Consumer History | Clorox — Five Hundred Dollars and a Brine Plant Off High Street
· 1913-5
Unreviewed contributionBy kevin · · Report an issue
Find memories left by people near you.
Distribute Bounty
This will distribute the bounty equally among all qualifying memories. This action cannot be undone.
Cancel Bounty
Are you sure you want to cancel this bounty? The remaining amount will be refunded to your account.
Success!
Operation completed successfully.
Error
Something went wrong.
Consumer History | Clorox — Five Hundred Dollars and a Brine Plant Off High Street
kevin
People treat Clorox as an Oakland tower that always sold household bleach in a diamond bottle.
The first company was an industrial bleach works that almost folded.
On 3 May 1913 five Oakland men each put in $100 in 1913 dollars and formed the Electro-Alkaline Company.
The signers were Archibald Taft, a banker; Edward Hughes, who sold wood and coal; Charles Husband, a bookkeeper; Rufus Myers, a lawyer; and William Hussey, a miner.
In August 1913 they agreed to pay $3,000 for a plant site on the east side of San Francisco Bay.
The plan was to turn Bay brine into sodium hypochlorite by electrolysis.
An equipment engineer, Abel M. Hamblet, coined Clorox from chlorine and sodium hydroxide and sketched the diamond mark.
First-year sales in 1914 were $7,996.
The industrial grade ran 21 percent hypochlorite and left the plant in five-gallon jugs for laundries, breweries and walnut sheds.
The venture was near collapse when William Murray took over as general manager in 1916.
His wife Annie cut the strength for kitchens and handed 15-ounce sample bottles across the counter of the family grocery in downtown Oakland.
By 1917 the company was shipping through the Panama Canal.
The lasting plant at 850 42nd Avenue, off High Street, made liquid bleach from 1919 to 1981 and dry bleach until 1992.
Procter and Gamble bought the firm in 1957 and lost it a decade later when the Supreme Court forced a sale.
Headquarters moved from High Street to 1221 Broadway in 1976.
The mechanism that survived is the one Annie Murray proved: dilute the factory liquor, give it away in a grocery, and let the household bottle carry the industrial plant.
Photo: East Oakland industrial streets near the former High Street works, via Wikimedia Commons.
_thumbnail.jpg)
_thumbnail.jpg)
_thumbnail.jpg)
changes?
delete this memory?
We detected that you have a Blox in your crypto wallet! We will import the Blox into your account.
Click on done below to complete the import.
Welcome Back!
Sign in to preserve cherished moments
Don't have an account?
Welcome!!
Sign up and start preserving cherished moments
?
?
Choose your payment method
Buy with Metablox Credit
Do you want to mint Blox with Metablox Credit?
Which Crypto would you like to use?
Purchase Confirmed!
Your Blox is being minted on-chain and will appear in your profile shortly.
Log in or sign up to claim your Blox.
How many credits do you want to buy?
$100 USD = 1 Metablox Credit = 1 Blox.
Use Metablox Credit to mint any Blox you want on the map.
expand_more