New York Stock Brokers: Frank L. Seligsberg

F. L. SELIGSBERG.

Langlois scan

Stock memorandum of sale.  I'm not certain, but it looks like the sale was for 100 shares of American Tobacco.

Philadelphia Stock Brokers: George A. Huhn & Sons

GEO. A. HUHN & SONS BANKERS.

DEC

6

1898

PHILA.

David Thompson scan

From The History of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, ed. Andrew Wallace Barnes:

The banking firm of George A. Huhn & Sons was founded in January, 1894, by George A. Huhn, and first opened for business at 143 South Fourth Street.  Associated with him in the business were his sons George A. Huhn Jr., and Samuel P. Hugh.

A general banking business, besides operations in the purchase and sale of investment securities, the issues of municipal or public service securities, stocks and bonds, was carried by the firm.

New York Stock Brokers: Henry I. Dittman

HENRY I. DITTMAN

JUN

18

1899

NEW YORK.

H.  I.  D.

OCT  25  1900

H. I. DITTMAN,

New York.

Langlois scans

From The New York Times of April 5, 1902, Henry Dittman sued the Distilling Company of America, a trust that apparently was operating in less than a transparent manner.  This is part of a much larger article that can be found at the NYT website.

New York Stock Brokers: Edward C. Potter

E. C. Potter & Company memorandum of sale for 100 shares of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad at $108 7/8.

E. C. P. CO.

OCT 2X XX

Wealthy brokers like Mr. Potter had their share of scrapes with the working class.  In the case described below, Edward Potter fought a private security man names Frank Bell, who it seems from Mr. Potter's point of view did not know his station in life, and needed to return to it.

New York Times, March 14, 1907:

New York York Stock Brokers: John M. Shaw & Company

JOHN M. SHAW & CO.

APR

24

1901

David Thompson scan

John M. Shaw was in the brokerage business with a gentleman named Charles MacQuoid.   

On Beyond Holcombe Time Warp: James S. Kirk & Company

On Beyond Holcombe is on hiatus for a few weeks but will be back.  For today, I encourage looking back on this post from last year on James S. Kirk & Company.

Chicago Board of Trade Members: Irwin, Green & Company

Irwin, Green & Co.

MAY

4

1899

Chicago.

Langlois scan

Members of the commission firm of Irwin, Green included:

Augustus W. Green, CBOT #601

Charles D. Irwin, CBOT #2868

Happy Thanksgiving!

1898 Thanksgiving Day cartoon.  Uncle Sam carving Turkey for the "new faces" at the table, including the Philippines, Cuba, Porto Rico, and Hawaii.  Pictures of the Generals that won the Spanish American War hang on the wall.  

Chicago Board of Trade Members: Counselman & Day

Counselman & Day,

JUN  13  1899

CHICAGO.

Langlois scan

Charles Counselman was CBOT member #312

See yesterday's post on Charles Counselman & Company.  Charles Counselman ran two firms, Counselman & Day and Charles Counselman & Company, in which the later firm consisted of a grain elevator business while the former firm, Charles Counselman & Company, engaged in trading on the Chicago Board of Trade and the New York Stock Exchange.

Chicago Board of Trade Members: Charles Counselman & Company

CHAS. COUNSELMAN & CO.

SEP

1

1899

CHICAGO.

Langlois scan

Charles Counselman was Chicago Board of Trade Member #312 and traded in grain and provisions.

From A History of the City of Chicago, Its Men and Institutions:

Charles Counselman, son of Jacob and Mary Counselman, was born at Baltimore in 1849. The family of Counselmaan is of Dutch origin, and is on the list of the pioneers of Maryland. Mr. Counselman received sound rudimentary education in the public schools of Baltimore, and in early youth pursued the study of law under the preceptorship of the late Judge Hammond of Howard County, Maryland. His health gave away under the of close application to books, and under advice of physicians he started west ward in quest of a business less sedentary than that of law.

Arriving in Chicago in 1869, Mr. Counselman engaged himself as a clerk in the then well-known commission house of Eli Johnson & Co, ; thence he transferred his services to the oil firm of Handford & Co., but soon returned to the commission trade, in the services of his first employers.

Early in 1871 Mr. Counselman was encouraged to begin business on his own account, and was enrolled as a member of the Board of Trade. The great and historic fire that year drove him out of his first quarters, but he speedily opened a new office on Canal street, to which locality the board was removed, pending the reconstruction of its ruined building. From then, until now, Mr. Counselman has been a prominent factor of the vast grain business yearly transacted in Chicago.

