- Andrew Rapoza
- Dec 20, 2024
- 13 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
The inventor of a hair tonic, an electric plaster & a window lock ... he was plagued by success.
Everything Reuben P. Hall needed to know about business was covered in Aesop’s fable, “The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs.”
But he didn’t learn.
Too bad. So sad.
If he had taken the children’s fable a little more seriously, his life story could have been hoisted up as one of America’s all-time success stories. Patent medicine royalty. Lots of people thought he was an entrepreneurial giant, but Reuben P. Hall wasn’t the success who was standing behind his own name.
Okay, let me crack open this scrambled story for you.
Brick Dust and the Destitute Italian Sailor
Reuben P. Hall started out his life like most people in New Hampshire in the early 1800s – one of many children in a farmer’s large family. Nothing was getting handed to him – he was destined to live only by the sweat of his brow. When he married Betsy Barrett in 1844 they started their lives together next to her parents’ farm, probably on land her parents had gifted or rented to them. Reuben and Betsy lost their first two babies but in census year 1850, they had 6-month-old Loretta with them. Reuben’s work life began with the physically demanding job of making bricks; with the town’s poor house just a dozen buildings away, the young father and husband was daily reminded that any work was better than none at all.
Three more babies arrived over the next decade and by 1860, Reuben had left brickmaking in the dust and turned to farming. But his farm was one of the lowest valued in the area and the Hall’s only sure crop seemed to be babies, with yet two more sprouting in 1861 and 1862. Having become the breadwinner for a family of eight in twelve years, Reuben was increasingly concerned about relying on nature and weather to yield a cash crop; so he bid his wife and six little ones adieu and disappeared down the country road, a 44-year-old peddler.
Peddling was a standard form of selling goods around the countryside in those days, providing the advantage of the store coming to the house, especially important in the rural states of northern New England. As the story goes, somewhere along his travels, Reuben Hall, peddler, crossed paths with an Italian sailor. Reuben might have come across the old salt in his travels to Salem, Massachusetts, some 50 miles from his home, where census records show there were a few Italian sailors knocking about the port town in 1860 and 1865, or less likely if his peddling peregrinations took him to Searsport, Maine, 200 miles from home, where there was a single Italian sailor during that time (there were no Italian sailors in all of New Hampshire or Vermont during these years). Harder to fathom, perhaps, was why this seafarer was carrying a hair tonic formula in his otherwise empty pockets. But the sailor was described as “destitute,” apparently synonymous with desperate, so the money-strapped peddler bought the formula from the stone-broke sailor. The chance encounter was about to change the trajectory of Reuben Hall’s life.
To modern ears, the sailor’s curious formula read like a recipe from Arsenic and Old Lace: sage and raspberry leaves were to be steeped in water and mixed with tea; then the brew became sinister: mix in oil of citronella, glycerin, milk of sulfur, and white sugar of lead and presto, it was ready for use on hair that for one reason or another had had the audacity to go gray or white. Lead was the magic in the medicine that turned light hair dark; the more frequently used, the darker the hair would get, like 100,000 tiny barometers of lead poisoning. Lead is a neurotoxin that can cause memory problems, muscle pain, headaches, constipation, and high blood pressure, and if the system absorbs enough of it, it could bring about seizures, comas, kidney failure, and death. But let’s not be unfair by judging Reuben too harshly; after all, it wasn’t until 2022, over 150 years later, that the federal government decided to take the lead out of hair products. Like the “help” Aunts Abby and Martha thought they were giving “suffering” old bachelors, Reuben thought he was selling the people what they wanted.
He called his medicine Hall’s Vegetable Sicilian Hair Renewer, the addition of “Sicilian” being an allusion to the Italian sailor who sold him the formula. Make-believe origin stories were created all the time for patent medicines because they were part of the standard medicine advertising pitch, getting waved on the same flagpole with the equally dramatic promises of cures. But while the name hinted at its Italian sailor beginning, this origin story never appeared in the advertisements, trade cards, or booklets. If it was a fiction, it was entirely underutilized. It was more likely true but not a tale that Hall cared to share. The truth sounded too concocted and make-believe, like a storybook beginning that flowed out of an advertiser’s pen, and Reuben Hall was much more pragmatic and deliberate than that. He knew his hair renewer was darkening hair and bringing back moisture to dry scalps and that was the story he wanted customers to hear. So he peddled the stuff from his wagon as fast as he could, one door at a time.
