The cast of 19th-century doctors and scholars to whom you owe the mouthwash you rinse

In the mid-18th century, English opticians Chester Moore Hall and John Dollond pioneered achromatic lenses. These were crystals that eliminated the color defect that occurred when viewed through lenses. At the beginning of the 19th century, Joseph Jackson Lister rounded out their discovery: he also found a way to correct the spherical shape of everything viewed. Today, he is considered the father of the compound optical microscope. This scholar had a son, Joseph Lister. He was a surgeon and a pioneer in the use of antiseptics: he operated by sterilizing everything he touched. His surname is the origin of one of the world's best-selling mouthwash brands: Listerine. Today, the product is part of the catalog of Kenvue, an American multinational founded in 2023 as a result of the spin-off of one of the divisions of Johnson & Johnson, which last year had a turnover of €14.26 billion. However, Lister Jr. was not the inventor of the concoction. He merely inspired it.

The true creators of Listerine are two forgotten scientists: Dr. Joseph Lawrence and pharmacist Jordan Lambert. If you type the former's name into Google, the search engine redirects you to the actor and singer Joey Lawrence. In the latter case, it shows you a basketball player for the King Tornado, a Yankee collegiate sports club. To find Listerine's parents, you have to search a little more. Dr. Lawrence was a scholar of Listerine's research, having been inspired by Louis Pasteur's thesis on incorporating carbonic acid into surgical dressings to reduce postoperative infection rates. It was his idea to apply this to the oral environment. The result came in 1878 with the formulation of a surgical antiseptic that included four essences: eucalyptol, menthol, methyl salicylate, and thymol. Lawrence kept the quantities in the formula secret.

From the laboratory to the market

Lawrence was clear that he didn't want his product to be used solely in surgeries: he had ambitions to turn it into a general-purpose germicide. To this end, he called on a pharmacist: Jordan Wheat Lambert. He entrusted him with the dosage and marketing of the product, and to fully embrace the venture, Lambert founded the Lambert Pharmaceutical Company. Together, they named the product Listerine. The first time the brand reached dentists was in 1895. The fact that it didn't require a prescription boosted sales.

This generated a huge amount of money. In the agreement Lawrence signed with the pharmacist, there was a clause that has continued to fuel the storm of cash flow to this day. It stipulated that the doctor's heirs, executors, and successors would receive a fixed payment in perpetuity for every 144 bottles sold, as long as Listerine was marketed. In 1950, real estate agent John Reynolds bought half of the rights to the company. royalties, which ended up in the hands of the Archbishopric of New York. Since then, they have been disseminated. However, one still goes to descendants of the inventor.

However, it was Lambert's son, Gerard Lambert, who popularized Listerine. When he took over from his father at the helm of the company, he invested heavily in advertising. Until then, bad breath wasn't considered a serious problem, but with Lambert's campaigns, Listerine became a necessity. "Listerine didn't invent mouthwash, it invented halitosis," the book summarizes. Freakonomics quoting publicist James B. Twitchell. In 1955 the company merged with the American cosmetics company Warner-Hudnut and formed the Warner-Lambert Pharmaceutical Company, which marketed the product until 2000. That year it signed the deal to Johnson & Johnson (J&J), which operated it until 2023, when it was transferred to Kenvue.