Colgate’s Huge Contribution to Toothpaste History
Colgate is an absolute monolith when it comes to paste for teeth. They haven’t quite reached the level of interchangeable vocabulary with the item itself, like Kleenex or Band-Aid, but I’d argue they’ve come close. There’s an entire accredited university, founded in 1819, that has to regularly deal with the question, “Colgate? Like the toothpaste?” Even more embarrassingly, they have to answer, “Yes, a little bit.”
Do you ever wonder, though, how Colgate established such a stranglehold on the toothpaste scene? Was it simply good marketing? Superior minty flavor? Being the first to do that thing where the paste has cool stripes in it?
It turns out that Colgate is, in fact, responsible for the introduction of an absolutely (and inarguably) revolutionary bit of toothpaste tech: the tube.
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Yes, the ubiquitous presence of the squeeze tube that projects tiny, shiny turds of tooth-cleaning substance is thanks to Colgate itself. The tube may have been invented by another toothpaste manufacturer, Dr. Washington Sheffield and his son, Lucius, but Colgate saw its genius and introduced it to the world at large. Sheffield was making toothpaste in his own dental office, but Colgate began to mass produce and sell their toothpaste in tubes starting in the 1890s. Up until that point, toothpaste had been sold in *wait for it* jars.
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Not only was this less sanitary, given that a jar would require rooting around in there once or twice a day, but unimaginably more convenient. My god, knowing toothpaste’s skill even now at propagating itself across a bathroom like mold spores, drying into tiny dots, can you imagine the sort of damage done trying to pry a mouthful out of a jar on the regular? Your mirror would look like it had just been blasted with a fire extinguisher every time you scrubbed up your pearly whites.
For that reason alone, I may finally have to switch my allegiance completely over to Colgate.
“Shouldn’t you really switch to Dr. Sheffield’s?” you might ask. But look, that’s not how these things work. Take it up with Nikola Tesla, who deserved to be remembered for more than exploding cars he never made.