He is senior partner in two firms—that of Counselman & Day, and that of Charles Counselman & Co. The first-named firm confines itself to commissions and purchases on the Board of Trade and New York Stock Exchange, the latter conducts one of the largest elevator businesses in the country. The city elevators operated by Counselman & Co. comprise the large plants at South Chicago and the famous Rock Island elevators on Twelfth street.

The former are owned by the Counselman firm, the latter are leased property. The two systems have a yearly storage capacity of 6,000,00Q. bushels. In addition to these the firm manages several elevators in out side towns, with a yearly capacity of 4,000,000 bushels.

The Counselman firms have experienced, and gone successfully through, several storms -of commercial panic, always paying one hundred cents on the dollar in the worst times, and always making their fair share of profit in flush seasons. To-day they are among the most favorably regarded of the enterprises in their domain of business.

Chicago Board of Trade Members: A. Sanford White & Company

A. S. WHITE & CO.

MAR

2

1900

CHICAGO.

Langlois scans

April 11

August 17

August 17

A. S. White & Company was a Chicago commodities brokerage firm.  The prominent commodities trader Arthur Cutten got his start in the business at this firm. 

Board of Trade members in the firm included:

#3359 A. Sanford White

#6258 Arther William Cutten

On Beyond Holcombe: Vapo-Cresolene

On Beyond Holcombe by Malcolm A. Goldstein appears on Sundays at 1898 Revenues.

According to Mustacich and Giacomelli, the Vapo-Cresolene Company can be conclusively linked to only a single printed cancel appearing on RB 28.  Hardly worth a mention in philatelic annals, right?  Perhaps such willful ignorance animates those battleship specialists whose principal joy is discovering new intricacies in the line arrangement or millimeter spacings among printed cancels.  Since this study focuses on the wider implications of patent medicine companies, the immense volume of this company’s advertising in contemporary newspapers, magazines and journals and the lingering existence of its iconic lamps (ever discovered in dusty corners of flea markets, in antique stores and available on line), argue for its enormous success both as a patent medicine industry competitor and as a cultural force worth examining.

Even philatelically, there ought to be more to Vapo-Cresolene’s story.  The sheer enormity of its presence in both the past and present markets seem to require a larger philatelic footprint.  Mustacich and Giacomelli do identify one hand-stamped “V.-C.Co” cancel observed on an RB 28 that probably ought to be matched with this company.  Other un-attributed “V. C. Co.” cancels appear on values other than RB 28. These cancels may or may not coincide with the Company’s product line, which did include both replacement parts and replenishment bottles of the liquid used in its system.  Two un-attributed hand-stamps (only one of which appears on an RB 28) that otherwise might match - “T V C” and “T V & Co” - just miss alignment with the company’s name, even though that name sometimes appears in advertising as The Vapo-Cresolene Co.  Maybe this article will persuade collectors of all flavors - stamps, bottles, lamps, antiques - to take another look at their boxes and revenue stamp pieces to see if they can find more cancelled battleships that are definitively Vapo-Cresolene’s.

Vapo-Cresolene was popular.  The Vapo-Cresolene box appeared large, yellow, and solid on the druggist’s shelf.  When opened, it contained a small glass lamp, a sturdy, heavy, but gracefully molded, iron stand with an opening at the bottom to hold the lamp and an arm at the top suspending a vaporizer tray over the opening for the lamp, together with a bottle of Cresolene, a spare lamp wick, and instructions.  The instructions told the user to fill the lamp with kerosene only - alcohol would explode - and turn the flame up as high as manageable without causing smoke for the first fifteen minutes.  Once the lamp was producing heat, it was placed in the stand under the Vaporizer tray. 

However distinctively idiomatic the lamp and stand were and remain, it was the Cresolene, a sticky black liquid,  that constituted the therapeutic core of the device.  The Cresolene was poured into the tray and allowed to vaporize over the lamp flame in a ventilated room, and was intended to disinfect the space into which it permeated. The company advertised the Vapo-Cresolene system to be effective in treating respiratory diseases such as croup, catarrh, diphtheria, whooping cough, scarlet fever and asthma, by destroying the disease producing microbes in the patient’s system when the vapor was inhaled.  While Cresolene was the company’s proprietary formulation, the American Medical Association’s analysis in 1908 found it to be no more or less than garden variety cresol as described in the United States Pharmacopoeia, the official scientific compilation of medical compounds used in the United States. (Recall that the eminent scientist, Dr. Lyon of Nelson, Baker & Co, served on the 1900 decennial revision committee for that document.) 