Gangrenous Greed
Like his cart on the bumpy backroads, sale of his hair renewer was slow going. His modest manufacturing operation was taxed at only $10, the same amount he was taxed for the combination of his gold watch and the piano his wife and children had to entertain themselves during his long absences. His remedy needed an infusion of cash if it was to succeed, and he found that in Charles A. Gillis, the well-heeled son of a wealthy father. Reuben brought on Gillis as a partner, turning over to him a controlling share of the company; by June 1865 Gillis bought the entire company for $30,000 ($697,791 in 2023 USD). The deal had made Reuben a wealthy man but in the process he had sold his soul: the deal had not only made Gillis the sole owner of the company, but in so doing stripped away Reuben’s rights to the secret formula for the hair renewer, the rights to make and sell it, and the exclusive right to use the product and company names – his own name – from there on out.
Gillis set up a manufacturing facility in Nashua, New Hampshire, and immediately invested heavily in advertising. Before Gillis came on board, Reuben was only able to afford advertising in a single Vermont newspaper. In the next year he had increased that to four states; but when Gillis took the reins in 1865, newspaper advertising of Hall’s Vegetable Sicilian Hair Renewer swelled to 23 states and by 1870 it was being broadcast across 30 of the 37 states then in existence. In court, Gillis admitted to making an annual profit of $50,000 to $60,000; Reuben had estimated it to be closer to $80,000 and standing on the outside looking in, he felt he deserved much more than what now seemed like a paltry $30,000 that he had accepted five years earlier. So despite his contract with Gillis, he started to make and sell the same medicine from a different location in Nashua. He called it R. P. Hall’s Improved Preparation for Restoring the Hair.
In July 1870 Reuben’s clandestine company was brought to court for having engaged in the secret manufacture and sale of the now-famous Hall’s Vegetable Sicilian Hair Renewer and using a facsimile of the trademark; they were arraigned upon the charge of “counterfeiting wrappers or labels with intent to cheat and defraud.” In the 1870 court case of Gillis v. Hall, Gillis, the plaintiff, claimed Reuben had broken every covenant of their contract, by commencing the manufacture of Hall’s Vegetable Sicilian Hair Renewer at another location in Nashua, under the same firm name, R. P. Hall & Co., and endorsing the bottles with a trade-mark which was “a palpable imitation” of the one in use by Gillis’s company. Gillis brought the signed contract before the judge, which showed Reuben Hall had covenanted:
He would not use or allow his named to be used in the preparation of any similar article;
He would not engage in the manufacture thereof;
He would not impart to anyone his secret or recipe for the manufacture thereof;
He would not engage in the manufacture of any article similar to this;
He would allow the plaintiff the free, uninterrupted and exclusive use of his name in the manufacture and sale of said preparation.
Defendant Reuben P. Hall claimed there was another document that restored his rights; but he couldn’t produce it, so the final judgement was predictable. The judge ruled that Reuben could make hair preparations or any other product he wished, but he wasn’t allowed to make or sell Hall’s Vegetable Sicilian Hair Renewer and he couldn’t use “the name Hall, or R P. Hall, or Reuben P. Hall, …upon any such preparation, and from making or using any trade-mark, label, or wrapper in imitation by those now in use by plaintiff.” Over the decades to come, millions of trade cards and newspaper advertisements would be made to promote the hair tonic named Hall’s and tell the world that it was made by the R. P. Hall & Co. of Nashua, New Hampshire; unfortunately the future success and legacy would no longer have anything to do with its creator and namesake, Reuben P. Hall. He no longer had any rights or privileges to his hair product, its trademark, name, or face on the tax stamp. He probably wasn’t even allowed in the company’s door. For 30,000 pieces of silver, he had lost himself.
Green-Eyed Monsters
Before he could catch his breath over his staggering losses of fame and fortune, he was about to lose something even more precious.
Reuben and Betsy had moved their family down to Vineland in southern New Jersey during the spring of 1870. When Reuben returned to New Hampshire for his arraignment on making counterfeit hair renewer, his 20-year-old daughter, Angela, met and began a relationship with an older man: 38-year-old Dr. Edward Sharp, a successful physician and the son of prominent and wealthy parents. The papers would later describe him as “well-connected and in good practice” and young Angela “was beautiful and well-to-do … nothing seemed wanting to a perfect matrimonial condition. But soon a cloud arose.”
Reeling from his losses in New Hampshire, Reuben returned to his family in Vineland and learned that after a whirlwind 4-month courtship, Angela and Dr. Sharp were going to get married. On that fateful wedding day, 21 September 1870, Reuben and Betsy went to the posh residence of Dr. Sharp’s attorney, ready to celebrate their daughter’s wedding, but Angela took her father’s breath away with the doubly-shocking news that she was pregnant and Dr. Sharp was demanding that Reuben provide his daughter a $20,000 marriage gift or else Sharp wouldn’t marry her and she would forever be identified as a ruined, “fallen woman”. It was extortion, pure and simple. And what made it even worse was that Angela was the one badgering her father to pay. About an hour before the wedding ceremony, Reuben signed a bond (conveniently drawn up by the attorney and wedding host), agreeing to pay his daughter as Sharp had demanded. But it turned out that Angela was not pregnant (in fact, Angela never had any children during their subsequent 57-year marriage).
