Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (46 page)

As an oil, it floats, and often coats the nets of fishermen. It was early Arab fishermen who first appreciated ambergris’s sweet odor and its great fixative qualities in extending the life of a perfume. Ambergris, for example, is able to delay significantly the rate of volatility of other perfume oils with which it is mixed. Today both musk and ambergris can be synthesized, and the perfume trade has voluntarily refused to purchase ambergris out of consideration for the survival of the sperm whale.

Civet
. This is a soft, waxy substance secreted by the civet cat, a nocturnal, flesh-eating animal of Africa and the Far East, with spotted yellowish fur.

Civet is a glandular secretion of both male and female cats of the family
Viverra civetta
. The waxy substance is formed near the genitalia, and it can be collected from captive cats about twice a week. It possesses a revoltingly fecal odor, but when blended with other perfume essences, it becomes both extremely agreeable and strongly fixative. Exactly how ancient perfumers of the Far East discovered this fact remains a puzzling mystery.

Castor
. This scent is derived from both Russian and Canadian beavers of the family
Castor fiber
. The secretion collects in two abdominal sacs in both
males and females. Extremely diluted, castor (or castoreum) is itself agreeable, but its primary use is as a scent-extending fixative. The fixating qualities that mark all four of these animal essences are a function of their high molecular weight. The heavy molecules act as anchors, impeding a perfume’s predominant scents from rising too quickly above the liquid’s surface and escaping into the air.

Cologne: 1709, Germany

An Italian barber, Jean-Baptiste Farina, arrived in Cologne, Germany, in 1709 to seek his fortune in the fragrance trade. Among his special concoctions was an alcohol-based blend of lemon spirits, orange bitters, and mint oil from the pear-shaped bergamot fruit. His creation was the world’s first eau de Cologne, “water of Cologne,” named after the city founded in
A.D
. 50 by Agrippina, wife of the Roman emperor Claudius.

While the city of Cologne was famous in the Middle Ages for its great cathedral, containing the shrine of the Magi, after Farina’s creation it became known throughout Europe as the major producer of cologne. The first cologne fragrance enjoyed a tremendous success, particularly among French soldiers stationed in that city in the mid-1700s during the Seven Years’ War. The Farina family prospered. Several members moved to Paris and started another successful perfume business, which in the 1860s was taken over by two French cousins, Armand Roger and Charles Gallet. Broadening the Farina line of toiletries, the cousins sold them under their combined names, Roger & Gallet.

Soon, in the trade, “cologne,” “toilet water,” and “perfume” acquired well-defined meanings. A perfume became any mixture of ethyl alcohol with 25 percent of one or more fragrant essential oils. Toilet water was a thinner dilution of the same ingredients, containing approximately 5 percent essential oils. And cologne was a further alcoholic dilution, with 3 percent fragrant oils. Those definitions apply today, although a particularly rich (and pricey) perfume can contain up to 42 percent of the precious oils.

The French dominated the perfume industry well into the nineteenth century—and beyond.

It was François Coty, a Corsican whose real surname was Sportuno, who, watching U.S. infantrymen sending home vast quantities of perfume following World War I, grasped the full possibilities of the American obsession with French fragrances. By selling name-brand products in smaller quantities and at cheaper prices, Coty appealed to new sectors of society and ushered in the first form of mass production in the perfume industry. Also capitalizing on the American desire for French perfumes, Jeanne Lanvin took her creation Mon Péché, which had failed in Paris, and in 1925 turned it into an immediate and resounding success in America under the name My Sin.

shalimar
. The same year that My Sin debuted, two French brothers, Pierre
and Jacques Guerlain, created Shalimar, Sanskrit for “temple of love.” The brothers were inspired when a rajah, visiting Paris, enthralled them with a tale of courtship in the Shalimar gardens of Lahore, Pakistan. In the gardens, replete with fragrant blossoming trees imported from around the world, Shah Jahan, a seventeenth-century emperor of India, courted and married Mumtaz Mahal. After her death, he built the magnificent Taj Mahal mausoleum as her memorial.

