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.
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