Reuben consequently refused to pay as the bond required. It was fraud, he said; a conspiracy on the part of his daughter and Dr. Sharp to rob him of a large sum of money. In 1873, over two years after their wedding day, Dr. & Mrs. Sharp took Reuben to court over the bond he had voluntarily signed but refused to pay and the newspapers frothed, “there was much hard swearing, and great bitterness of feeling between the parents and their daughter was displayed at the trial”; it was “a first-class piece of scandal ….” In what seems to me to be a gross miscarriage of justice, the coercive daughter and her swindling husband won their lawsuit; Reuben had lost his second major court case and the relationship with his daughter had probably been irreparably ruined.
Trouble on a Chain
His past having gone up in smoke, Reuben could only move forward. In 1874 he and his son Philip were back in Nashua, setting up a new company to manufacture Reuben’s newest product idea: galvanic electric plasters. Regardless of how effective or ineffective it might prove to be, Reuben’s product (see my previous blog, “Hall’s Galvanic Gizmo,” 18 December 2024) was admirably inventive, combining the century-old use of electricity for health improvement with the medicinal application of plasters. Plasters and electrical devices had existed before and would continue long after Hall’s Galvano-Electric Plaster, but it may have been a unique invention that combined both forms of medicine; unique enough that he wanted to get it patented. Consequently, Reuben offered a very comprehensive and scientific-sounding justification for his invention in the patent application he submitted to the patent examiners, but his advertising for the plaster was simplified in order to appeal to the common man,
“STOP PAIN AS IF BY MAGIC. THEY REALLY PERFORM MIRACLES.”
There were plenty of galvanic batteries on the market and lots of medicated plasters too, but Reuben thought of combining the two in one, allowing the plaster’s medication to soak into the body while low-grade electrical current traveled through body sweat completing the electrical circuit begun by the battery embedded in his plaster. And like any worthwhile patent medicine of the 19th century, the plaster-electricity combo promised to cure all sorts of pains: rheumatism, neuralgia, sciatica, headache, sprains, spinal difficulty, nervous diseases, and female weakness.
Reuben tried to promote his new plasters the way that his old partner had done, by advertising the hair renewer in newspapers. Hall’s plaster advertising ran across nine states in 1874, but the number of states kept diminishing each year thereafter. The one bright spot seemed to be the Bell Mann & Co., a Chicago-based perfume distributor who had become one of the sales agents for the plasters shortly after their introduction in late 1874. In 1876 Reuben was listed in the Chicago city directory as a “plasterer” boarding at the Clifton House. (The directory publishers didn’t seem to know what to do with this rather unusual man who was making medicated plasters; so they added him under the Plasterer grouping with several other men who actually plastered walls.) The Clifton House was just a block away from the Bell Mann company on 163 Wabash Avenue; more importantly, however, Bell Man was now the proprietor of his plasters. Trouble had followed Reuben Hall to Chicago; actually, it had gotten to the point in his life that it seemed like he was just dragging trouble along with him wherever he went.
In January 1877, attorneys for Mr. Bell Mann were explaining to a judge that Reuben Hall had transferred the right to manufacture and sell Hall’s Galvano-Electric Plasters to a Milwaukee dentist for a royalty based on the number of Hall’s plasters the dentist made. But the dentist in turn transferred his manufacturing rights to Bell Mann, who then got the patent rights assigned to his company. Not seeing this coming, Reuben had also assigned a half-interest in the patent to another group of businessmen, (Hall seemed to have a franchise model of business in mind for his plaster), but Mr. Mann took them to court, insisting he had the patent rights and the court should require the defendants to assign their part over to him. There was more electricity coursing through the courtroom than was ever generated by Hall’s plasters. The result was that Bell Mann owned the trademark, patent, and manufacturing rights to Hall’s Galvano-Electric Plasters, leaving Reuben once again with nothing.
In November of the same year, the Chicago Tribune included a mention of a fire that had engulfed a one-story frame building at 4 Hubbard Court, about a mile away from the Bell Mann company; the newspaper noted that the burned building had been used by Reuben Hall as an electric plaster factory. It’s unclear whether it was an act of arson or accident, but either way, Reuben’s effort to counterfeit his own medical product had once again been stopped for good. The newspaper also reported that he couldn’t be found, so he had probably already gone back to his family in New Jersey; there was no future for him in Chicago.
