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.

Action-filled Compositions

Peter Helck (1893-1988) was an American illustrator who specialized in depicting the racing circuits of Europe. He estimated that he had produced more than 600 sketches, drawings and paintings during his career. He was there in the early days of auto racing with the Vanderbilt Cup Race of 1906. He worked for many of the major automobile magazines, in particular The Autocar, which took him to England and to major races in France and Italy. In the 1930s Helck was commissioned by the Sinclair Oil Company to produce a large-format road map. This map did much to build Sinclair's reputation and to promote driving for pleasure.

His compositions became more well-known, he also successfully pursued a path in commercial work, becoming an acknowledged expert in the portrayal of industrial subjects and machinery. Among others, his advertising work included Packard, TWA, Caterpillar Tractor, Sinclair Oil, GE, Mack Trucks, Alcoa, and Republic Steel. Perhaps his most famous US series was with the Chevrolet truck division of General Motors in the 1950s. His work made him a first-rate salesman, too. The details of these paintings placed the viewer within the scene and suggested Chevrolet was apparently the only truck manufactured. One source of his realism was that he painted on location, not from photographs. Though he obviously combined various subjects for a completed utopian painting.

Mr. Ferris and His Wheel

Although early "pleasure wheels" may go back as far as the 1500s, the first commercially successful Ferris wheel was designed and constructed by the Galesburg, Illinois native and engineer, George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. (1859-96) for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Ferris owned a company that tested iron and steel for railroads and bridges. He used his knowledge of structural steel to design an immense steel structure 264' tall that would amaze the visitors to the fair. It was the most popular structure at the fair. In the first five months after its debut in 1892, more than 1.4 million people rode the world's first Ferris wheel. The Ferris wheel was dismantled and then rebuilt in Lincoln Park, Chicago, in 1895, and dismantled and rebuilt a third and final time for the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, Missouri. It was ultimately demolished in 1906. Modern versions have been called Observation Wheels, the tallest being the 820' Ain Dubai, which opened in late 2021 and is located in the United Arab Emirates.  

A George Ferris biography can be found here.