Word: levers
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...nozzle and having it dry before it falls engaged the million-dollar attention of a battalion of lawyers who represented four-fifths of the entire U. S. soap business. Brilliant Newton Diehl Baker led the mass-attack of Procter & Gamble (Ivory Snow) and Colgate-Palmolive-Peet (Supersuds) against Lever Brothers Co. (Rinso) for alleged infringement of patents...
Nevertheless, the biggest U. S. soap company and the second biggest were determined to fight it out against the third biggest, which is an important affiliate of Britain's utterly fabulous soap trust. P. & G. and Colgate had acquired the patents with an eye to competing with Lever's Rinso; but no sooner was the product on the market, said the plaintiffs, than Lever began to alter the form of Rinso, eventually hitting on practically the same process. Last week Lever contended that spray-drying was an old, old idea, that its own patents went back for half a century...
This is the first year that Lever could rightfully speak in half-century terms but both the plaintiffs are accustomed to rolling off a round century or more, William Colgate sold his first cake of soap in his little Manhattan shop 128 years ago. For three generations the Colgates ruled Colgate, their hegemony ending with the Palmolive-Peet merger in 1928. As late as 1931 the company was selling $90,000,000 worth of Palmolive, Cashmere Bouquet, Octagon soaps, tooth paste, shaving cream and whatnot. But profits dropped from $8,900,000 to a slight deficit in 1932. That...
...South Bend trial could hardly be described in terms of two venerable soapmakers ganging a struggling competitor. The assets of Britain's Lever Brothers Ltd. are $175.000,000 larger than the assets of P. & G. and Colgate combined. Its profits last year footed up to £6,200,000?about $31,000,000. Lever's properties are so far flung that at the annual meeting last April the chairman had a map of the world on the wall behind him with Lever plants ?and plantations?picked out with tiny colored electric bulbs. When the chairman pushed one button, green...
...William Lever was the seventh child but first son of a Bolton wholesale grocer. He soon tired of gigging about the countryside selling groceries, decided to go into soap. Unlike Harley Procter who had a soap before he had a name,* William Lever had a registered name (Sunlight) before he had the soap. By 1888 he was breaking ground for Port Sunlight, the first of his countless adventures in "enlightened self-interest." The biggest was his Congo adventure into which, in his restless search for raw materials, he plunged in 1910. He acquired from Belgium millions of acres of palm...