Things then get quiet for Reuben over the next decade. He had retired by the time the census taker came by in 1880; the 62-year-old lived with his wife and sons Philip, 24, and Blanchard, 17, in Landis, New Jersey; Philip was a farmer and Blanchard worked in a shoe shop. In the years after Hall had lost his court case in Nashua, the massive J. C. Ayer Company had bought the rights to Hall’s Vegetable Sicilian Hair Renewer and reinvigorated the product’s promotion in newspapers and trade cards on a scale that only the Ayer company could do (in 1885, advertisements appeared in newspapers of 45 American states and territories). The Hall name still reached across the country, selling the hair renewer and on a much smaller scale, the plaster, but no longer because of the one man who had started it all.
Out of the limelight and the courtroom, Reuben quietly focused on his next big idea. He was more of a visionary and inventor than anything else. He never claimed to be a doctor, although some of his apologists claimed that distinction for him. And constantly trying – and failing – to break deals he had made, he definitely was not a businessman. He got his hair formula from an impoverished Italian sailor but others made it a nationwide success. His patent application for the galvanic-electric plaster looked at the human body as part of a mechanical process.
His last invention – a lock to secure windows and shutters – was as logical and pragmatic as the plaster. In 1886, at age 68, he secured a patent for his “Fastener for Windows and Shutters,” a remarkably detailed mechanism that would fasten windows closed and keep shutters open. And perhaps best of all, no one tried to lock him out from his own invention or patent rights.
Reuben died two years later from cirrhosis of the liver. While the disease can be caused by a number of contributing conditions, it is best known as the result of alcoholism. If that was the cause for Reuben’s cirrhosis, the toll of his legal, financial, and personal miseries had likely contributed greatly to his final, tragic end.
Then as now, almost everyone who saw his name in print assumed the man behind the advertising was a genius, a tycoon, and leader in the patent medicine industry. In truth, he was a visionary with a creative mind, but also a man of poor judgement, questionable ethics, and a pawn in the hands of others who outplayed him. Few knew the real story of Reuben P. Hall – until now.
Lynn Massachusetts history - History of medicine - 19th-Century Health Remedies - Vintage Medical Ephemera - 19th-century medicine
- Andrew Rapoza
- Dec 16, 2024
- 10 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Long, long before Iron Man's Arc Reactor, R. P. Hall's Galvano-Electric Plaster was made to recharge worn-out bodies
It doesn’t happen often.
After 40 years of collecting Victorian advertising, it has to be something really special to catch my eye; something so different that it makes me do a double-take, causes my finger to slip off the mouse button, my head to lean forward so my face gets really close to the screen, and my eyes to go into microscopic-focus mode to make sure I’m not seeing things. My brain goes into overdrive, checking the virtual collection in my mind to make sure I don’t already have one; it studies the subject for possible subliminal messages, cultural vividness, and historical significance; it soaks in the richness of the colors, the allure of the graphics, the brilliance of the design. On those rare occasions that the image before me exceeds my wildest expectations, the little boy in me pronounces the official response of my experienced, high-level analysis:
“Cooooool!”
Click. Somewhere out there, I’ve made a seller happy. Okay, calm down, adrenaline, it’s mine.
I recently had such an experience and I’d like to share it with you. It actually happened about a month ago, when I saw the Hall’s Galvano-Electric Plaster trade card for the first time ever. I’ve spent so much time examining this card and researching the backstory of the product and its advertising, it has taken me until now to be ready to report my findings. In fact, I found out far more about the product and the man behind it than I had expected to learn, so I’ve been in a quandary about how to present it in a blog post. I’ve decided to do it a different way: this post will be exclusively about this one advertising trade card, but the next post will be the whole story – the inventor of this product, his life story, how he came to make this particular medical item, and what happened to both of them – the man and his invention.
So for today, let’s focus on the curious medical device that bamboozled the patient and the inventor alike: Hall’s Galvano-Electric Plaster.
Mustard and Frogs’ Legs
The inventor of this device was Reuben P. Hall, a former peddler with no formal medical education, but what he lacked in knowledge he made up for with a vivid imagination, meticulous ingenuity, and keen perception. He saw two medical treatments – ancient plasters and modern electricity – being used for the same aches, pains, and diseases, and in 1874 he figured out a way for the two methods to be brought together into one new and improved solution.
For centuries, wives and mothers were making a home remedy called plasters from ingredients they had in the house. Mustard plasters were the most common form, made by mixing mustard powder, flour, and water into a paste, then spreading the gloopy mess on one side of a piece of fabric and applying it wherever on the body it was needed, such as on the chest for colds and congestion or on the back for arthritis, muscle pain, and backache. The mixture gave a penetrating warmth to the area beneath. Today’s more modern-sounding and medicinally improved “pain relief patches” are the evolved descendants of this time-honored practice.
