6 Cheery Old Ads for Stuff That’s Now Illegal
Advertising can be tricky when the law bans your product. The very page you’re reading advertises weapons-grade plutonium (Pu-239 chiefly, with a little Pu-240 mixed in), but we are forced to disguise that, calling it something else, such as the Disney Pixie Dust Pass.
But no product was always illegal. And before that product’s ban was in place, people could freely sell the stuff, with the customer completely unaware of the consequences.
Chlorine Gas: The Cure for the Common Cold
Oakland Tribune
People already knew chlorine gas was deadly before this 1925 ad. The military manufactured the stuff as a weapon, in such facilities as one chemical plant in Maryland. But during the pandemic following the 1918 flu, doctors noticed that workers at this Maryland plant didn’t suffer from the flu as badly as people in general.
Today, we still don’t know why those workers fared so well. Maybe it was because they had jobs, so they were hardier than the average person in town. But the theory at the time credited incidental exposure to chlorine. This resulted in a few dubious experiments to confirm that chlorine really can be good for the lungs, followed by the release of the product above, the Chlorine Kilacold Bomb. It was an ampoule of chlorine that you could inhale to purportedly relieve and even cure respiratory illnesses, including the common cold.
The product eventually got shut down for claiming to be “absolutely harmless,” which is something you can’t claim about a cheeseburger, much less chlorine gas. Later still, we proved for certain just how bad even the 0.35-gram dose of the stuff was, but for a while, people really did breathe it in for relief. The ad is also telling the truth about Calvin Coolidge using it. Rather than healing his respiratory problems, this made them worse, ultimately killing him.
Formaldehyde for Your Milk
Milk isn’t so fun to drink once it goes chunky. The bacteria in the stuff can also kill you when they get really organized, so people have long tried to figure out how to keep milk drinkable for longer.
Storing milk somewhere cold helps, as people learned early on through trial and error. Late in the 19th century, milk sellers discovered an additional solution. Just before milk went sour, they could pour in a little embalming fluid. Embalming fluid keeps flesh from decaying, so it did the same for food, while also adding a touch of sweetness that covered up what sourness had already formed.
The chemical formaldehyde was marketed as Preservaline in the above ad from 1898. While it did appear to keep milk from going bad, formaldehyde was itself toxic, as eventually became clear when loads of kids started dying. Indiana banned Preservaline early in the 20th century, and the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act enforced the ban nationwide. Luckily, people soon discovered a new process for keeping milk safe. It was called pasteurization, and until this point, everyone assumed it was only good for treating wine.
The Promise of Lead Paint
You knew that lead paint was once a thing. But given that even paint manufacturers were starting to warn about lead poisoning as early as 1905, maybe you didn’t expect to see the stuff advertised quite the way the above 1939 ad handled it. And this isn’t even an ad being made by any specific paint brand. It comes from a lead trade organization, hoping to push the broad concept of lead paint to raise the demand for lead.
It took till 1977 for the United States to ban lead paint. Generations that grew up licking the stuff are still alive and running the country, and if you look closely, you can still see bits of brain matter leaking out their ears each day.
Beer: Great for Children!
Laws on selling alcohol to children go back surprisingly far. In Washington state, they passed a law stopping vendors from selling alcohol to minors all the way back in 1877. Violators could face a $500 fine, which is around $15,000 in today’s money.
However, just because a store couldn’t sell a child a keg didn’t mean that private individuals would be penalized for splitting a drink with a beloved grandchild. And so, we get this 1906 ad, urging you to cultivate the Rainier Beer habit in your children from an early age.
Sure, drunkenness may lead all sorts of danger, but a little supervised drinking never hurt anyone. Tell someone back then that the letter of the law would one day forbid a little girl and her grandfather from sharing glasses of healthful malt tonic while in the privacy of their home, and they’d think you were mad.
Just Plain Heroin
Heroin, of course, began as a medicine because opioids don’t just grow on trees. They grow on poppies, and it then it takes chemical processing to turn them into something so pure as heroin.
Much like morphine, heroin promised powerful pain relief, but heroin originally claimed an advantage: It wasn’t addictive. That claim didn’t prove true in the end, but for a while, it seemed so safe that you could even take it for diseases like bronchitis or asthma, the sort of conditions that one day would be instead treated using chlorine gas.
This 1914 ad, targeting doctors, advised about the correct dosage for heroin. Sure, an adult could take a teaspoon every few hours — we can all relate to that. But for tweens, a mere half teaspoon or less would be more appropriate. Children younger than that should receive just a handful of drops of heroin. If nothing else, it would shut them up for the evening.
Let’s All Sing About DDT
Much like lead paint, DDT is a product you knew was once sold widely but perhaps never really pictured being advertised. Unlike with lead paint, the bold claim that DDT was “good” was, largely, true. Pesticides are good because pests are bad. It was great to have fruit without worms in them and cows whose legs weren’t getting eaten up by flies.
When we did eventually turn on DDT, the reason wasn’t the risks to humans from exposure. The stuff is a little carcinogenic, but you needn’t expose yourself to much of it if someone washes those apples before they get to you. No, the problem was that the chemical built up in birds and made their eggs too brittle. It’s especially ironic then that a bird is celebrating DDT in this 1947 ad. However, that’s a rooster, so maybe this enforced birth control really is nothing but a cause for celebration for him.
DDT was why bald eagles became endangered. Then, banning DDT was why bald eagles stopped being endangered. So, don’t despair. The world can recover from anything.
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