Cresols are organic compounds characterized by a methyl group (CH₃) attached to a phenol molecule (a benzene ring with a hydroxyl radical (OH) already bonded to it).  By definition, they occur in nature as components of pitch and bitumen, and had been used without specific identification as parts of these undifferentiated materials for medicinal purposes since antiquity. First recognized as separate chemicals and refined in the 1830s, these compounds themselves were, as will be discussed below in detail, produced by distilling coal tar, itself originally regarded as a useless by-product of the reduction, or controlled burning, of wood or coal.  The medicinal utility of cresols was debated throughout the 19^th Century.  They were employed as antiseptics and disinfectants, but as the concentration of the cresols increased in a substance, the potential to burn also rose in direct proportion. While a number of companies that cancelled battleship revenues built their fortunes on clever uses of cresol compounds (and those companies will be encompassed by this study), eventually, the compounds themselves were replaced for most medical purposes by others that had the same beneficent power to disinfect without the concomitant danger of injury.

As for the public’s use of the Vapo-Cresolene vaporizer system, since the therapy was accepted as potentially medically useful, although marginal at best since the inhalant had to be kept quite mild to avoid being poisonous, all the AMA article could conclude - much in the same manner as Consumer Reports does now for consumer goods - was that the Vapo-Cresolene system was unnecessarily expensive without producing any greater beneficial effect than any inexpensive generic equivalent cresol compound: “ This report indicates that Vapo-Cresolene is a member of that class of proprietaries in which an ordinary product is endowed, by the manufacturer, with extraordinary virtues.  The type is so common and has been referred to so frequently that but for the dangers attendant on the inhalation of any of the phenols, this particular product need not have been mentioned.”

Vapo-Cresolene, as a patent medicine business, resulted from the merging of the talents of one James Henry Valentine, the inventor of the vaporizer system, and George Shepard Page.  Sadly, Valentine’s character and personality do not emerge clearly from current records.  In a history of Chatham, NJ, he is portrayed as the man who singularly and successfully used a “coal tar acid named Cresolene” as a vapor to relieve the discomfort of his child suffering from whooping cough.  However, because he did not have sufficient money to follow through with his idea, he soon turned the operation of the vaporizer business over to Page.  The government issued its first patent for the vaporizing system in 1881 to one Elias H Carpenter.  Carpenter immediately assigned the patent to Valentine, who, in turn, assigned a one-half interest to George Page.  Valentine owned parts of several patents obtained from the 1880s to 1903, in connection with improvements made the lamp apparatus as well as for the bottles used for Vapo-Cresolene, and, although he ought to have drawn some monetary benefit for himself (as well as his sick daughter) from these patents, he is remembered now only for his intuitive tinkering and otherwise fades quickly from the history of the Vapo-Cresolene Company.  A possible consequence of his exit is that a James H Valentine is listed as a director of the Vaporia Medicine Co, which filed in New Jersey for a corporate certificate in 1900, and in 1901 maintained its own offices in New York City. This company, which, coincidently, also marketed a coal tar derivative vaporizing system, became the Varoma Medicine Co in 1902, and promptly appointed as its agent another battleship cancelling company, wholesale druggist W H Schieffelin & Co (yet another story for another day).

George S. Page

George S Page (1839-1892) was already rich when he first encountered Valentine.  Born in Redfield, ME in 1839 and educated in Chelsea, MA, by 1879, Page had both control of the essential ingredient, Cresolene, and the financial expertise and means to fully develop Valentine’s vaporizer idea. Because of his own comfortable situation, he was delighted to finance Valentine’s vaporizing venture as a side business to his own.  Because the Pages conducted the Vapo-Cresolene business, had the wealth, and attracted its attendant contemporary publicity, they have earned whatever kind of immortality articles such as these produce.

