Robert Peary took it to the North Pole. There’s a song in its honor. It makes smiles sparkle. It’s used to coat the feet of vending machines to keep pests out. It controls unruly hair. People put it on chickens to prevent frostbite. It protects baby’s bottoms, and is invaluable to virgins. A tycoon swore eating a spoonful a day helped him live to see 96 years, and odds are that you have some in your home. It’s Vaseline.
The name Vaseline comes from the German word for water and the Greek word for oil—though I never thought German and Greek mixed. The inventor, Robert Chesebrough, was a purveyor of illumination oil and a chemist in England who saw that there was a greater fortune to be made dealing in petroleum than there was in the oils from whales with which he had been dealing. In 1859, at the age of 22, he spent his life savings on a ticket to Titusville, Pennsylvania to meet with the oil barons there. Upon touring the oil fields he noted a rigger scraping a thick, dark goo from an oil pump’s joint, and he asked about. It was explained that the troublesome wax-like gunk tended to come up with the crude, and collect on the rigging; if it wasn’t cleaned off periodically, it would gum up the works. And some people thought that it helped wounds heal faster—that notion lit dollar signs in his eyes, and he made off with a bucket full of the “rod wax”.
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