Chanel No. 5
. The superstitious fashion designer Gabrielle (“Coco”) Chanel associated good luck with the number five. In 1921, she introduced to the world her new fragrance, announcing it on the fifth day of the fifth month and labeling the perfume No. 5.

At that time, the perfume was unlike others on the market in that it did not have the distinctive floral “feminine” scent then popular. That, in fact, played a large measure in its appeal to the “boyish” flappers of the Jazz Age. The revolutionary No. 5, with its appropriate timing and scent, turned out to be a lucky number all around for its creator, earning her fifteen million dollars. Americans took immediately to the perfume, and Marilyn Monroe once replied to a journalist who asked her what she wore to bed: “Chanel No. 5.”

Avon: 1886, New York

The modern cosmetics industry in America was not dominated entirely by foreigners. It is true that Chanel, Coty, and Guerlain hailed from France; Helena Rubinstein from Krakow, Poland; Elizabeth Arden (born Florence Nightingale Graham) from Canada; Max Factor from Russia. But Avon was strictly an American phenomenon, and a unique and pioneering one at that.

The first Avon Lady was actually a man, young door-to-door salesman David McConnell from upstate New York. He launched Avon Calling in 1886, offering women cosmetics in the comfort and privacy of their own homes. But perfumes and hand creams were not McConnell’s initial merchandise.

At the age of sixteen, McConnell had begun selling books door-to-door. When his fare was not well received, he resorted to the then-popular advertising gimmick of offering a free introductory gift in exchange for being allowed to make a sales pitch. A complimentary vial of perfume, he thought, would be an ideal entrée, and he blended the original scent himself, with the aid of a local pharmacist.

Fate stepped in. As a later door-to-door salesman discovered that his free soapy steel-wool pads (see “S.O.S. Pads,” page 102) were preferred by housewives over his actual pot-and-pan wares, McConnell learned that women adored his perfume and remained indifferent to his books. Thus, he abandoned books and organized the New York–based California Perfume
Company, named in honor of a friend and investor from California. The door-to-door approach seemed tailor-made for cosmetics, particularly in rural areas, where homemakers, in horse-and-buggy days, had poor access to better stores.

The first female Avon Lady was Mrs. P. F. E. Albee, a widow from Winchester, New Hampshire. She began her chime-ringing career selling the company’s popular Little Dot Perfume Set, and she recruited other women, training them as door-to-door salespeople. The company was rechristened Avon for the simple reason that the New York State town in which David McConnell lived, Suffern on the Ramapo, reminded him of Shakespeare’s Stratford-on-Avon.

By 1897, McConnell had twelve women employees selling a line of eighteen fragrances. And the numbers kept growing and growing. Today, despite the scores of expensive, prestigious American and foreign brand-name cosmetics, Avon ranks first in sales nationwide, with more than half a million Avon Ladies ringing doorbells from coast to coast.

Chapter 10

Through the Medicine Chest

Medication: 3500
B.C
., Sumer

Because early man viewed illness as divine punishment and healing as purification, medicine and religion were inextricably linked for centuries. You became ill because you lost favor with a god, and you regained that god’s grace, and your health, by a physical and spiritual purging. This notion is apparent in the origin of our word “pharmacy,” which comes from the Greek
pharmakon
, meaning “purification through purging.”

By 3500
B.C
., the Sumerians in the Tigris-Euphrates valley had developed virtually all of our modern methods of administering drugs. They used gargles, inhalations, suppositories, enemas, poultices, snuffs, decoctions, infusions, pills, troches, lotions, ointments, and plasters.

The first drug catalogue, or pharmacopoeia, was written at that time by an unknown Sumerian physician. Preserved in cuneiform script on a single clay tablet are the names of dozens of drugs to treat ailments that still afflict us today. As a gargle, salt dissolved in water; as a general disinfectant for wounds, soured wine; as an astringent, potassium nitrate, obtained from the nitrogenous waste products in urine. And to relieve a fever, pulverized willow bark, nature’s equivalent of aspirin.

The Egyptians added to the ancient medicine chest.