Page’s career and fortune arose from the production of coal gas and the discriminating refinement of coal tar.  After briefly attempting to make his fortune in the West as a young man, he returned to work with his father at Samuel Page & Son of Boston, MA, a company which specialized in the distillation of paraffin oils, wax and mineral oil then used as the purest and choicest of illuminating materials, from the by-products of that reduction, of wood, certain minerals or coal.  By 1800, scientists also had discovered the secret of extracting coal gas as another by-product from the reduction of coal.  This process, in turn, became one of the growth industries of the first half of the Nineteenth Century because coal gas was the first product that could be both manufactured and distributed cheaply to illuminate the lamps of cities at the dawn of the “gas light era.”  (Natural gas came decades later.)  Coal gas production became, in essence, the first indispensable utility.  Coal tar, itself a mixture of some two hundred different substances, was also a by-product of the reduction of coal. To virtually all of those who were busy cashing in on the coal gas boom to illuminate cities, coal tar was an oily, thick, dirty substance often considered worse than useless. Page not only applied the talents he had learned working for his father to jump into the field of coal gas production, but he also made the vital connection that coal tar itself could be further refined into usable pitch, a material then most notably used as a water-sealant for caulking ships, or in Page’s observation, as a paving material to lay a sidewalk.

Page himself often recounted the story of his life-altering discovery. He noticed a group of workmen laying a pitch sidewalk during a visit to Salem, MA, and took from them some of the pitch they were using.  He then went to the local Salem gas works, where he procured some coal tar.  On the following morning, he returned to the paving site and presented the foreman of the job with the sample of pitch the foreman had given him together with a sample of pitch he had produced from the coal tar by-product of the Salem gas works.  The foreman chose Page’s product as superior, and a new paving material industry was born in that instant. Necessity might also have driven Page’s brilliant insight because just at the same moment he experienced his epiphany in Salem, commercial petroleum was becoming available from Pennsylvania to supplant paraffin as the finest and most brilliant illuminating material. Page was bright and quick enough to observe that he had to expand his horizons beyond paraffin production.

By 1865, as well as his coal gas production interests, Page was associated with the firm of Page, Kidder & Fletcher, which in 1872 morphed into a stock corporation, the New York Coal Tar Chemical Co, known for producing roofing and water proofing material, as well as a range of commercially useful chemicals, such as carbolic acid, naphtha, benzol, and ammonia sulfate, all from coal tar.  Page’s fortune was created by his clever application of scientific advances and redoubled by his shrewd investment in the capricious stock market of his era, although his career in industry also continued from highlight to highlight.  He was responsible for introducing to the United States several new generations of European technology for improving the refinement of coal tar to produce purer and more precise derivative compounds, each of which rewarded him with a fresh fortune. He also played a significant role in the gas industry itself, negotiating at one point, for example, among warring factions of gas producers in St. Louis to resolve their differences and form an efficient (and probably monopolistic) combine.

Page played as hard as he worked.  He was, as an obituary characterized him, “an ardent sportsman, and his love for the rod, gun, dog and field was second only to his fealty to the gas industry.” By 1888, he had created an estate of several hundred acres called “Stanley” in honor of his mother’s maiden name, in the Orange Hills near Chatham, in Morris County, NJ, had settled down to the life of a country squire and had separated himself from the day to day operations of his chemical company. He was a driving spirit behind the U.S. Fish Commission, a government agency which was among the earliest to apply scientific methodology to fish breeding, was the president of the Chatham, NJ Fish and Game Protective Association, and vice-president of the American Fish-Culturist Association. He was instrumental in the development of Rangeley, ME as a fishing and hunting destination.  The breeding records of his kennels, also developed with his son Albion as a commercial business and known as the Dunrobin Kennels, are enshrined in the archives of the American Kennel Club.  After his father’s death, Albion carried on in his father’s footsteps as a sportsman.  In 1900, his racing horses, which garnered second prize at the Morristown Field Club, in Morristown, NJ, team trials, were two chestnut mares named Vapo and Cresolene.           

George S Page was also a noted philanthropist in his time, serving as the president of the Howard Mission and Home for Little Wanders .  He was an active member of his Congregationalist Church, superintendent of its Sunday School, and a vocal advocate and supporter of public education. He was also a founder of the New Jersey Temperance Association and its president for several years.  When he died, quite suddenly at age 52, his funeral was held, as the same contemporary obituary noted, at his “manor house ... amid a throng that represented every phase of the life of the district for miles around.”  That obituary, published in the American Gas Light Journal issue of April 4, 1892, noted that his death:

caused a shock to many of our readers; for it is hard to realize that a splendid physical development nourished by carefully trained habits of abstemiousness and by strict attention to the laws of nature and culture could be so closely allied to the swiftest summons of death.  In the prime of a vigorous manhood, Mr. Page passed away, almost without warning, on the morning of Saturday, March 26th, and with this going out was terminated the life that animated the body of an impulsive though consistent, of a just but generous, of a decided but not bigoted man. In fact, to write of him as dead is somewhat difficult now.  The time that separates him from us does not seem sufficient to reconcile us to the knowledge that his marked personality is at an end.

