular products included Polident denture cleanser and Poli-Grip denture adhesive. By 1999, the WD-40 Company bought the Lava brand from Block Drug.

Unlike typical soap bars, Lava contained ground pumice, which gave the soap its name. The soap and pumice combination is intended to scour tar, engine grease, paint, dirt, grime, filth, and similar substances from the skin. The original beige-colored Lava bar soap, without moisturizers, is no longer manufactured.

Note: The word lava comes from Italian and is likely derived from the Latin word labes, which typically refers to a disaster, downfall, landslip, or slide.

Acting for Beans

Below are four Hollywood personalities (and one dummy) who served as spokespersons for four popular coffee brands from the 1930s through the 1970s.

Virginia Christine

San Francisco's Pioneer Steam Coffee and Spice Mills was the original name behind Folgers of 1850. Employed as a teenager, James A. Folger eventually became a full partner in the company by 1865. By 1972, Folger bought out the partners and renamed the company, J.A. Folger & Co. Skipping ahead about a century, supporting actress Virginia Christine played "Mrs. Olson," a Swedish neighbor who recommended a cup of Folgers coffee as a break from the character's hectic day in television commercials. Beginning in 1965, she played the character for twenty-one years. In 1971, Christine's hometown of Stanton, Iowa, honored her by transforming the city water tower to resemble a giant Swedish-style coffee pot.

Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy

Chase & Sanborn Coffee was created by the coffee roasting and tea and coffee importing company of the same name in 1864 in Boston, Massachusetts. Named for Caleb Chase (1831-1908) and James Sanborn (1835-1903). They were the first to sell ground coffee in sealed cans. When Standard Brands was formed in 1929, it acquired Chase & Sanborn until 1981 when the company merged into Nabisco. Nabisco sold Chase & Sanborn to Colombian, Alberto Duque in 1982. The Chase & Sanborn Hour/Program was a radio variety show that featured ventriloquist pioneer Edgar Bergen and sidekick Charlie McCarthy. Though their contract was not renewed after a decade on the program, their radio career continued until 1956 before breaking into television.

Margaret Hamilton
Introduced in 1892 by wholesale grocer Joel Cheek, Maxwell House Coffee was named in honor of the Maxwell House Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee, its first major customer. The blended coffee was so well-received, it became the hotel's house brew. In 1915, Cheek and Partner began advertising with the now-famous "Good to the last drop" slogan. Along this timeline, Maxwell House introduced its iconic coffee cans to seal in freshness. A 1970s campaign for Maxwell House featured actress Margaret Hamilton, famous for her role in the original, The Wizard of Oz. She played Cora, the general store owner who proudly announced that Maxwell House was the only brand she sold. 

John Zaremba
Hills Bros. has its origins with the two sons of a Maine shipbuilder, Austin Hills and Reuben Hills, aka R.J. Hills. In 1898, Edward Norton, of New York, used his United States patent on a vacuum process for canning foods, which was subsequently applied to coffee. By 1900, Hills Brothers of San Francisco were the first to pack roast coffee in vacuum-sealed cans. Late in his career, character actor John Zaremba was the primary spokesperson for Hills Bros. in the 1970s and 1980s. His character was a fictional, senior globe-hoping coffee bean buyer, hardly recognizable to those who knew him from the 1950s. But the voice was unmistakable. Zaremba was a busy actor, noted for science fiction films, but television made up the bulk of his career with numerous supporting roles. He may be best remembered as a doctor in the 1960s series, Ben Casey, and for thirty episodes as a scientist on Time Tunnel. 

The Hoover Do Over

The Hoover Dam is a concrete arch-gravity dam in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River, on the border splitting Nevada and Arizona. From 1931 to 1936, over four million cubic yards of concrete and eighty-eight million pounds of plated steel were used. And with the removal of rock from the canyon walls, boring four diversion tunnels, and the sacrifice of more than 100 lives, the dam quickly became a symbol of the American "can-do" spirit. For millions of people in the 1930s, Hoover Dam, and on a lesser scale, the Empire State Building, came to symbolize what American workers could do even in the depths of the Great Depression. 

When President Herbert Hoover lost the White House in 1932 to President Roosevelt, his new Interior Secretary, Harold Ickes, snubbed the Hoover name from the day of the dam’s dedication. “This great engineering achievement should not carry the name of any living man but, on the contrary, should be baptized with a designation as bold and characteristic and imagination-stirring as the dam itself.” His political bias blotted out the fact that Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Calvin Coolidge already had dam sites attached to their names. 

