Part 3 of 3: THE OIL WELL
"Kennedy knew as much about medicine as a horse does about astronomy"
(- Kennedy's friend and chemist, 1882)
I’ve only lived down here in East Texas for the most recent few decades of my life, but there has never been a question about where I was. We have Arizona’s heat and the Amazon’s humidity. Some of our bugs are the size of a hand … with eight hairy fingers. Alligators lurk in some rivers and ponds like leftover dinosaurs silently waiting for their next victim. Then there are the big metal pumpjacks, or “thirsty bird” pumps, bobbing up and down in one spot, silently sucking the ground below. I’m not sure which creature unnerves me more – the alligators or the giant thirsty birds.
Finally there are the oil derricks, usually surrounded at their base by a sizeable number of life forms scurrying about in brightly colored hard hats. At nighttime glowing spotlights illuminate them – from miles away through the vast darkness of the Texas countryside, the brightness looks like a star has crashed into the earth; get closer and the derrick scene at night looks like an alien invasion. Texas is, first and foremost, Oil Country USA.
Carboline looks Texan: in a close-up of the design on its 1877 box, oil wells can be seen standing in an oilfield, with busy workers doing all the things that oil workers did. A large drum labeled “CARBOLINE” is at the center, with the derrick’s pipe shooting oil right into the drum, ready to make the next big batch of Carboline. The scene screamed Texas, but it wasn’t. Not even close.
DIFFERENT PLACE, DIFFERENT TIME
Texas wouldn’t have its day for a while yet – the great Texas Oil Boom wouldn’t begin until Spindletop gushed all over about its black gold in 1901. Pennsylvania was the country’s big oil play in the 1870s, not Texas.
Oil wasn’t as important in 1877 as it was in 1901. It was mostly being used in the form of kerosene to light lamps because it was a cleaner, cheaper lamp fuel than the oil from slaughtered sperm whales. Oil wells were starting to be found more easily than the constantly moving leviathans of the deep in their rapidly thinning pods.
As lamp wicks across western Pennsylvania started lighting up with the kerosene byproduct of oil, an enterprising Pittsburgher had a flash of brilliance – oil didn’t need to just go up in smoke – he was going to turn it into medicine – to grow hair.
Robert Monroe Kennedy wasn’t a petroleum engineer or a doctor, or even a chemist; he was an entrepreneur whose skills were creativity, vigor, and making money – a great mix for a businessman. In his hands, black, stinky, sticky goo from the ground was just another opportunity waiting to happen.
He got into business as a boy, peddling cheap jewelry. He made enough money at it to expand his business. In 1867, a few years after the Civil War was over, the 24-year-old went by R. Monroe Kennedy and created a network of salesmen far and wide to sell his “Mammoth Prize Stationery Packages,” as well as silverware, photographs, and what he openly called “cheap Jewelry.” The sole qualification he required of his recruits was for each to be a “LIVE man” – full of energy to do a great job – in other words, they needed to follow their leader.
In 1871, after four years in general goods sales, he changed his moniker from R. Monroe Kennedy to simply R. M. Kennedy, and undertook a new venture, proprietorship of a line of remedies he called Dr. Radcliffe’s, headlined by a Dr. Radcliffe’s Seven Seals or Golden Wonder (It was actually the flagship of a whole line he developed under the Dr. Radcliffe's name, including Elixerene or Favorite Panacea, a nervine & blood purifier; Expectoral, a cough and lung balsam; Favorite Pills, for dyspepsia and liver complaints, and Positive Cure for Catarrh, to relieve congestion. But these were all weak stepsisters to Seven Seals and were rarely advertised.). With a completely fabricated backstory as to the origin of Seven Seals, Kennedy promised the medicine had, “in cases of the most intense, excruciating and agonizing pains, aches, cramps, spasms, etc., … absolute power to subdue and extinguish pain almost instantaneously. … IT LITERALLY DEMOLISHES PAIN.”
No surprise; an analysis two years after it was introduced revealed it contained ether and chloroform (two strong and potentially lethal ingredients that were being used to knock people out before surgery) camphor and capsicum (two more pain-killing ingredients), and oil of peppermint (probably for flavor), all in a whopping 90% alcohol. Simply put, it was a powerful and dangerous brew that could “demolish pain” and potentially the patient. Kennedy advertised the Seven Seals robustly across the country for the next half dozen years, in dozens of newspapers and with many trade card designs (which he called show cards); but then he suddenly shifted his advertising to his newest creation, Carboline.
GREASY HANDS & HAIRY HEADS
Kennedy named his product Carboline, apparently by blending “carb-” from carbon, the stuff that makes oil black, and “-oline” the Latin suffix for oil. It seemed effective for 1877 – “carbon oil” was the common term for the black crude that was starting to change America’s financial landscape.
The story Kennedy wove for Carboline was at least as imaginative as his claim that Dr. Radcliffe’s Seven Seals was named after a British physician who was the seventh son of a seventh son (popularly believed to be the sign for having the gift of healing, possibly with psychic skills mixed in). Kennedy’s advertising copy claimed a practical chemist in Pittsburgh had become very interested in a paragraph he read in one of the city newspapers about a government officer in southern Russia who had amazing success when using petroleum on some cattle and horses that had lost their hair as the result of a cattle plague.
He recollected that a former servant of his, prematurely bald, had got the habit, when trimming the lamps, of wiping his oil besmeared hands in the scanty locks which remained [on his head], and the result was a much finer head of black, glossy hair, than he ever had before.
The chemist then experimented on this claim and found that vigorously rubbing the head with a palmful of highly-refined American oil over the space of three days had the same desired results: it invigorated the scalp as well as strengthened the hair and returned it to its original dark color.
