Jell-O
On March 17, 1993, according to the Jell-O Museum web page, technicians at St. Jerome Hospital in Batavia, NY, apparently having nothing better to do, hooked an electroencephalograph up to a bowl of lime flavor Jell-O. They were amazed, the story goes, to discover that America’s favorite gelatin dessert exhibits brain waves “identical” to an adult human being. Unrecorded but obviously relevant is whether the adult human used for comparison happened to work as a technician at St. Jerome Hospital.
But while lime Jell-O seems an unlikely candidate for the Nobel Prize in much of anything, it does hold the distinction of being a big hit in Salt Lake City, which consumes more of the green jiggly stuff than any other American metropolis.
For a brand name that today is recognized by 95% of Americans and found in 66% of their homes, Jell-O got off to a rocky start. The first person to patent a gelatin dessert, in 1845, was Peter Cooper, the inventor, manufacturer and philanthropist best known for pioneering the railroad locomotive in America. But making Cooper’s gelatin took the better part of a day and the product was not very popular.
A scant fifty years later, however, carpenter and cough-medicine purveyor Pearle B. Wait and his wife May Davis Wait of LeRoy, NY fiddled a bit with Cooper’s gelatin, and by 1897 had developed easier-to-make strawberry, raspberry, orange and lemon flavors. A name was needed for the product, and May came through with a winner — “Jell-O.”
Given the spelling “Jell-O,” May Wait was probably thinking of “jelly,” not “gelatin,” when she dreamt up the name, but the two words share a common root. The Latin “gelare” means “to freeze,” and as it percolated into various later European languages took on the connotation of “to congeal” (in fact, “congeal” itself is a descendant of “gelare”). Both “gelatin” and “jelly” were originally applied to a substance produced by boiling animal bones, skins, etc., to release collagen, which “jells” into a semi-solid as it cools. (Fruit jelly, which does not come from animals, jells because of the pectin in the fruit itself.) Today’s gelatin, including that found in Jell-O, comes from the same animal sources, but is so rigorously purified that many vegetarians consider Jell-O perfectly acceptable.
In subsequent years the Jell-O brand changed hands several times and today is owned by Kraft Foods Inc., which markets more than 150 products under the Jell-O name, including puddings, pie fillings, and Jello-O Pudding Pops. And in January 2001, all that lime finally kicked in and Jell-O was declared the “Official State Snack” of Utah. EEG testing of the legislature might be interesting.
Fig Newton
Didn’t know it was a trademark, did you? But only the cookies made by Nabisco are, legally speaking, Fig Newtons. Everything else is just “fig bars.”
One popular theory says that Fig Newtons were named after Isaac Newton, but much as we’d all like to see a line of famous scientist cookies (maybe Copernicus Nut Clusters or Heisenberg Uncertainty Macaroons), no such luck. It turns out that the first Fig Newtons were baked by the Kennedy Biscuit Company of Massachusetts, back in 1891. The folks at Kennedy Biscuit, later merged into what would become Nabisco, evidently had a habit of naming their confections after local towns (Beacon Hill, Shrewsbury, etc.) and institutions (e.g., Harvard). The Fig Newton thus immortalizes the lovely Boston suburb of Newton, Massachusetts.
Motorola
Most people would consider parking your car at the curb and cranking up the radio rude or worse. But when Paul Galvin did it in 1930, it was brilliant guerilla marketing.
When Galvin founded his Galvin Manufacturing Corporation in 1928, the timing could not have been worse. The Chicago company had early success with its “battery eliminator,” which allowed radio owners to run their sets on household current, but the stock market crash of 1929 threw the continued existence of Galvin’s enterprise into serious doubt.
Searching for a new product to revitalize his company, Galvin learned that some auto shops were doing makeshift installations of radios in customers’ cars. Galvin realized that a radio made specifically for cars, easy to install and insulated from interference, could be a winner. He rushed his staff to work on the project, and they produced a working model just in time for the 1930 Radio Manufacturers Association convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
Unfortunately, Galvin lacked the funds to rent a booth at the convention, so he had his engineers rig an external speaker to the radio mounted in his own Studebaker, drove to the convention, parked out front, and cranked up the volume. A crowd quickly gathered, and as Galvin pitched his product his wife took down the names of distributors interested in selling the radios.
One hurdle now remained — what to call the gizmo? Gavin polled his team of designers, and they quickly settled on “Motorola,” combining a sense of “motion” from “moto” with “sound” from the suffix “ola,” well-known in the trade names of “Victrola” phonographs and “Pianola” player pianos.