As a former mining engineer, Hoover took an active part in settling the engineering problems and the location of the dam in Black Canyon. When he left office, construction finished more than a year ahead of schedule. The Hoover name was vindicated when House Resolution 140 was introduced and passed by the 80th Congress in 1947. President Harry S. Truman signed the resolution and restored the name Hoover Dam to the structure. To clarify, the names "Boulder Canyon Dam" and "Boulder Dam" were simply references to nearby Boulder City, Nevada, and not official. Almost a million people still come to visit the huge dam every year.

Note: The illustration above highlights the intake towers before Lake Mead was filled to its normal operating level.

RKO Blood on Fort Apache

The films below were released by RKO Radio Pictures in 1948, and they are two famous Western films with different premises. Though both deal with a clash of personalities, one is a traditional Western, while the other is a shadowy, moody, noir Western.

Fort Apache
Released March 27, 1948, Fort Apache is an American Western saga, the first of John Ford's "Cavalry Trilogy." It was followed by She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950), all starring John Wayne. The film was one of the first to present an authentic and sympathetic view of Native Americans.

Wayne's substantial co-star is Henry Fonda, supported by a talented cast including Shirley Temple, Pedro Armendariz, and John Agar. Cinematography is by Archie Stout. Fonda plays an arrogant and abrasive Lieutenant Colonel in command of Fort Apache, much to Wayne's disappointment, who had expected to receive that commission.

Blood On The Moon
Released November 9, 1948, Blood on the Moon is considered one of the best noir Westerns, in contrast to the sunlit saga of Fort Apache. It is a moody, "psychological" film starring Robert Mitchum, a role that neither Wayne nor Fonda could pull off. There is little of the Western formula approach to this story. The supporting cast includes Robert Preston, Walter Brennan, and Barbara Bel Geddes. The film is directed by another legend in cinema, Robert Wise. The outstanding cinematography is by Nicholas Musuraca. 

Of note is an extended fight between Mitchum and Preston without any stuntmen. Then again, it took three days to shoot. Wise wanted realism, where the winner is also badly beaten and exhausted, instead of a cliched brawl where the hero comes out clean and unscathed. Mitchum's acting was lauded at the time, whereas both Wayne and Fonda somewhat cancelled each other out of any accolades.

Note: From a budget of approximately $2.1 million, Fort Apache had a box office total of $3 million. Blood On The Moon made a decent profit out of a $1.5 million budget with a $2.4 million box office take.

The Chocolatier of 1900

The history of the chocolate bar, similar to what we know today, dates back to the 19th century. But solid chocolate was probably consumed in pre-Columbian America. In 1847, however, Joseph Fry created the first proper mass-produced chocolate bar by mixing cocoa powder, sugar, and cocoa to form a paste that could be pressed into a mold. This moved it from a beverage to a solid, edible treat.

In 1875, milk chocolate came onto the scene. It was developed by a Swiss confectioner, Daniel Peter, with the help of his neighbor, Henri Nestlé, who specialized in dehydrated milk products. This development significantly improved the taste and palatability of chocolate, leading to its widespread popularity.

1984 marked a significant milestone in the chocolate industry, thanks to Milton Hershey (in all his chocolatey goodness, above). The Hershey Company introduced its first candy bar in 1900, the Hershey's Milk Chocolate Bar. This transformed chocolate from a luxury item into an affordable and "block by block" accessible treat.

Other notable early chocolate bars include the Lindt Chocolate Bar, 1879, and the Baby Ruth candy bar, developed by Otto Schnering in 1920, which became the most popular candy bar in America by 1925. The evolution of chocolate bars continued with the inclusion of various ingredients such as nuts, caramel, and nougat, leading to the creation of candy bars like the Goo Goo Cluster, invented in 1912.

Television Suits You

In the second half of the twentieth century, the Botany 500 name for the wardrobe ending credits of many television programs was as common as Gunsmoke. The brand's association with television personalities helped it become a household name. Throughout the 1970s, Botany 500 provided menswear for many game show hosts and countless television stars. That list can be found online. Botany 500 often paid for the clothes of television celebrities and did not always provide the clothes themselves. They were sometimes custom-made by other tailors.

