I am not terribly proud of the fact that I have medicines stuffed into upstairs cabinets that go back to the Jurassic or maybe before and yesterday I found a real relic — a big jar half filled with Vaseline. The top of the big square jar with the dark blue top was thick with dust from at least the Cretaceous, so much that I could barely read the word “Vaseline” on the label.

But I opened it of course, thinking it would be a big yellowish clump of granite, but it was not. It was perfect, as perfect as the day it was bought all those eons ago. I felt compelled to find out how come that blob of sticky, redolent, golden-white grease that does so many good things for humanity could have lasted all those years and stayed as it was when first jarred and sold to me. And what a fascinating history it has indeed.

Seems there was this guy named Robert Chesebrough back in the mid-1800s, a chemist out of Brooklyn NY who one day was watching a fellow worker cleaning an oil-rig pump of thick black residue called “rod wax.”  The gunk was considered worthless, but not to Chesebrough. Who knows what was going through his mind, but he decided to clean up the gook and make it into yellow-white jelly and voila! Vaseline was born.

And now he had to figure out what to do with his creation.  He began to ponder on this issue as chemists are wont, and wondered if it could be turned into a salve of some sort. Now, I have always avoided using that word because I can’t figure out how to pronounce it — savv? salv? solv? sahv?? Whatever, Mr. Chesebrough began hawking this now pristinely white jelly, although he first had to convince potential buyers that it would not burst into flame, ever, even though it was an oil by-product. He loved languages and so took the German word for water which is wasser (W is pronounced as V in Deutschland,) and then he borrowed the Greek word for olive oil which as we all know is elaion, and voila!  Vaseline.  Works for me!

Persistence was Chesebrough’s middle name, OK it really wasn’t, but he was determined to sell this product as something to spread on germs or burns or all sorts of cuts, bug bites and gashes, so he did what any entrepreneur back then would do; he hired teams of salesmen to wander about in upstate NY in horse-drawn buggies to hand out free samples of his creation.  And sometimes he’d go along and sometimes when people doubted his claims of the healing ingredients of Vaseline, Chesebrough would actually cut or burn himself to show how incredibly efficacious his product was. Can you even begin to imagine sales people doing that kind of thing today?

Vaseline was a smash hit in upstate NY and even at the famous Paris Exposition on 1900. Bob Chesebrough was, as they say, sitting in the catbird seat.  His product was a big hit, and was even renamed Wonder Jelly in some circles. It was and probably still is used on burn victims, and on cuts to keep bacteria out of the wounds, on chapped lips, it neither melts nor freezes so can be taken all over the entire world.  I know when I was growing up a jar was always on a shelf in everyone’s kitchen to help heal kitcheny-type wounds.

Mr. Chesebrough did good, philanthropic works with his wealth and never stopped believing in his gooey essential product.  In fact, when he was in the midst of his 50s, he quite nearly died of pleurisy and insisted he be covered from head to toe with yes, Vaseline. He survived and lived to be 96. See?  He knew of what he spoke!  And if this can be believed and why shouldn’t it be, he also became quite seriously ill in the 1930s, survived that and “confessed” to the world that he did so because he ate one spoonful of his wonder jelly daily.  Eeuw. But hey, 96?  I guess it worked!  I know I’m a believer. Do I eat Vaseline? Nope. But I’m nearing 87 so maybe I’ll give it a shot and make it to 100.  Why not? Spread on good toast it may not be so bad, right?

LC Van Savage is a Brunswick writer.