In 1874 electricity was still more mystery than science when Reuben claimed he had harnessed the stuff in his plaster. Almost a century earlier, the Italian physician Luigi Galvani applied an electrical spark to a dead frog causing its legs to twitch with animation. That result was widely interpreted by lay people to mean that if electricity could bring life to part of a dead frog, then it could help revive and restore humans’ pained and diseased bodies. Hence, all sorts of medical devices promising to rejuvenate an anxious public were created on the basis of shock-producing electricity; it was usually referred to as magnetic or galvanic electricity. People bought hand-cranked magneto-electric units to cure ailing family members at home, sometimes combining low-voltage shocks with steam cabinets and baths; others bought belts lined with various configurations of metal discs or cylinders to be worn under their clothing, next to the skin, to generate an electric current through the body; often men’s belts included a scrotal sack feature hanging below to bring some zip-a-dee back to the doo-dah.
Patented Magic
In his patent application, Reuben Hall provided a detailed review of the ever-expanding array of electrical appliances being foisted on the public and also pointed out their shortcomings, the worst of which was the lack of traditional medicine being passed into the body; unlike the age-old mustard plasters, electricity was the only medicine being served up by the new medical shock equipment:
Electric currents have long been used by the medical profession in the treatment of many diseases. They have been applied in many ways. Currents from batteries, induction apparatus, or frictional apparatus have been used, by means of wires and electrodes placed on designated parts of the body. In other cases, they have been applied through the medium of baths, and in still other[s], by Voltaic belts, to be worn upon the body, the current being there both generated and applied. Their use has not been as extensive as it might have been, for the reason that while they were used the ordinary exterior local applications of medicine could not be used, as was often desirable.
In electric baths, this has been remedied to some extent by inclosing the bath, and supplying medicated air or vapor to the patient while under treatment. This involves a cumbersome and expensive apparatus, and can be used only for limited periods, and at intervals. [emphases added]
Reuben then presented the patent examiners with his alternative – a unique invention in the medical electricity marketplace: a medicinal plaster with electrical components embedded in the fabric. On his detailed illustration below, two “electrically-dissimilar galvanic elements” (like copper and zinc), labeled “P” and “N,” were heart-shaped metal plates, connected to each other by a wire underneath. Human perspiration then completed the electrical circuit started by the two hearts and wire, producing a current. The latent electrical energy in the human body was thus triggered into action much like the frog legs.
Figures 1 and 2 were the standard plaster; Figures 3 and 4 were alternative forms that inventor Hall proposed, with two three multiples metallic disks. Figure 5 was another variation that allowed for charges to be set on opposite sides of the body, like wrapping over the shoulder.
The key difference between Reuben’s invention and all the other electrical devices then in existence was the combination of electricity generation and simultaneous medicinal application; yet ironically, his patent drawing downplayed what medicine should be used:
E is any suitable base or fabric, upon which is spread any suitable medical compound, A. To the composition of this compound I make no claim as it may be varied to suit various conditions or diagnoses. [emphasis added]
Customers or their pharmacists could apply whatever medication to the plaster they chose. It wasn’t so much that Reuben was ambivalent about the medicine, but he wasn’t trying to create a new old-fashioned plaster – he was focused on developing the next generation of electrical medicine. That, apparently, was where the real money was.
Miracle Born in the Storm Clouds
I’ve only seen this one advertising trade card for his product – I doubt there were any more. This trade card design captured the curative magic of Hall’s Galvano-Electric Plasters, showing the dramatic transformation from sickness to health. Under decorative arches, the archetypal before-and-after combination of a sick man and his healthy counterpart clearly displayed the benefit of the plasters. There could be nothing better than the visual of a man tossing his crutches and doing a jig to demonstrate the miracle of Hall’s plaster. Before-and-after visuals were a popular and often-used convention for medical advertising; Parker’s Ginger Tonic and Buckingham’s Dye for Whiskers were two such products with several equally effective variations on the theme. Tossing one’s crutches and doing a silly dance was a powerful way of showing off the cure’s effectiveness and the joy it brought.
To keep the customer focused on the product even longer, a poem followed the illustration. Written in contrived quatrains of butchered iambic pentameter, the point was not to present a timeless sonnet but to amuse and vividly praise Hall’s plaster for capturing the power of the gods: lightning –
Deep in the storm cloud’s womb I have my birth,
Thence flashed by Angel’s wings from Heaven to Earth,
Under the magic of my touch, old Pain
Wages his fiercest warfare all in vain
What Heaven-borne power slays disease’s demons in an hour?