Botany 500 was a brand name owned by the Botany 500 Group of New York. Beginning in 1889, their men's suits and sport coats were manufactured in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, by H. Daroff and Sons, who were contracted with Botany Mills of Passaic, New Jersey, to produce products and later bought the firm outright. Given the exaggerated proportions of the 1949 illustrated man above, one could assume he was once the center of an NBA team. His forty-inch inseam would not be a challenge for Daroff.

Daroff and Sons and the Botany group went bankrupt in the summer of 1973. An attempt was made to turn the company over to another company, still operating profitably. Because of resistance by the company's employees, they backed out of the deal. By the winter of 1973, Cohen and Sons bought the Botany 500 name and assets for $4 million. They planned to keep the labels, marketing, sales, and distribution of Botany as a separate Botany 500 line produced in Philadelphia.
The Botany 500 name lives on as a licensed property of several foreign clothing manufacturers, ending the exclusivity of Botany 500's glory days. In 2021, the Botany 500 name resurfaced as a brand name sold by the mail-order company Haband. 

Columbus Sales In Indiana

For many consumers, before winter hits, Arvin heater-fan combos are a sought-after item on shelves. But few know that Arvin built so much more than heaters before becoming a major supplier to the automotive industry. Their incredible diversity produced the automatic coffee percolator, AM/FM portable radios, outdoor barbecue grills, room humidifiers, component stereo systems, catalytic converters, heat exchangers for fireplaces, and televisions, to name a few.

Bartholomew County, Indiana, native Q.G. Noblitt and his friend Frank Sparks co-founded the Indianapolis Air Pump Co. in 1919, which would become Arvin Industries in 1950. The company sold air pumps to repair flat tires. In 1927, the company changed its name to Noblitt-Sparks and would move its corporate headquarters to Columbus four years later. 1919 was also the same year that Clessie Cummins launched the Cummins Engine Company in Columbus, which would later play a significant role in Arvin's revival.

Arvin Industries assumed a global role, becoming a Fortune 500 company. It was named the "Hoosier Company of the Year" in 1978. However, Arvin’s ties to the community would start to unravel by 2000 when they merged with Troy, Michigan-based Meritor Automotive Inc., creating the eleventh largest supplier of automotive systems and parts in the world. But Arvin lost its focus within the merger. The company sold the former Arvin headquarters, the Q.G. Noblitt building, to Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp. in 2006. In 2011, ArvinMeritor changed its name to simply Meritor Inc., eliminating the last remnant of the former Columbus-based automotive supplier. Cummins Inc. acquired Meritor Inc. in 2022, reviving Arvin Industries, which was once a household name in southern Indiana.

Note: Arvin Industries, Inc. began produced its own television sets. An example is the 1950 Arvin model 2216CCM TV with built-in phonograph player, above.

Dial Me Two Copies

American Photocopy Equipment Co. (APECO) has a diverse history spanning various industries. Apeco was incorporated in 1954 after acquiring the name and assets of a limited partnership that had existed since 1939. The company's sales grew quickly in 1952 after adapting the transfer-diffusion process of producing photocopies. Apeco introduced an improved model of its wet photocopying process in 1953, which was similar to the Polaroid Land Camera and became immediately successful. 

Apeco's glory days began to fade when Xerox Corporation revolutionized the photocopy industry with its dry-process, plain-paper 914 model in 1959. Eventually, everyone was making a "Xerox" and not an "Apeco" copy. Though Apeco introduced its own dry-process machine, it faced technical problems. Apeco was infamously known for its Dial-A-Copy and Dial-A-Matic models in the 1960s. It featured a small "telephone-style" rotary dial for selecting the number of copies. This feature provided frustration as some users found it unreliable with frequent malfunctions. Apeco filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1976, phasing out its photocopier production. The company emerged from bankruptcy four years later but liquidated its photocopy sales and distribution activities in 1983.

Too Busy Illustrators

Beginning in the 1970s, TV Guide heavily featured illustrated covers by various artists. Whereas the prior decade was mostly photography, the new decade was dominated by established illustrators meeting short deadlines. Two of the most frequently used were Bernie Fuchs and Richard Amsel. Each had a distinct style that was readily identifiable. Each used a minimalist approach, capturing the essence of the personality's face and character.

The top row features Fuchs, the bottom highlights Amsel from the mid-1970s.