Strangely enough, aside from his mention in connection with its funding, George S Page’s name does not really ever appear again in the Vapo-Cresolene Company’s records.  However, Page had four sons and a daughter and there can be no doubt this business, among all of George’s various interests, was carried on as a family affair. By the 1880s, George Page’s oldest son Albion Lambert Page, had become the President of the Company. Forty years later, a listing of the Vapo-Cresolene Company’s directors in 1919 shows that Albion was still entrenched as President and Manager of the Company as well as a director.  George’s second son Harry de Bacon Page, was Vice-President, Treasurer and a director.  George’s third son Lawrence S Page was Secretary and a director of the Company.  The remaining directors were Raymond F Page, George’s fourth son, and George’s only daughter, Florence P Ensign.  The Company had begun operation in 1879, had offices in New York City at different addresses on Fulton, Wall and Cortlandt streets, and located its manufacturing plant in Chatham, NJ, undoubtedly where George S could keep an eye on it as long as he remained alive.  It soon had its own offices in Montreal, Canada and Durban, South Africa.  Its London agent was Allen and Hanburys, Ltd, already profiled in this column.  In 1901, its capitalization was $75,000; by 1919 capitalization had doubled to $150,000.

Vapo-Cresolene’s vaporizer system was, and continued to be, advertised widely for approximately 80 years.  Of course, used improperly, Vapo-Cresolene units could, and did, cause harm.  There was always the danger of fire posed by an open flame in any lamp, and upset Vapo-Cresolene lamps and stands accounted for some number of fires.  There were periodic reports in medical journals of near poisonings caused by using the Vapo-Cresolene lamp in an improperly ventilated room, although Vapo-Cresolene’s advertising stressed that it was most efficaciously used in a closed room. On a least one occasion, in 1912, an infant died from drinking the contents of an unattended Cresolene bottle, which everyone understood to be poisonous if ingested.  By the 1920s, the Company branched into producing tablets to broaden its product offerings, and by the 1940s, the government forced the company to tone down its promises of cures for respiratory illnesses. Yet with all these drawbacks, Vapo-Cresolene vaporizer units, eventually with electric heating elements supplanting the kerosene lamps, continued to be produced until the 1950s.  Why did the public embrace such an inefficient and potentially dangerous system for so long?  That question probably cannot be answered precisely, but it can equally asserted that nothing has really changed.  Medicine is often predicated on refining poison.  After all, Botox, the miracle anti-aging drug of our times, is merely diluted botulism toxin, among the most fatal and deadly substances known to man.

The major figure that emerges from the history of Vapo-Cresolene is George S Page, who really plays only an indirect role in its story.  While today, to the extent he is remembered at all, he is known as a sportsman, he was also a pioneering businessman, and deserves his place among the industrial barons of the Nineteenth Century, with all of the both good and bad connotation that title evokes. If Vapo-Cresolene was an afterthought or off-shoot of a more important venture to him, it has endured to eclipse his memory and lives on in our collective imagination, because of  its still available advertisements and vaporizers, and is stitched into our collective image of art nouveau.   

Vapo-Cresolene cancels from the collection of Henry Tolman

Oil Companies: The Standard Oil Company - John Rockefeller and Ida Tarbell

What was the Standard Oil Company?  Standard Oil was established in 1870, became the largest oil refiner in the world, and was broken up for anti-trust reasons by the Supreme Court in 1911.  John D. Rockefeller was the founder and chairman of the company, and with his control and ownership became the richest man in  the world.

Standard Oil and John Rockefeller became famous, and in some quarters infamous, for the firm's and its chairman's voracious appetite for its competition.  Rockefeller managed to undercut, weaken, and then find ways to control, buy-out, or destroy competition.  These behaviors would ultimately stimulate the work of muckraking journalists, and lead to anti-trust litigation that would break up the firm.  

The first great American investigative journalist, Ida Tarbell, would essentially establish the craft of investigative journalism through her work on the case of Standard Oil.  

