Trademarks: Love in a Bottle

As America moved closer to the end of the 19th century, more and more products loaded store shelves and newspaper pages. Competition for consumer dollars consequently became tougher, so manufacturers resorted to branding their products and some got their product designs and names trademarked.

It was the early years of registered trademarks in the U.S. (the first being issued in 1870), so the art and craft of creating an effective brand went in many directions - some became standards that have lasted into our lives today and many more have gone the way of the dodo - but even those have fascinating and sometimes fun stories to share with us today.

Lots of Lynn medicine makers applied for trademarks and I have featured them in Appendix B of Promising Cures. I will drop them in as blog entries from time to time, starting with this amusingly dramatic scene for Parisian Afro Tonic:

The product name was actually an abbreviation - probably to make it reader-friendly - it was short for Parisian Aphrodisiac Tonic. The man on bended knee is assumed to depict the product's proudly French creator, Charles Francois Julien Petit de Langle (note the enhanced detailing of the man's face compared to the plainer rendering of the woman's face). Although there were proprietary medicines for every human ailment under the sun, the French doctor created one for an issue infrequently discussed: sexual desire.

ARE YOU IMPOTENT?

his newspaper advertisement asked boldly.

The physician and specialist in genitourinary diseases had immigrated from France to the U.S. with his wife, Marie, and settled in Lynn. In 1893 he set up a complete medical facility in Central Square, comprising a waiting room, a laboratory, a dispensary, and an operating room, and Marie advertised her services as a Parisian dressmaker. He also introduced his own medicine in that year – the Parisian Aphro Tonic – an aphrodisiac medicine for the marketplace; in so doing, he had a trademark created that was clearly designed to attract attention.

The trademark depicted a man, presumably de Langle himself, on bended knee before a well-endowed and over-corseted woman, almost certainly Marie in one of her Paris creations, holding a bottle of the Parisian Aphro Tonic. The image makes you wonder: is he proposing marriage, or propositioning her, or just begging for the medicine? The scene implies that he is trying to be amorous, but perhaps he was just pleading for the bottle of tonic so that he could be! Maybe an even better question would be: is the curvaceous, wasp-waisted lady refusing to give it to him?

Something seemed to be working for Charles and Marie; the couple celebrated a “joyous triple ceremony” - their tenth anniversary, a house warming, and the anniversary of the French republic on 14 July 1896, and invited hundreds of guests for the grand event at their new home on the corner of Ocean and Basset streets. The de Langles seemed very happy and very much in love - perhaps there was something to his medicine after all.

For more on the career of Charles F. J. Petit de Langle, see:

PROMISING CURES, Vol.4, Chapter 10: Exposing the Naked Truth

& Appendix B: Lynn, Massachusetts Proprietary Trademarks