8 Basic Products That Were Once Sold As Revolutionary

8 A Special Soap... Just for Your Armpits?

The first commercial deodorant was created by a company named Mum in 1888. The name either evoked something wholesome and maternal or something secret (“mum’s the word”) depending on what campaign they were trying. These campaigns took a while to take hold. By 1937, they still needed to inform the general public about what a deodorant even was. 

These ads weren’t claiming that Mum was a better deodorant than competitors. They were just selling people on deodorant as a concept. Bathing does nothing to guard your body against future odors, it warned. Also, the underarm is an area that needs special care.

In addition to selling the first deodorants, Mum went on to invent the first roll-on deodorants. Until they did create that roll-on version, their product was a cream, and applying it took half a minute. While it did combat body odor, using mechanisms similar to today’s deodorants, the cream had an odor of its own, so Mum initially struggled to convince buyers that it served a purpose. 

They also initially struggled to figure out exactly what they were selling. When they first created their zinc-based product, Mum advertised it as both a cream for your underarms and a cream for your feet. As you can see in one of the above ads, they also suggested smearing the cream on sanitary napkins.

All of these ads may well remind you of bygone feminine hygiene ads, which we now mock for trying to solve something that was never a problem. Only, with deodorant, we today say, “Wait, no. That one really does fix a problem. Let’s keep that.” 

7 Imagine, a TV You Can Tune With Switches

Television has changed so much over the years that we can’t accurately guess what sort of TV anyone reading this grew up with. But we’re going to guess that just about the oldest possible TV many of you can imagine is one where you had to go up to it and turn a dial to a new notch to change the channel.

However, even that would have been considered a new convenience to someone from an earlier generation. Earlier, simply shifting the dial to a predetermined spot wasn’t the end of the story. You’d still need to tinker with it if you wanted the get the picture clear. Then a new technology offered to rid you of that task. With automatic fine-tuning control, the TV would take care of that for you with a single switch.

That 23-inch TV (“there’s none bigger made”) started at a very reasonable $460, which is $4,200 in today’s money. Or, it gave you the option of paying every month for two years. Here’s an ad Zenith produced to show off automatic fine-tuning control:

“It’s so easy, you can do it blindfolded,” says the ad, revealing that the model turning the dial is wearing a blindfold. Which is obviously a ridiculous thing to say about someone watching TV, but they love the joke so much that right after doing it, they do it a second time. 

6 Stay Connected, With Your Own Telephone

When you want to talk to someone, you go over to their house and speak with them, naturally. But let’s now imagine a situation where that’s impossible. Let’s say you’re in quarantine. You’ll be isolated and unable to communicate with anyone — unless you and your unreachable loved ones got yourselves some Bell telephones.

This ad resurfaced and circulated in 2020, with many people saying it dated to the 1918 flu. It actually dates to 1910. If you’re wondering what nationwide quarantine in 1910 was confining everyone to their homes, well, there wasn’t any. This ad instead referred to the continual quarantines that anyone might find themselves suddenly swept up in. 

Perhaps your city would round up tuberculosis patients one day, or maybe everyone would have to shut themselves in to stave off the bubonic plague. A century later, people would be forced to learn Zoom, but back then, this was many people’s introduction to the benefits of a telephone line. It saved you from isolation. Or, as in the above image, it saved you from being isolated with that one person you were quarantining with, which could be an even worse fate. 

5 Put Away That Match. Light the Room with Electricity!

Electricity transformed how homes and factories operated, but people had to be convinced to make the transition. This ad from 1916 tells you of how electricity relieves the burdens of not just humans but dumb animals, too:

One sentence may jump out at you: the part about how “the cost of everything else has gone up” (a perennial complaint), but the cost of electricity had gone down. This was true — the cost of electricity had plummeted in the years right before this and would continue to fall over the next century. 