… the mighty master –
… Hall’s Galvano-electric plaster!
The card displayed first-rate creativity but second-rate execution. The artwork was nice but not refined, the color palette was minimal, and the poetry was hackneyed, but the message was crystal clear: Hall’s Galvano-Electric Plaster cured the hopeless and miserable. An 1878 advertisement in the Boston Globe said in words what the trade card said in pictures: “STOP PAIN AS IF BY MAGIC. THEY REALLY PERFORM MIRACLES.”
The trade card’s reverse side has a few variants. The version shown here is the trademark registered in January 1877 (see evolution of the trademark design further below). The advertisement describes the “Galvanic Battery” embedded in the plaster that produces “a constant but mild current of Electricity, which is most exhilarating” when the electrical circuit is completed by being put in contact with the body. Twenty-five medical miseries, ranging from weak eyes and constipation to lung and heart disease would be speedily cured by the electricity, “those subtle and mysterious elements of nature,” produced by Hall’s plaster. The last promotional line summarizes the benefits illustrated on the card front, once again promising nothing short of miracles: “They cause the Lame to leap with joy and the Halt to take up their beds and walk,” subliminally reminding the reader of the same miracle performed by none other than Jesus himself. (John 5:8-9; also see Isaiah 35:6)
Professor of Nothing
It wasn’t just lightning that was in the clouds; doom was in the air as well.
Hall’s plaster advertising ran across nine states in 1874, but the number of states kept diminishing each year thereafter. Just a few short years into the sales of Hall’s Galvano Electric Plaster, a lightning storm of new-fangled electrical medical devices made their appearance across the land – and on people’s upper chests.
They were also described as galvano-electrical batteries but without any medicinal plaster component. These were distinctly designed to be stylish, even fashionable jewelry-like medical devices: small and shiny, suspended most often by a silk band, worn at the top of the cleavage, even though the instructions generally recommended they be worn “as close to the heart as possible.” They were pretty items, with a pleasing arrangement of disks of different metals, like bronze, copper, nickel, and zinc, arranged in a circular pattern around a central object, which could be a flower, hexagon, cross, heart, or other design, each the creation of a different manufacturer. Most were enclosed in a circular band of bronze or white metal; one was edged in a horseshoe pattern, and the Scott’s Galvanic Generator was extra-fancy, with a sculpted winged cherub holding bundles of lightning bolts on one side while the reverse side had a zinc fist similarly clutching lightning bolts all embedded in a copper shield. Hall’s Galvanic-Electric Plaster was expected to be hidden under the clothing; Boyd’s Battery, Scott's Galvanic Generator, and the rest of the batteries put out from 1878-1886 were designed to be the center of attention and in the public eye.
London Galvanic Generator, Pall Mall Electric Association, ca. 1881. (left) front side - winged cherub sculpted in Lionite, holding bunches of lightning bolts; (right) reverse side - copper plate with embedded zinc in the shape of a fist holding lightning bolts. (collection of author.)
While their public exposure surely increased their popularity, it also brought them into condemnation by critics who insisted they weren’t giving any medical benefit at all. Calling electric batteries “toys”, the faultfinders guffawed that “a wooden button worn upon the breast would be quite as effective as the so-called ‘batteries’ which have hitherto been sold as curative to an over credulous public”; wearing a slice from an ear of corn would do as much good (and look pretty much like) as one of the batteries. To the critics, the popular belief in the curative power of electric batteries fell into the same realm of superstition as those “otherwise intelligent persons [who] believe that carrying a Horse Chestnut in the pocket will keep off rheumatism.”
The detractors also came after the “before-and-after” illustrations that Hall’s plaster and other electric battery companies used to promise amazing results. The critic’s sarcasm was as vicious as it was humorous:
There is a picture of a man without any battery, labelled “Before Using,” and another picture of a man with a battery, and this is labelled “After Using.” Now if these pictures are accurate representations of the man before and after, we protest against its use. One has only to wear one of these things, and his own mother would not know him. A rogue has hereafter no need to go to Canada to escape justice. All he has to do is to wear one of these batteries, and if these pictures are true, he becomes another man altogether. [emphases added]
Electrical batteries like Hall’s and all the rest were facing stiff headwinds at the same time as they were being warmly received by the public. They didn’t last long, probably from a combination of significant critical opinion as well as the fact that they just didn’t work.
There is no more development of electrical action between these bits of metal than there is between the coins in one’s pocket – and we pronounce the thing to be an UTTER BARE-FACED FRAUD.
People still suffered from weak eyes, constipation, and heart disease even though electrical batteries dangled from their neck or Hall’s Galvano-Electric Plaster stuck to their backs. If there was any improvement, it was more likely the result of time and nature providing their own remedy or, in the case of constipation, time and nature might be aided by a heaping plate of beans.