Kennedy then claimed all that remained to converting crude oil into the perfect hair-growing medicine was, oddly, the same challenge that Joseph Burnett had with his coconut-based hair oil – getting rid of the strong smell. Thinking back to the last time I put oil into my car, I am convinced that Kennedy’s deodorizing mission must have been more critical than Burnett’s.
Neutral paraffin oil, another distilled version of petroleum, was by far the main ingredient (93%) in the formula for Carboline; among other purposes, it is used today as the basis for baby oil – a very gentle moisturizer to the skin that can be helpful for the relief of dry skin and dandruff. In addition to the pint of paraffin oil, the formula called for four drams of cantharides (“Spanish Fly” or more accurately, soldier beetle, ground up and saturated in alcohol, probably used to stimulate the scalp), 20 grains of euphorbium (resin from a Moroccan cactus-like plant), and oils of rosemary, cassia, and cloves, all likely added for fragrance. Kennedy definitely accomplished his goal of deodorizing the oil, and its color (as shown in the bottle pictured above) is as mild a shade of yellow as a slice of banana cream pie.
Kennedy’s new hair-growing oil seems pretty innocent, especially compared to his earlier venture with Dr. Radcliffe’s Seven Seals. Perhaps complaints about bad results with Seven Seals or Golden Wonder was the reason for R. M. Kennedy’s quick product change to the fairly benign Carboline. The only thing bold about it was the promise, “RESTORES THE HAIR ON BALD HEADS.” From “demolishing” every pain to growing hair on bald heads, there was nothing R. M. Kennedy’s medicine couldn’t do, at least according to R. M. Kennedy. One of his ads promised in 1882,
A CHANCE FOR BALD-HEADS.
Their day of deliverance has dawned. This is the age of wonders: wonders in science, wonders in mechanism, wonders in everything. ...
THE MERCHANT PRINCE OF PITTSBURGH
R. M. Kennedy advertised the heck out Carboline, reaching almost every state in the country once again by using newspaper advertising and show cards. He ran a contest in the New York Times for children to see how many words they could make from the letters in “Carboline” and another contest for adults to write songs praising the healing properties of Carboline.
He came to be known by his friends as “Carboline Kennedy,” and "The Merchant Prince of Pittsburgh." Whether the light-yellow liquid grew hair on bald heads or not, sales were brisk and Kennedy made a lot of money. Then, just as his hair grower sales were peaking, he sold out his rights as sole agent in late 1878 to Geo. W. May & Co. of Staunton, Virginia. He still did some limited promotions of the product in a small number of newspapers over the next few years, but they weren’t the same size or frequency of what he had run in its banner year, 1878. Maybe he detected that sales were weakening, and perhaps he knew this was coinciding with an escalating number of consumer complaints that their bald heads had not, in fact, returned to luxuriant billows and waves of dark, strong hair. Whatever the reason, he suddenly took his earnings and started investing in real estate. He purchased farmland on the outskirts of Pittsburgh and transformed them into beautiful villages, erecting many cottages that he then sold. He laid out the city of Homestead, Pennsylvania, on the northeast side of Pittsburgh (complete with a glass-making factory), and it was said he had made more money in Pittsburgh real estate than any man up to the end of the century.
The prince of Pittsburgh was well-known, wealthy, and popular because he frequently helped out his friends with needed cash. His largesse, mixed with a little naivete, almost got him killed. Not a gambler himself, in 1882 he watched a poker game in a hotel room at the pleading of the friend of a friend, who was soon borrowing small amounts from him – and losing them in the game. Things escalated out of control when Kennedy was asked for $500; saying he would only fund the card player $300 and only if the man signed an IOU for repayment. He was then attacked by the crowd of gamblers and thieves at the game and severely beaten, and “he is now lying at the point of death as a consequence of the injuries inflicted by the scoundrels.”
The 39-year-old Kennedy did recover but more tragedies followed. His young wife died in 1884 of heart disease after she retired early to her room, suffering from a severe headache. Kennedy had moved on from real estate to speculating in oil investments, and made great money again, but while on an extended trip to England he was one of several investors who was convicted of conspiring to manipulate the oil market prices and in so doing he overdrew his account by $66,059 (over $2 million in 2023 USD). His personal effects were sold by the sheriff. But his friends were convinced he would bounce back because he was R. M. Kennedy. He had some bad luck throughout his business career, but then he would “rapidly regain all he had lost,” and his devoted friends were convinced that he picked up another fortune when he returned home from Europe, although they didn’t know what it was.
R. M. Kennedy traveled and lived in both England and Pittsburgh until his death fifteen years later, in 1899. His heavy investment and push of Carboline in 1877-1878 turned out to be little more than a tryst with the hair grower, an affair he ended shortly after it had begun. It would have been heady news if his medicine really did grow hair on bald heads, but it could not and did not. In fact a friend admitted as early as 1886, “Kennedy knew as much about medicine as a horse does about astronomy.” The friend, who was probably also his chemist for the medicines, continued:
He used to get an idea that a medicine for some particular ailment would sell well, and he would come to me to get up something. I’d always do it for him, making up a medicine that would be as harmless as possible. Then Kennedy would go into the most extravagant advertising and tell the world of some remarkable discovery.
The old business associate and friend waxed philosophical in his closing remarks about patent medicines in general, “There is no business so uncertain as the patent medicine business; the shores of time are strewn with their wrecks.” Maybe so; but the patent medicine ships of R. M. Kennedy, when he was their captain, flew like Yankee Clippers, fearless and with great energy. Undaunted by life’s setbacks and the flimflam of his own swindles, he only changed course when he wanted to, and most everyone in Pittsburgh seemed to admire the cut of his jib.
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