However, considering that this ad was urging people to try electricity for the first time, the real comparison should have been electricity versus alternate types of energy, and this change was even greater. When it came to lighting, for example, electricity brought costs down by more that 99.9 percent from 1700 to 2006 (and that doesn’t count the continued drop in prices thanks to the later shift to LED bulbs). During the previous few centuries, the price of lighting hadn’t dropped at all. 

It was such a revolutionary change that some ads had to downplay it to avoid scaring customers away. “If it is not particularly troublesome, try our services anyway,” offers the above modest 1908 ad. Others felt they could advertise the benefits more freely. The following sign, which went up in many hotels, said you needed no match to light your room. You could just turn the key by the door:

4 A Candy With a Hole

When Life Savers first debuted, they called themselves “the candy with a hole,” and this wasn’t just branding. Candy with a hole in the center offers provable advantages over traditional fruit drops, they argued, and they were willing to explain this in terms of each object’s surface area. Greater surface area meant your mouth converts more saliva to candy juice every second, hitting you with a mathematically elevated level of flavor. 

Also new at the time: the innovative packaging. That combination of foil and paper was designed to “weatherproof” the candy. Before this special wrapping (which Life Savers still use today, a full century on), kids would walk around with maple candy in their pockets, which melted in the heat, leading to widespread tragedy. 

3 The Very Concept of Plastic

We’ve talked to you before about the long quest to invent plastics, which included such ventures as mixing sawdust with blood before finally making the stuff from petroleum, largely by accident. And once we finally figured the stuff out, well, the applications were obvious. In fact, they meant that you should quit your job and turn to creating plastics yourself, today!

Imagine if you could fabricate, shape, cast, mold and dye plastics, all in your home. This 1945 ad promised that you’d then have your own business, and never mind that some of the verbs in that last sentence are just synonyms. 

As with all get-rich-quick schemes, these promises were lies. The advertiser was fairly upfront about this. They put the word “fabrication” right there in big letters. 

2 Buy a Gas Heater, to Save on Labor

Let’s return now the topic of how tech saves us from drudgery. 

When you debate what sort of heating system to use in your home, you think about how much it costs, about how much heat it puts out, about how likely it is to break down and perhaps about the environmental impact. One thing you might not think about is how much effort you must put into constantly shoveling more fuel in, but that was an important factor, once upon a time. 

With a gas heater, no longer will you leave to load up a stove with coal or wood. Moreover, given that the person making this purchasing decision is a man, no longer will your wife have to load up a stove with coal or wood. Because if you’re the one doing the loading, well, maybe there’s a certain honor in that, and maybe you sneer at lazy neighbors who turn to newfangled inventions to avoid that chore. But if you’re making your wife tire herself out when you can buy a gas heater instead, that would make you a scoundrel. 

A gas line is “sunshine on tap,” said this 1907 ad. That slogan is so good that we have no doubt that Edison went on to steal it to advertise his electricity.              

1 Watch Movies at Home! It Doesn’t Matter Which Movies

Before VCRs, it was next-to-impossible to own and watch Hollywood movies. You needed to own your own film projector, which was hard enough, but you also needed to own a reel of the movie in question, which was harder. Hollywood lent reels to theaters and later converted these for television broadcast, but they didn’t mass produce them for home media 

You could, however, buy reels that lower-profile creators produced. For example, in 1956, you could join the Movie-of-the-Month club, and they’d send film shorts right to your door. Which film shorts? Well, you won’t have heard of them. No one will have heard of them. But they were new movies — new comedy movies. Some of them even came with sound, if that’s what you’re into. Maybe they’d send you Sleeping Beauty, a “comedy satire that kids the ads.” 

As you look at these photos of provocative women and someone staring at a film’s individual frames, you might wonder to yourself, “Is this just an ad for porn?” That is always a reasonable question. But given that the ad offers specific boxes for people looking for children’s movies or family pictures, we’d like to think this was more than that. People always liked watching comedy even when they couldn’t get to a theater, and before you could stream specials by some famous personality or watch a known film that everyone recommended, people were happy to just take whatever they could get.

And if they did get porn, that was just a bonus. 

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