Developed in 1914 by George Bunting, a Baltimore pharmacist, the skin cream Noxzema was originally called Dr. Bunting’s Sunburn Remedy.
He searched in vain for a better name until one day a customer entered his drugstore and told him, “Your sunburn cream sure knocked out my eczema.”
The concoction that “knocks eczema” became Noxzema.
The now legendary and defunct Burma-Shave advertisements were developed in 1926 by Allan Odell, the son of the founder of the Burma-Vita Company. Burma-Shave was a new product, the first brushless shaving cream, and in the 1920s it was difficult to sell. But when Odell saw a series of roadside signs for a filling station,…
The phrase belongs to President Theodore Roosevelt, who, while visiting Andrew Jackson’s home, the Hermitage, in Nashville, Tennessee, drank a cup of Maxwell House coffee and was offered a refill. He is said to have replied, “Will I have another? Delighted! It’s good to the last drop!” By the way, there actually was a Maxwell…
The original camel for Camel cigarettes was an Arabian dromedary named “Old Joe” that appeared in the Barnum & Bailey Circus at the turn of the century. At that time, the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company was looking for an exotic name and concept to link with its new Oriental and Turkish blend cigarette. On…
The numbers 10, 2, and 4 represented the times between meals when a person’s energy is at its lowest and can be revived by Dr. Pepper.
The Bic pen is named for Baron Biche. But Biche did not invent the ballpoint pen, Hungarian Laszlo Biro did, in 1938. Biche’s French firm, Bic, took over the English company that had agreed to produce the pens. In England the pen is still known as a “biro,” in France as a “bic.”
The 7 in 7UP stands for the soft drink’s original 7-ounce bottle, the UP for the bubbles from its carbonation. In 1929, when the drink was first introduced by Saint Louis businessman Charles L. Grigg, it was called Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda. The name was derived from one of its original ingredients, lithium salts.