The Curtain That Never Closes

The more commonly used term for an air door in North America is "air curtain." The concept may seem like a marvel of the modern age, where a vertical waterfall of air separates two distinct environments from one another with great precision. But this technology dates back to 1904. Theophilus Van Kannel received a U.S. patent for "Means for Excluding Drafts from Open Doorways," which described an air curtain. However, the first air curtain installation in the United States was not installed until twelve years after the patent was issued. Erling Berner brought advanced European air curtain technology to the United States in 1956 and formed Berner Industries, which later became Berner International.

Air curtains are commonly used where doors are required to stay open for operational purposes, such as at loading docks and vehicle entrances. Cold drafts can be avoided by mixing in warm air heated by the air door. They offer energy savings and increased personal comfort by maintaining interior temperatures and helping keep flying insects out by creating forceful turbulence. Modern air curtains are designed to perform their barrier function without hampering passage or creating obstructions that can lead to accidents.

Airflow through a door depends on wind forces, temperature and pressure differences. Air curtains and doors work best when the pressure differential between the inside and outside of the building is as close to neutral as possible. Negative pressures, extreme temperature differences, elevators nearby, or extreme humidity can reduce the effectiveness of air curtains.

Above is a 1960 advertisement from the American Air Curtain Corporation.

Stanley Steamer & The Airbrush

Though Abner Peeler invented the first airbrush device, which he called the "paint distributor," it was Francis Edgar Stanley who patented the first airbrush pistol in 1882. Stanley, a photographer and inventor from Massachusetts, along with his twin brother Freelan Oscar Stanley, built the famous Stanley Steamer automobile. Stanley designed the airbrush device to assist with retouching photographs and named it the “Stanley Air Brush.” It revolutionized photo retouching. The tool used hand-pumped bellows to push air through a small nozzle, producing a fine, controlled spray of color.

The airbrush quickly found its way into the automotive industry with its greater precision and speed for painting cars, motorcycles, and other vehicles. Charles Burdick patented an airbrush device in 1893, more similar in design to what is most familiar today. During the 1930s and 1940s, airbrush pioneers included George “The Petty Girl” Petty, who used airbrushing to create highly realistic illustrated pin-up girls that were adopted as nose art on some WW2 aircraft. Alberto Vargas made famous his scantily-clad “Vargas Girl” illustrations, considered by many at the time to be an obscenity.

Hollywood makeup artists adopted the airbrush, offering a revolutionary way to smoothly apply color. By the 1960s, the hippy generation used airbrushing for dreamy psychedelic artwork on album covers, surfboards, panel vans, and, of course, the Volkswagen Transporter. During the 1980s and 1990s, airbrush shops became a cultural phenomenon, offering customized designs on apparel and more. Other artists could often be found at county and state fairs. The airbrush shops faded by the new millennium as digital printing and mass production became more commercially viable.

Airbrushing retains its versatility in various art forms, including illustration, portraiture, professional graffiti-styled art, makeup, fashion, murals, cake decorating, and vehicles. 

Foiled Again

The emergence of tin as a viable metal dates back to about 3500 B.C. with the discovery of bronze, an alloy of tin and copper. Skipping ahead about a “bazillion” years, pure tin became more widespread, leading to the eventual invention of tin foil. Hammering tin into thin sheets started in the late 18th century. By the mid-19th century, tin foil was commercially produced and used as a wrapping material. One major concern for foods wrapped in tin foil was the 'tin taste" that was sometimes present. The early uses of tin foil were not limited to food preservation. Due to its reflective properties, it was also utilized in various scientific experiments and early photography.

A shift from tin to aluminum started due to aluminum's non-corrosive properties, lower cost, and better performance. The breakthrough moment was in 1910 when the first aluminium foil rolling plant, Dr. Lauber, Neher & Cie, was opened in Emmishofen, Switzerland. In 1911, Bern-based Tobler began wrapping its chocolate bars in aluminium foil, including the unique triangular chocolate bar, Toblerone. The first use of foil in the United States was in 1913 for wrapping Life Savers, candy bars, and gum.

Reynolds Metals Company—acquired by Alcoa in 2000—has a long history in the aluminum industry, dating back to Richard S. Reynolds, who founded the U.S. Foil Company in 1919 in Louisville, Kentucky. Initially, the company produced tin foil for cigarette packaging, but it switched to aluminum foil in the 1920s when the price of aluminum dropped. In 1926, Reynolds began using aluminum foil as a packaging material for the first time. The company expanded into various aluminum products, including aluminum siding, which it pioneered in 1945.

