Word: mckitterick
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Dates: during 1936-1936
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Messrs. Ellis & McKitterick were well aware of the fact that the dealer was fed up with profitless prosperity. They also knew that they enjoyed considerable personal prestige in the trade. As crack salesmen for the old Tobacco Trust, later for Melachrino, and then as vice presidents of Tobacco Products Corp., they had built up reputations for giving dealers a break. President Ellis could cash a check in any cigar store in any U. S. city of 5,000 or more. All in all, the time seemed ripe for a 15? cigaret that really sold...
...baby" and, if dealers loved Rube and Mac, they would not cut prices. They did not cut, then or later. But Rube Ellis never lived to see his cigaret burn bright. Few months after it was launched, he dropped dead, and Philip Morris was left to Mac McKitterick...
Philip Morris sales boomed from the start. But to give them added impetus, President McKitterick speeded up research on a hygroscopic agent called diethylene glycol. A hygroscopic agent is what attracts and retains moisture in tobacco. Most cigarets use glycerin. Chemists discovered, however, that when diethylene glycol is burned, unlike glycerin, it does not give off an irritant called acrolein. That was a neat find indeed, and it promptly went into Philip Morris advertising, though Philip Morris claimed that it had been using the agent all along...
President McKitterick then took his diethylene glycol to Columbia University pharmacologists, had them experiment. They put a solution of smoke from cigarets containing the new hygroscopic agent under the eyelid of a rabbit. To President McKitterick's delight, it produced less swelling than a solution from cigarets using glycerin and, curiously, less than a solution from cigarets using no hygroscopic agent at all. How much this test really proved is still a matter of debate. A solution of smoke is not smoke, a rabbit's eye is not a human throat and almost nothing is known about...
Great was the relief of pharmacologists, therefore, when President McKitterick withdrew the acrolein advertising story pending further experiments, which are still going on. Sole use now of the diethylene glycol angle is among doctors. In some 40 medical journals, and there only, Philip Morris runs quiet advertising about its hygroscopic agent. At every big medical convention Philip Morris salesmen pass out packs to the delegates, discuss cigaret pharmacology with them in learned language...