During an intense courtroom cross-examination in 1882, one of the leading electric battery manufacturers, Professor John C. Boyd, was asked, “Professor of what? Responding under oath, his telling reply was, “Professor of nothing.” His credential, like his product, was a ruse, good for nothing. The only thing shocking about Hall’s plaster and the subsequent wearable electrical batteries was that they didn’t work; they didn’t generate electricity and they didn’t cure or remedy disease. They do make great patent medicine antiques though!
Just like Iron Man's Arc Reactor, Hall's Galvano-Electric Plaster and all the small body batteries that followed should have stayed in the world of fiction; maybe they can be included in the next Iron Man movie!
(left) Lowder's Magneto-Electric Battery (center design: two circles within a hexagon), ~1886 (courtesy of the Wellcome Collection; public domain); (right) Richardson's Magneto-Galvanic Battery (center design: heart), Journal and Courier (Lafayette, IN, 25 MAR 1881).
(left) J. R. Flanigan Medal Battery, 1880; (center) John M. Lewis, 1880; (right) Boyd's Battery, 1878. (from patent drawings and other public domain files)
Lynn Massachusetts history - History of medicine - 19th-Century Health Remedies - Vintage Medical Ephemera - 19th-century medicine
- Andrew Rapoza
- Sep 14, 2024
- 6 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Part 2 of 3: THE COCONUT
I remember my mom taking me to the bear cage at Buttonwood Zoo when I was a little kid. I could smell the bears long before I could see them … the pungent odors of molting fur and beastly wastes combining in the stagnant August heat … To this day, the overpowering stench hangs in the recesses of my memories. Put bear’s grease in my hair? No way.
But coconut?
Absolutely – that’s a happy smell for most of us. There are tons of coconut scented shampoos and conditioners on the market even today. And to make a fine point about that tropical fruit, we eat coconut ice cream, coconut cream pie, and coconut macaroons; maybe it's just me, but toasted coconut sprinkled over anything turns it into instant FABULOUS!
Joseph Burnett thought coconuts were great as well, even though he lived over 9,000 miles away from where coconut trees grew. Born in 1820, he was a precocious young man, graduating from college at 17 years old as a Doctor of Chemistry. He then went to work for a manufacturing chemist in a Boston apothecary shop. There he could use his education not only to fill doctor’s prescriptions but also to formulate new medicines, toiletries, and other products of his own creation. In less than ten years he was a partner in the firm and forming a strong reputation for excellent products.
In 1846 he made and supplied the first general anesthetic used to knock out a patient before surgery. In 1847 he was the first to produce vanilla extract in the U.S.; it was so popular, he expanded his extract line to over thirty flavors, including lemon, almond, celery, nutmeg, rose, nectarine, and cinnamon (I wonder if he made extract of coconut?). Burnett’s Extracts quickly became a major brand; by 1855 they were being sold all over the eastern half of the continent, fully 15 years before the government began registering trademarks in 1870.
Then came the coconuts
Americans had a long-standing fascination with foreign lands and cultures. Stories that came back from sailors and whalers, missionaries, merchants, and explorers told of strange animals and curious people in distant, exotic locations across the globe. One such account caught Joseph Burnett’s eye; it gave a vivid description of the people of Sumatra, reporting “Their hair is strong, and of a shining black, the improvement of both which qualities it probably owes in great measure to the constant use of Cocoanut Oil.” Burnett’s advertisement repeated only part of the author's sentence, which originally read, “it probably owes in great measure to the early and constant use of coconut oil ... .”
Burnett determined that he would invent a coconut-based hair oil that would produce the same effects – strong and shining – on a wide scale. He had purposely removed the word “early” from his advertising copy because he wanted his customers to feel confident that they would derive the benefits as soon as they started using his coconut oil. Including "early" might sway them not to purchase the hair dressing because they hadn’t been using it all their lives, like the Sumatrans.
His advertising also promised that his formulation had removed “the peculiar odor” and made it “the blandest” preparation for hair ever offered to the public. Interesting that the coconut fragrance so widely enjoyed by us today in our hair products was off-putting to Americans in the mid-nineteenth century – or at least to Joseph Burnett.
Then he made another decision with this product that has caught 21st century bottle collectors by surprise, confusing a whole bunch of them in the process. He named his new coconut-infused hair product “Burnett’s Cocoaine.”