Note: Aluminum Foil is shiny on one side when two sheets of aluminum foil are passed through the rollers during the final rolling process. The side in contact with the highly polished steel rollers results in a shiny surface, while the other side produces a matte finish. Despite the "old wives tales," it makes no difference whether you wrap or cover food while baking with the shiny side up. Today, approximately three-quarters of aluminum foil is used for packaging of foods, cosmetics, and chemical products, and the remaining quarter is used for industrial applications such as thermal insulation and electrical cables.

The above advertisement is from the early 1950s

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 Affair

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

Tell Me What You See

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.

Give 'Em The Ol' St. Louis Shoe

The Brown Shoe Company began in 1878 as a partnership among three St. Louis businessmen: George Brown, the lead partner, Alvin Bryan, and Jerome Desnoyers. St. Louis was the midwest hub of the shoe manufacturing business and with new rail lines through the city, shipping could be done to all parts of the country. Buster Brown shoes were made from the thickest, most durable leather resulting in weeks to break them in. Many parents just hoped the higher cost paid off by the end of the school year. 

At the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, the Brown Shoe Company built a model of their factory so visitors could witness how shoes were made. An employee came upon Richard F. Outcault, the cartoonist famous for his new comic strip, "Buster Brown," featuring an ornery child with a blonde pageboy haircut and a dog. Outcault was paid $200 for licensing rights to use the Buster Brown name and image on the insoles of children’s shoes. The company adopted the mascot almost immediately. The Brown name was purely a coincidence but the destiny proved fruitful. For the girls, the shoe was Mary Jane, the sister of Buster. Other brands from the World’s Fair began competing in children's footwear including Red Goose Shoes and Poll Parrot.

After several decades of acquisitions and divestitures, in 2015 the Brown Company was rebranded as Calares. In addition to the family brands that sell in stores and online via their Famous Footwear name, Caleres groups their footwear into two other categories—shoes for healthy living, including Naturalizer, Dr. Scholl’s Shoes, LifeStride, Bzees, and Rykä. The second category caters to fashion—Sam Edelman, Franco Sarto, Via Spiga, Vince, Diane von Furstenberg (DVF), Carlos by Carlos Santana and Fergie Footwear. The company is one of the largest shoe companies with worldwide annual sales of nearly $2.5 billion. I have yet to discover whether the Buster Brown name still exists.

Perhaps you were fitted for Buster Brown shoes as a youngster using a Brannock  foot measuring tool. Once placing the foot on the high-tech-appearing device, the salesman would slide a "nob" along the inner side of the foot. It usually tickled when it slid by my foot. Designed in 1927, the Brannock Device remains the standard for the footwear industry.

Note: Speculation suggests the "Buster" name came from the popularity of Buster Keaton (1895-1966) while a child actor in vaudeville with his parents in the early 1900s. Though notable for his physical comedy even then, the Keaton legend was anchored some twenty years later. Roger Cushman Clark (1899–1995) may be the "original model" for the Buster Brown character, however.

They Call Me Speedy

Alka-Seltzer is an antacid and pain reliever. Its effervescent "fizzing" tablets release active ingredients when dissolved in water. Developed by head chemist Maurice Treneer, it was first marketed by Dr. Franklin L. Miles of Miles Laboratories fame in Elkhart, Indiana in 1884. Print advertising was used immediately, and by 1932, the radio show Alka-Seltzer Comedy Star of Hollywood began, along with many more. The radio sponsorships continued into the 1950s, with the Alka-Seltzer Time show airing from 1949 to 1957. Miles Laboratories was purchased by Bayer in 1979.

Alka-Seltzer's "Speedy" character was introduced in 1951. His body was made of one Alka-Seltzer tablet, while he wore another as a hat. It was conceived by Chicago's Wade Advertising Agency (1909-1966) and designed by illustrator Wally Wood. Originally named Sparky, the name was changed to Speedy to align with that year's promotional theme, "Speedy Relief". Speedy appeared in over 200 television commercials between 1954 and 1964. Actor Buster Keaton (above) assumed various occupations for a series of commercials with the mascot. The ads through the 1970s were among the most popular of the 20th century in the United States. Adding to the success was Speedy's jingle, "Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is" with an adult providing a child-like cartoon voice. Speedy was resurrected a few times over the coming decades. In 2008 Alka-Seltzer began a series of new commercials featuring the character using modern computer graphics.