A Brief History of Window Cleaning

The 1933 invention of Windex wasnt the first major innovation to come from the Philip W. Drackett Company that was Drano, the powdery lye-
and-aluminum-and-dyed-salt solution that came about in the early 1920s. That once-a-week drain concoction was invented by Philip and his
son, Harry. (The elder Drackett died just a few years later, in 1927.)
The company came to its success in consumer products after expanding from its roots as a maker of industrial chemicals. That can be a tough
jump to make, but the company was able to pull it off in no small part thanks to smart marketing formulated by Sally Drackett, Philips wife,
who came up with the name and the symbol over the , to ensure proper pronunciation.
A decade after finding its footing in the consumer market, Harry followed up by coming up with household window cleaner something that
proved a winner for the company. Like his dad, Harry looked at consumer trends of the era: Like indoor plumbings growth immediately after
World War I, windows were having a moment in the Great Depression era. Cars used them, obviously, and they were becoming a common part
of homes.
But it was not necessarily a good moment for a new window cleaner at least on the surface.
"[T]he timing seemingly could not have been worse," Cincinnati Post reporter Barry M. Horseman wrote in 1999. "It was the depth of the
Depression, when clean windows were the least of many American families concerns. This was a marketing nightmare compounded by having
to compete not just with other similar products but with free water."
Eventually, though, things would become clear. Windex would eventually become a big hit for Drackett and its corporate successors arguably
bigger than Drano became, which is saying a lot.
First focusing on the car market, the company quickly found a place for its product in homes, in no small part to all the windows that needed to
be cleaned.
(Side note: Windex a great example of why you shouldnt simply rely on a Wikipedia entry in doing research. The page for the chemical strongly
implies that Windex was initially a highly flammable material that was only sold at first in a metal spray container, with its current form only
coming through reformulation. But the claim, which dates back to an unsourced 2006 addition to the encyclopedia and has appeared in books
written after the addition date, lacks firm ground: A 75th anniversary press release makes no reference to the metal cans, while ads in 1935
show glass bottles, not cans, and advertising dating as far back as 1943 specifically claims the material isnt flammable. Metal cans didnt come
about until the late 1950s. That said, evidence that the spray was reformulated is common knowledge.)
But theres something else that Drackett deserves credit for that the Windex bottle may be responsible for popularizing, and thats the container
that the not-safe-to-drink chemical comes within.
The weird thing about Drackett was that Windex and Drano were not the only things going on with the company at the time. The firm had a
relationship with Henry Ford, who had an interest in using soybeans as building block for manufacturing.
Ford worked closely with George Washington Carver on this endeavor, with the duo hoping to use their smarts in agriculture and manufacturing
(along with Fords massive soy fields) to help create items that would eventually forge new industries by killing two birds with one soybean.
Most notably, this led to the creation of the "Soybean car," a device that was made almost entirely with naturally-occurring plastics derived from
soy, hemp, and other versatile plants. It was a weird idea. (Did it inspire the Chevrolet stepvan made from marijuana, as featured in Cheech and
Chongs Up in Smoke? Well never know.)
The car turned out to be a bit of a bust, but their experimenting did help Drackett, which had interests in Fords soybean endeavors as well as a
few of its own, move into plastics a crucial part of the success of the spray bottle. The firm, notably, announced a kind of fabric produced from
soybeans named Azlon, as part of the companys diversification efforts. That effort came about directly because it bought a business from Ford.
And that diversification turned back to the spray bottle the company sold with
bottles of Windex. (Well, usually. Theres at least one example of Windex being
advertised without any spray functionality at all.)
Over the years, Drackett sold its sprayers in a variety of styles, including a metal
nozzle that you press down on. One early plastic model was reminiscent of the
sprayers on bottles of the modern sore throat medicine Chloraseptic. Early on
out of a mixture of necessity due to the fragile nature of early plastics, and to
encourage re-use the company even sold Windex sprayers separately, rather
than including them with the solution.
During this same period, Drackett had built a reputation for experimenting with
soy-based plastics, which likely helped inspire much of the companys work on its
spray bottle designs, even if much of that soy-based plastic never actually made
it to market.
Eventually, Drackett moved away from soybeans entirely, in part because the
sector was pushing them toward food production rather than industrial uses.
(Nearby Worthington, Ohio, noted for its influence on meat analogues, was
among those that pushed Drackett to use their formidable soy resources for
making veggie food.) But the move toward plastics in general stuck with the
company continuing to improve its spray-bottle designs.
Drackett was eventually bought out by larger companies, and its brands are now
a part of S. C. Johnson & Son. But the efforts the company put into spray bottles helped drive the cleaning industry forward.
Eventually, the industry found a solution for cleaning supplies that proved especially effective: The gun-style trigger sprayer, an invention of
Japans Tetsuya Tada in the late 1950s, quickly took over the cleaning supplies aisle of the grocery store. Windex headed in that general
direction, itself, moving toward its now-standard design by the 70s.
Tada, who died in 2015, was heartfelt about the effect that his engineering work had on the broader world.
"I firmly believe that all of this is making a humble but significant contribution to the current protection of the ozone layer, which is so essential to
all life on our planet including, of course, mankind," Tara wrote on the website for his company, Canyon Corporation.
Its a quiet innovation certainly, we dont talk about it much but it probably did in fact change the world for the better.
http://tedium.co/2017/06/13/windex-glass-cleaning-history/