Lucky for Edna Murphey, people attending an exposition in Atlantic City during the summer of 1912 got hot and sweaty. For two years, the high school student from Cincinnati had been trying unsuccessfully to promote an antiperspirant that her father, a surgeon, had invented to keep his hands sweat-free in the operating room. Murphey had tried her dad’s liquid antiperspirant in her armpits and discovered that it thwarted wetness and smell. That’s when she decided to start a company to manufacture the product she would name Odorono (Odor? Oh No!). Borrowing $150 from her grandfather, she rented an office workshop. It wasn’t long before she had to move the operation to her parents’ basement because her team of door-to-door saleswomen didn’t pull in enough revenue. Murphey approached drugstore retailers who either refused to stock the product or who returned the bottles of Odorono, unsold. The first deodorant that killed odor-producing bacteria was called Mum and was trademarked in 1888, while the first antiperspirant, which thwarts both sweat-production and bacterial growth, was called Everdry and launched in 1903. This was still a very Victorian society, and nobody talked about perspiration. Instead, most people’s solution to body odor was to wash regularly and then overwhelm those around them by drowning themselves in perfume. Now, over 100 years later, the deodorant and antiperspirant industry is worth $18 billion annually. Naysayers might argue that western society would have eventually developed its dependence on deodorants and antiperspirants without Murphey, but she certainly left her mark on the armpits of America.