John D. Rockefeller

1839-1937

For all the approbation cast upon Mr. Rockefeller for his aggressive business practices, Rockefeller was one of the greatest philanthropists in history and his legacy still benefits the world today.  Rockefeller lived a long time: 98 years.  He retired from business while still in his sixties, giving him more than 30 years to practice and structure formal philanthropy.  As one of the richest men in history, combined with his extended "retirement", John Rockefeller ultimately became a boon to the pursuit of the arts and sciences in the United States and throughout the world.

Ida Tarbell

1857-1944

Though published as a book, Tarbell's original work on Standard Oil appeared in a magazine called McClures, serialized in 19 parts.  McClures was quite popular in turn of the century United States, and distinguished itself by publishing a series of muckraking articles, including Ray Baker's investigation of United States Steel.

The famous 1904 Standard Oil octopus with a grip on everything within its reach, including the Congress, and with its eyes on its next target, the White House.

Oil Companies: Producers Oil Company Limited

P. O. Co. Ltd.

JUN  11  1900

From The Official Railway Equipment Register of 1901:

The Producers Oil Company represented a group of independent oil producers long in the sites of John Rockefeller's Standard Oil.  For years the company maintained its independence despite constant hostile takeover attempts by Rockefeller. 

By 1897, Standard Oil interests owned a majority of Producers' stock.  But the voting and controlling shares of the firm remained with the forming owners of the company, and legal actions by Standard to seize control through majority ownership were rebuffed by the courts.

The travails of the Producers Oil Company were documented by Ida Tarbell in her muckraking classic, The History of The Standard Oil Company.

*****

The year of this cancel, Producers Oil Company became part of a larger holding company called the Pure Oil Producing Company.   Eventually Pure Oil would become a national name brand in the petroleum industry.  The company was independent and successful through the mid-1960s, when it was absorbed by Union Oil, which in turn branded itself Union 76.  Union 76 was the property of Unocal, which merged with Chevron in 2005.

Oil Companies: Cornplanter Refining Company

CORNPLANTER

JUN

10

1899

REFINING CO.

CORNPLANTER

FEB

3

1900

REFINING CO.

Langlois scans

Cornplanter Refining Company was a small, Warren, Pennsylvania based oil company.  The firm not only refined oil but prospected for and produced crude oil in the northwest Pennsylvania oil patch. 

Chief Cornplanter, portrait by Frederick Bartoli, 1796

Chief Cornplanter was a Seneca Indian chief during the early history of the United States, including the periods of the French and Indian War and the Revolutionary War.  The US Government "gave" Cornplanter a grant of 1500 acres along the Allegheny River in Pennsylvania near the boundary with the State of New York.  I presume what would become part of the Pennsylvania oil patch included the territory of this original grant.

Linseed Oil

Golden and Brown Flax Seeds

In Old English, lin was the word for flax

What is linseed oil?  The production of the oil, and its use in paints, were once major industries in the United States.  Cartels were built, and major fortunes were made for men like Spencer Kellogg.  But now the oil is largely obsolete for large scale industrial use, and the old firms extinct.

It is now fall in the northern hemisphere, and the summer clothes should all be put away.  As a man whose boyhood was spent in the south, this meant that the linen was put away:  linen jackets, pants, and suits.  And where does linen come from? From the same place that linseed oil comes from, the flax plant.  Flax was grown not just for the fibers, but for the oil that came from the seeds.  Oil paints used flax seed oil as the base, and millions of gallons were produced each year in the United States for the production of paint.  

SPENCER KELLOGG

AUG  27   1899

BUFFALO, N. Y.

Spencer Kellogg was one of the largest linseed oil producers in the US and the world.  

Linseed oil dries, or polymerizes, into a solid.  And it is the drying and solidifying action that made it an important part of paints before the discovery and synthesis of alkyd resins.  Today, water-based paints predominate, further reducing the use of linseed oil.

In 1860, Frederick Walton invented something called linoleum, which used linseed oil as a binder for ground particles of wood and other materials.  Linoleum was a common home and industrial floor covering for nearly 100 years, until its replacement with PVC floor coverings.

Nat'l Linseed Oil Co.

AUG   4   1898

CHICAGO

Notoriety:  Linseed oil is the oil that made paint rags notorious for spontaneous combustion.  Rags soaked in the oil and then left to sit provide a large surface area for rapid oxidation of the oil.  The reaction is so rapid that it creates heat, in some cases so much that the rags can spontaneously combust.  One Meridian Plaza in Philadelphia was the most famous building in recent history to be destroyed by a fire started by the spontaneous combustion of linseed oil soaked rags.