Word: levers
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...oils. Last week buttery oil and sudsy oil flowed together in a merger of a great margarine company and a great soap company. The margarine company was Margarine Unie, a Dutch concern which, with its British affiliate, Margarine Union, is Europe's largest margarine producer. The soap company was Lever Bros., which, with some 200 associated companies, is world's largest soap maker. Inasmuch as both Margarine Union and Lever Bros, control their sources of raw materials and also operate chain store systems through which their finished products reach the consumer, the merger represented one of the largest and most...
Sunlight. When U. S. washers think of Lever Bros., they may perhaps think of how 98% of Hollywood cinemactresses use Lux, or of how Lifebuoy soap removes Body Odor. Some oldtime U. S. washers may think of the oldtime question: Good morning, have you used Pear's Soap? Yet, though Lux, Lifebuoy and Pear's all are Lever Bros, soaps, they are not the Lever Bros. soap. Leading Lever Bros, product is Sunlight Soap. The main Lever works are at Port Sunlight on England's Mersey River. Almost unknown in the U. S. is Sunlight, largest selling soap...
William Hesketh Lever was born in Bolton, Lancashire in a three-story brick building the natural unloveliness of which was later emphasized by the addition of an extremely inappropriate bay-window. His earliest childhood recollection (1854) was the burning in effigy of Emperor Nicholas of Russia, for at that time the Crimean Wrar was going on and it appeared extremely important that the Russians should not take Constantinople. His father, James Lever, had risen from a grocer's apprentice to a retail and finally to a wholesale grocer. The family was solvent rather than affluent and William's boyhood allowance...
Sunlight Soap, made from vegetable oils and superior to the tallow soaps then (1885) generally in use, was almost immediately successful, became inside of three years the largest selling soap in the United Kingdom. In 1887 Soapman Lever reclaimed a large area of swampy land along the Mersey River and built Port Sunlight, perhaps the earliest instance of the paternal industrialism it represents...
...remaining history of Lever Bros., after the establishment of Port Sunlight, is largely the history of expansion through branches. Mr. Lever globe-trotted all over the world. Wherever he traveled he left behind him, in strategic spots, a Lever Bros, branch or a Lever Bros, subsidiary. France, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, the U. S.?even China was not too far distant. In 1906 he tried to arrange a consolidation of leading British soapmakers, but the late great Lord Northcliffe raised such an antitrust turmoil that the project was abandoned. Thereupon Mr. Lever sued Lord Northcliffe and other