What is Vaseline?

Ever wondered what was in Vaseline and where it came from? The story of Vaseline generically known as petroleum jelly starts with one man, Robert Chesebrough an English inventor. Robert was formerly in the oil business as a chemist working with whale oils. When he heard about petroleum he knew that it would be the future of fuel so Robert took his life savings and headed to Pennsylvania in the USA to get his slice of the profits.

When he arrived he met with the oil barons, and while on a tour of the oil fields he came across thick goo collecting around the pump rods on the oil wells. He later learned that the substance was called Rod Wax and was a nuisance to the oil extracting process, but that the workers put it on their cuts and it seemed to help heal their wounds. Well, Robert saw dollar signs and he collected a great quantity of the stuff for experiments, and since the stuff was a problem to the oil drillers he could get the Rod Wax for cheap. Robert spent the next ten years purifying the product making it the colorless odorless product that is widely available today. But when Robert finally finished his product it was not widely available because all the pharmacists that he brought it to were not interested in his salve. Not willing to quit after ten years of labor, Robert set about to sell his product using unconventional methods.

He took his product to the road and set up stands where he would cut, stab, and bun himself and then he would apply his ointment. He had various stages of healing wounds on his body to show the people who happily took the product amazed by Robert's macabre experiments on himself. When the people went to their pharmacists to get more they of course did not have any to sell. Now that there was profit involved the pharmacists were ordering Robert's invention like crazy. A self satisfied Robert was only too happy to sell his miracle product to those who had scorned him earlier.

But where does the name come from? There are several different stories but here are two popular stories. One story says that during his ten years of work in the lab Robert ran out of beakers for holding the Rod Wax that he used all of his wife's vases to hold more Rod Wax. Robert added the popular medical term "line" to the word vase because of his propensity using vases in his work thus Vaseline was born. The other story holds that the word Vaseline is a combination of the German word for water and the Greek word for oil. Whatever the case may be Vaseline is a great product used for everything from coating the feet of vending machines to keep pests out and controlling unruly hair. What more can be said for a product useful for a great variety of things and can be found in any drug store for cheap.

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Where did the idea for Vaseline come from?
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