From Durex founder to medium: the forgotten story of the condom genius

Chingford is a residential neighborhood on the outskirts of London full of terraced houses with gardens. There is a nursery, a few cafes, a church, and a train station, which connects the area to the heart of the English capital. Surrounding it are the lush greenery of a golf course and Epping Woods, a wooded area full of paths andrunnersIt's in the middle of this bucolic setting where, in 1939, a company called London Rubber set up the country's main condom factory. The company had been registering the Durex trademark for ten years and had seen immediate success. But who was behind the company, and how did they lay the foundations for a brand that, a hundred years later, leads a market worth $10 billion annually?

The question is not easy to answer. Until a few years ago, the sole honor of being the father of Durex fell to Lionel Alfred Jackson. He was a Russian immigrant who, in 1915, founded the London Rubber Company to import condoms and barbering products to the United Kingdom. In 1929, he patented the Durex trademark, a name formed from the three key values: durability, reliability, and excellence.

In 2020, historian Jessica Borge published the most comprehensive book ever on the history of London Rubber, Protective Practices: In History of the London Rubber Company and the Condom Business(‎McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020), and revealed that not all of the credit for Durex lay with Jackson. Another name appeared in the company founder's correspondence and patents: Lucian Landau. Rummaging through the archives, he came across an autobiography. "All the pieces fell into place," explains in an article in the digital The Conversation.

A precocious mind

"What I discovered was that, while Jackson invented the business model, Durex's technology emerged from Landau's mind," Borge explains. He was a Polish teenager born in 1912 who was studying rubber technology at what is now London Metropolitan University. He came from a family of industrialists in the cosmetics industry. When he walked through the center of the capital, he couldn't take his eyes off the shop windows and all the rubber products for sale. His first interest was bath sponges. He locked himself in the university laboratory and devised a system to improve them. It was during this process that the light bulb moment hit him: what if he started an English condom factory? Until then, all condoms were imported from Germany or the United States, and latex was still a relatively unknown material in the country.

To evaluate the idea, he went to see a pharmacist he was friends with, who recommended he speak with Jackson, the retailer who sold him imported condoms. It was at that moment that the destinies of the sales expert and the latex genius intersected. Jackson immediately recognized the opportunity Landau was offering him: to compete head-to-head with foreign manufacturers. He wrote the young man a check for $600, and together they created British Latex Products, the company that would henceforth supply condoms to London Rubber under the Durex brand. In 1932, when they began producing British condoms, the young Pole was only 20 years old.

Following Borge's thesis, Landau was the mastermind behind the mechanization of the entire condom production process. In 1950 and 1952, two automatic machines came into operation, boosting production capacity from 2 million annually to 2.5 million weekly. London Rubber had no competition in the United Kingdom. However, disagreements with the heirs of Jackson—who died suddenly—condemned Landau to anonymity. "His name was erased from the company's history until I rediscovered it," the historian maintains. In September 1953, tired of not being recognized for his work, he packed up his belongings and began an unusual career as a medium. He died in 2001.

Since 2010, Durex has been part of Reckitt Benckiser, a multinational that controls other brands such as Finish, Calgon, Strepsils, and Air Wick. "Attractive advertising, constant innovation, and diversification with related products such as lubricants are three of the things that have made Durex successful," says Josep Maria Espinet, professor of marketing at the University of Girona.