Not Cocaine – Coc-O-aine
Chemically formulating his new hair dressing might have been easier than formulating the product’s name. The “Coco” part of “Cocoaine” was obviously for its principal ingredient – coconut – but the reason for the ending is not as clear; “aine” is the pharmaceutical suffix for a local anesthetic (such as cocaine, lidocaine, novocaine, etc.). Maybe Burnett classified the coconut hair oil as an anesthetic because of its promised benefit of soothing an irritated scalp.
In 1857 Joseph Burnett introduced Burnett’s Cocoaine to America, following the same advertising blitz strategy that he was using successfully with Burnett’s Extracts – whatever success it was going to have would be totally dependent on its association with coconuts because America had not yet heard of the South American drug, cocaine; in fact, a method to extract cocaine powder from the coca plant wouldn’t be accomplished for another two years. Only after this had happened could cocaine be put into medicines and human bodies (unless people just started chewing the leaves).
Joseph Burnett focused his attention on differentiating his new hair oil from its old-world competition, bear’s grease. “The inventors of Cocoaine, knowing that animal oils – Bear’s Grease, Pomades, &c. – induce heat rather than alleviate it, turned their attention and pharmaceutical science towards Vegetable Oils as the basis of a medicament to promote the growth and preserve the beauty of the hair.” Burnett’s promotional copy continued, “Burnett’s Cocoaine is superior to all animal oils,” explaining it was a cooling vegetable oil, while animal oils were heating (19th century consumers reading this could easily imagine that the furry hide of a bear was far hotter than a coconut hanging under its swaying palm leaves). He then explained that coconut oil does not become rancid like animal oils do (that’s not true, but it sounded good). He concluded his pitch with the promise that he had “permanently deodorized” his Cocaine product of that “objectionable” coconut odor. Whatever.
Burnett’s Cocoaine was an immediate success which consequently drew a quick succession of competitors. In 1859 an imitation hair oil made in New York City with a copycat name (“Cocoine”) and bottle shape, was taken to task by the Boston Post: “This is a poor subterfuge, and should not be suffered to be practiced to the injury of the very respectable and responsible
gentlemen who have devoted as much time, care and capital to inventing and making known the genuine article." The knock-off hair oil was also taken to court and the judge found that, “The conclusion is irresistible that [the defendant] was aware of the advertisements for Cocoaine and that he intentionally adopted ‘Cocoine’ as a close imitator of 'Cocoaine,’ and for the purpose of deriving profit from the simulated trade-mark [the name].” A permanent injunction was ordered against the New Yorkers. In 1862 a Chicago druggist began offering their “Cocoaine Soap” for chapped hands, made of “Glycerine Honey and Cocoa Nut Oil.” Not a pretender to Burnett’s hair oil business, but more of a camp follower, trying to cash in on the intensifying interest in Cocoaine as well as cocaine. By this point, medicine makers were starting to sell products containing the actual drug cocaine from the coca plant, like Dr. Tibbles’ Compound Essence of Cocaine in England and America’s Cocaine Toothache Drops.
Cocoaine - a valuable property
For the remainder of the century, there was less care being taken by typesetters (and perhaps the Burnett company and its advertising agency) to correctly identify Burnett’s Cocoaine. In 1870 The Times-Picayune of New Orleans twice incorrectly called the hair dressing Cocaine within the body of the Burnett’s Cocoaine ad; in contrast, an 1880 Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald. listed Bennett’s Cocaine along with the other products of the Burnett line, all of which were properly identified as Burnett’s. As Burnett himself knew from all those who tried to horn in on some of his sales, imitation was the sincerest form of flattery. Perhaps they felt that the occasional “slip” of the “o” from Cocoaine might be worth the confusion, since the drug cocaine was unregulated and addictively popular. The inconsistency and infrequency of the mistakes, however, would suggest they were unintentional mistakes. Burnett’s Cocaine was doing just fine and didn’t need cheap tricks to sell well. As one of their ads in 1883 powerfully stated, “The name “Cocoaine” has become a valuable property.”
Somehow, amid all of his empire building with extracts, toiletries, and Cocoaine, he had also managed to buy and build the large Deerfoot Farm in Southborough, Massachusetts. Deerfoot became one of the earliest dairies to package their milk products in glass bottles. Joseph Burnett also developed a recipe for sausage that made that product popular as well. From vanilla extract to coconut hair dressing to pork sausage, the Boston manufacturing druggist seemed to have the Midas touch; more likely, he was truly a skilled chemist and businessman.
In 1894 Joseph Burnett died at 74 years old as a result of a carriage accident. The Boston Druggist Association and the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy both sent delegations to his funeral as a tribute to his years of service and influence in both groups. His great stone mansion in Southborough, Massachusetts still stands and is being actively preserved.
For more on cocaine, see:
PROMISING CURES
Vol.3: Ashen Complexion
Next week: Part 3 of 3: THE OIL WELL