The Ebers Papyrus, a scroll dating from 1900
B.C
. and named after the German Egyptologist Georg Ebers, reveals the trial-and-error know-how acquired by early Egyptian physicians. Constipation was treated with a laxative of ground senna pods and castor oil; for indigestion, a chew of peppermint
leaves and carbonates (known today as antacids); and to numb the pain of tooth extraction, Egyptian doctors temporarily stupefied a patient with ethyl alcohol.

The scroll also provides a rare glimpse into the hierarchy of ancient drug preparation. The “chief of the preparers of drugs” was the equivalent of a head pharmacist, who supervised the “collectors of drugs,” field workers who gathered essential minerals and herbs. The “preparers’ aides” (technicians) dried and pulverized ingredients, which were blended according to certain formulas by the “preparers.” And the “conservator of drugs” oversaw the storehouse where local and imported mineral, herb, and animal-organ ingredients were kept.

By the seventh century
B.C
., the Greeks had adopted a sophisticated mind-body view of medicine. They believed that a physician must pursue the diagnosis and treatment of the
physical
(body) causes of disease within a scientific framework, as well as cure the
supernatural
(mind) components involved. Thus, the early Greek physician emphasized something of a holistic approach to health, even if the suspected “mental” causes of disease were not recognized as stress and depression but interpreted as curses from displeased deities. Apollo, chief god of healing, and Prometheus, a Titan who stole fire from heaven to benefit mankind, ruled over the preparation of all medications.

Modern Drugs
. The modern era of pharmacology began in the sixteenth century, ushered in by the first major discoveries in chemistry. The understanding of how chemicals interact to produce certain effects within the body would eventually remove much of the guesswork and magic from medicine.

The same century witnessed another milestone: publication in Germany in 1546 of the first modern pharmacopoeia, listing hundreds of drugs and medicinal chemicals, with explicit directions for preparing them. Drugs that had previously varied widely in concentrations, and even in constituents, were now stringently defined by the text, which spawned versions in Switzerland, Italy, and England.

Drugs had been launched on a scientific course, but centuries would pass before superstition was displaced by scientific fact. One major reason was that physicians, unaware of the existence of disease-causing pathogens such as bacteria and viruses, continued to dream up imaginary causative evils. And though new chemical compounds emerged, their effectiveness in treating disease was still based largely on trial and error. When a new drug worked, no one really knew why, or more challenging still, how.

As we will see in this chapter, many standard, common drugs in the medicine chest developed in this trial-and-error environment. Such is the complexity of disease and human biochemistry that even today, despite enormous strides in medical science, many of the latest sophisticated additions to our medicine chest shelves were accidental finds.

Vaseline: 1879, Brooklyn, New York

In its early days, Vaseline had a wide range of uses and abuses. The translucent jelly was gobbed onto fishermen’s hooks to lure trout. Stage actresses dabbed the glistening ointment down their cheeks to simulate tears. Because Vaseline resists freezing, Arctic explorer Robert Peary took the jelly with him to the North Pole to protect his skin from chapping and his mechanical equipment from rusting. And because the compound does not turn rancid in steamy tropical heat, Amazonian natives cooked with Vaseline, ate it as a spread on bread, and even exchanged jars of the stuff as money.

The reports of myriad uses from all latitudes and longitudes did not surprise Vaseline’s inventor, Robert Augustus Chesebrough, a Brooklyn chemist, who lived to the age of ninety-six and attributed his longevity to Vaseline. He himself ate a spoonful of it every day.

In 1859, Robert Chesebrough was searching not for a new pharmaceutical unguent but for a way to stave off bankruptcy. At a time when kerosene was a major source of home and industrial power, his Brooklyn-based kerosene business was threatened by the prospect of cheaper petroleum fuel from an oil boom in Pennsylvania.

The young Brooklyn chemist journeyed to Titusville, Pennsylvania, heart of the oil strike, with the intention of entering the petroleum business. His chemist’s curiosity, though, was piqued by a pasty paraffin-like residue that stuck annoyingly to drilling rods, gumming them into inactivity. The field workers Chesebrough questioned had several unprintable names for the stuff that clogged their pumps, but no one had a hint as to its chemical nature. Workers had discovered one practical use for it: rubbed on a wound or burn, the paste accelerated healing.