Name/Title
Bottle, BleachEntry/Object ID
2016.610.0001Description
Clorox 1/2 Gal bottle. Found by Joan while on a trail ride with her horse in the Gray's River, Wyoming area, in the same area as the Oregon Trail, it was at the base of a pine tree. Believe the bottle is from the 1920's era. The area has been used by sheep herders for a number of years.
1913-1927
The product and the company date back to May 3, 1913, when five entrepreneurs, Archibald Taft, a banker; Edward Hughes, a purveyor of wood and coal; Charles Husband, a bookkeeper; Rufus Myers, a lawyer; and William Hussey, a miner, invested $100 each to set up the first commercial-scale liquid bleach factory in the United States, on the east side of San Francisco Bay.[12] The firm was first called the Electro-Alkaline Company.[12] The name of its original bleach product, Clorox, was coined as a portmanteau of chlorine and sodium hydroxide, the two main ingredients. The original Clorox packaging featured a diamond-shaped logo, and the diamond shape has persisted in one form or another in Clorox branding to the present.
Bottle of Clorox bleach from a 1922 newspaper ad.
The public, however, didn't know very much about liquid bleach when Clorox bleach deputed. Although the Electro-Alkaline Company started slowly, and was about to collapse quickly, it would not be until 1916 when investor William Murray took over the company as general manager. His wife, Annie Murray, prompted the creation of a less-concentrated liquid bleach for home use. She built customer demand by giving away 15-ounce sample bottles at the family's grocery store in downtown Oakland.[13] Not long after, word began to spread and, in 1917, the Electro-Alkaline Company began shipping Clorox bleach to the East Coast via the Panama Canal.
1928-1960s
In 1928, the company went public on the San Francisco stock exchange and changed its name to the Clorox Chemical Company. "Butch," an animated Clorox liquid bleach bottle, was used in advertising and became well-known, even surviving the 1941 transition from rubber-stoppered bottles to ones with screw-off caps.[14]
The Clorox Chemical Company was strong enough to survive the Great Depression throughout the 1930s, achieving national distribution of Clorox bleach in the process, but during World War II, even though Clorox bleach proved useful as a first aid product for American armed forces, one of the bleach's ingredients was being rationed, as, under U.S. government orders, chlorine gas shortages forced many bleach manufacturers to reduce the concentration of sodium hypochlorite in their products, thus diluting them with water. Clorox, however, declined and elected to sell fewer units of a full-strength product, establishing a reputation for quality.[14]
In 1957, Clorox was purchased by Procter & Gamble, which renamed its new subsidiary "The Clorox Company." Almost immediately, a rival company objected to the purchase, and it was challenged by the Federal Trade Commission, which feared it would stifle competition in the household products market. The FTC won in 1967 after a 10-year battle, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that P&G must divest The Clorox Company, and on January 1, 1969, Clorox became independent again.