Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean that as a dig on your state of culturedness :). More of an FYI thing for those who might be interested in catching a local show, that they do go on the road sometimes.

Yeah I’ve heard it’s a pretty competitive gig.

Looks like the wiki table doesn’t list France. Poland, though, still available today, according to that chart.

You can technically get them still in the US and Canada - well most of, but there are several states & provs who ban them outright. But they can’t be sold as branded cigarettes, so they are sold instead as “candy sticks” or similar. I found a photo of what those look like. Same product, cig branding out, superhero branding in. I’m not sure that’s much better.

As somebody who’s known people who died of lung cancer (mostly in my parent’s gen), I am glad you didn’t take it up, too.

Nice.

They play the Sydney state theater once in a while, and maybe… mmm… Adelaide or so? Depending on viable vs prohibitive distances and such, it’s possible to see 'em without a trip to NYC.

Found a history of this guy, from the Southborough Historical Society

Interesting points: He was the first person to create Vanilla extract, and had a whole business selling that and various other flavoring extracts. He supplied the anesthetic used at Massachusetts General Hospital to perform the first painless surgery in the USA. But his “best known product”, per the Historical Society, was in fact this cocaine hair treatment, which he developed in 1857. He also started a business called Deerfoot Farms, which sold a range of meat products, and - bizarrely - supplied a cow that went to the south pole and back with Admiral Byrd.

He died in 1894 in a carriage accident.

Not sure, but if the second, it would at least require some process to distill the coke out of the solution. The ad doesn’t mention it, but I’ll guess that like Coca-Cola and various other early cocaine containing products, it was very dilute.

Cocaine wasn’t illegal at the time and you could even buy it at your neighborhood drugstore. So for it to make sense as a way to obtain it, it would have to be cheaper through hair products, than just rocking up to a pharmacy and buying some. That probably moves my credence toward the first option: they thought it did something, or at least, they thought the advertisement would be effective in convincing customers of that.

Found bottle photo:

Even the modern guide says,

Privacy is of less concern in athletic stadium shower rooms, or university athletic facilities

I wonder how many university athletes they surveyed before reaching that conclusion.

I wonder how many kids who grew up with smartphones realize that back in the day it was necessary to take a full 12, 24, or 36 pictures, then wait days for a photo lab to develop them, before you got to see any of them.

the image with that nice big hand crank.

I had the same thought. Although to be fair to the ad copy, from what I have read, devices like this were a major improvement on the labor of using a washboard. You still had to supply muscle power, but it was less labor intensive overall and much faster.

That casual assumption was nearly universal

Oh for sure. Big occupational segregation at the time, so the ad wasn’t even wrong per se, in its historical context. It would have indeed been exceedingly more likely.

Doesn’t it though! I could see a tiny local business run like that where you do business on a handshake. But this was a multi-national business with product shipped out of NYC and Toronto. The customer might be in like California or Saskatchewan. Eh, just send us some money once in a while if you keep it more than 30 days.

Found photo of surviving one.

These apparently became motorized around 1920, so the ad must be before that.

I have to admit, I thought this was historically significant, and would get more interest than it did.

So be it, lol. I actually learned more about this event from reading wikipedia and other sources to make the post, than I ever got out of my school’s history class!

The art is not bad, but I’m slightly uncanny-valleyed by the tail length to body size ratio of that kitty cat.

They had some difficulties going after him for the worst of the charges. I didn’t quite understand the legal situation or reasons behind that, but his conviction ended up being on lesser charges like mail fraud. Even that was hard because he used proxy control, and he himself wasn’t on the business roster. Hence the short sentence.

I didn’t see any info about how many people died due to his sham treatments, who might have been saved or at least given some more months or years. I’d love to know, though. There are photos where you can see crowded dining halls and so on.

False positives sound like an unpleasant process to discover. I wonder how many times those happened.

Edit. Also, though there are no recorded cases of a true positive, I wonder if there were false negatives, like someone really was alive, but nobody noticed the bell, or the mechanism failed in some way. Wikipedia does mention,

and a demonstration in which one of Karnice-Karnicki’s assistants had been buried alive ended badly when the signalling systems failed

Apparently there’s another folklore, also false, that “saved by the bell” referred to this practice. It’s boxing related, which is more plausible, but less fun.

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That’s the version Sam Jackson gets.

Seems everything you’d buy through the mail in those days, both sham and legit products alike, was sold could be bought C.O.D.