Inventions for Pets

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, you're a pet person. Uh huh. Many of our listeners are pet people. We know because they set us pictures of their adorable animals. So if you step into any pet store today, you're kind of inundated with so many clever products to make caring for your animals easier or to improve their well being. But this is actually a pretty new industry. The idea of a pet store didn't really exist until the late nineteenth century, and that was when Victorian England started to be more and more interested in keeping animals in the home instead of as livestock were like an outdoor collection. And then from there this idea of companionship pets as sort of something to be acquired spread to the US and the rest of the world. But even so, those early shops were really about selling the pets themselves, with a few care products like that you would need to support that thing to live. So the idea of a store filled to the brim with merchandise that's engineered expressly for use with pets did not really happen until the mid twentieth century, and perhaps the most well known story of an invention intended to help pet lovers and make their lives easier is kitty litter. This one has some problems in modern thinking that we will talk about, but kitty litter, it could be argued, was what kicked off an entire new industry. So today we are going to talk about the origin of cat litter, as well as other products that many of us probably have in our homes right now. And we're going to start by talking about the man who is credited with the invention of kitty litter, and that is Ed low So Henry Edward Lowe, who who went by ED, was born on July tenth, nineteen twenty in Saint Paul, Minnesota. When he was still young, his family moved to Marcellus, Michigan. Ed was not a good student. He'd had to repeat the fourth grade. He later attributed this to not being interested in his coursework. Ed's father was a serial entrepreneur. That's seer ial. In case you think we're about to talk about breakfast food. ED learned to value the idea of figuring out ways to make money for yourself rather than working for someone else. This was something that Ed embraced early on as a way to have money for his own purchases, and so he found all kinds of ways to generate an income, including newspaper delivery, scrap, metal sales, and pest control. And then as he got older, he worked in his father's businesses. As a young man, Ed served in the Navy during World War II, and when the war ended, he returned to Michigan and started working at his father's company in the town of Cassopolis. This was a business that sold sawdust and wood shavings for a variety of industrial absorbency uses, so things like absorbing oils, spills, and machine shops, et cetera. There are multiple versions of the story of how he invented kitty litter. According to the most common one, cold January day in nineteen forty seven, twenty seven year old Lowe was working at his father's shop and a woman named Kay Draper came in. She had an indoor cat, but according to this story, the sand filled litter box she used for this cat had frozen. She hoped to purchase some sawdust from low to use as a litter box substrate. Okay, if you're like me, the frozen sand story immediately brings up questions, But there may be an answer if we look at the state of litter boxes at the time. One a lot of people were not yet keeping their cats indoors with the litter box, so it was kind of a new thing. Using plain sand and sawdust was pretty standard at this point for those rare houses where people did keep their cats inside, So none of those substrates were clumping. So a box that used sand or sawdust could potentially retain liquid and freeze if it were in a cold enough spot. It is very possible if it were kept somewhere like a garage or a utility room, that it could easily get cold enough in Michigan in winter to freeze. In any case, Lowe later claimed that he had a bolt of inspiration in the face of Draper's dilemma. For a long time, his father had offered bags of sawdust for soaking up oil spills in places like mechanics garages, but the company had just introduced another material that did the job better, and that was granulated clay. This was clay that had been dried in a kill to the point that it would crumble, and with all the moisture removed from the naturally porous clay, it became really absorbent. This was great at handling oil, so Ed thought that it might also work for k Draper's cat. She took a bag of it and went home. Then, according to this version, a week later, Draper was back asking for more of that clay. She found that it worked way better than sand or wood shavings, and she wanted to switch her cat over to it completely, so Low sold her another bag, and then he decided to try selling more bags to see if other people liked it. He loaded up ten sacks with the granulated clay labeled them. Sometimes this is written as or described as him using like one of those oil crayons that get used for marking things in shops and labeling it as kitty litter. And then he tried to get a local pet store to carry these bags, and the store was not interested, so Low asked if maybe they would be willing to give them away to customers to try, and those ten customers were the start of his new business. Uh I didn't find any claims as to the number of how many of that ten returned to the store asking more of the clay litter. But according to a story that Low told many times, enough of them wanted more that he figured out how to launch a division of the family business around it. Another story came up in a newspaper from nineteen fifty five. That article, published in the Kalamazoo Gazette, was all about how low had expanded his business beyond cat litter. But that article also includes this excerpt, which makes it sound like a lot less of a scrabbly spur of the moment idea quote. Lowe's kitty catering all started because some friend of his wife's asked him to crawl under the front porch in the dead of winter and get sand for her beloved cat's box. I got it, but I did a lot of thinking afterward. I knew there must be a better product than sand for that job. There was. It was a clay once used to filter impurities out of petroleum products. Low and his chief assistance, Tony Friesel and Bob Bollett started bagging it by hand. We called it kitty litter at the time. We had to almost give it away. Now there is a big demand we have about ten men strip mining the stuff for us near Perry, Tennessee, and it's all packaged automatically. I'm not sure if that's really supposed to be Paris, Tennessee, where there is some mining in the area. But Perry is what it says in the article. Yes. In a nineteen eighty five version of the story that appeared in the La Times, the details were once again a little different. This one stated quote in nineteen forty seven, a neighbor asked him for a cat box filler. She had been piling ashes in her cat box and was tired of a house full of sooty paw prints. She asked for sand. He suggested the absorbent clay quote more to get rid of her than anything else. So that sounds very different. But from there his story was its more or less the same as the one in which he said he labeled the ten bags of clay himself and took them to a pet store. Then one more story, which appeared in the Washington Post in twenty fifteen. That version states, quote, one day in nineteen forty seven, his father received a sample shipment of a new clay product, but he was already loyal to a different brand, He would have nothing to do with this order of clay and left it in their storage garage. It sat around until one of Edlow's acquaintances, Kay Draper, asked him if he knew of any good absorbents for pet waste. So, according to this version, the problem was not a frozen box of sand or ash footprints. It was silica dust because Draper's cat was tracking the dust all around the house, and Lowe suggested that she could use the fuller's earth that his dad had not been interested in using. So, regardless of which of these stories is accurate, and it's possible none of them is actually how Low's invention happened, Kitty Litters start did not last long. Ed started driving around with stock, taking it to pet stores and attending cat shows as an exhibitor, and then over the course of several years, his business grew to the point where he actually needed a warehouse in a distribution process as a wholesaler. He acquired that warehouse from his father's company. In a nineteen forty nine write up in the Delaware County Daily. There's an interesting writeup that cites another man that we mentioned earlier, Robert Follett, who I think was called Bob in the article that Tracy mentioned just a moment ago, and this article mentions him as being Lowe's partner. The men are listed together in that nineteen forty nine write up as originators of kitty litter. It's a bit unclear what happened to that relationship, but the two gave a joint statement to the paper at that time saying quote, all we need is good business, science, write, promotion, and the cooperation of a few million cats. The cats definitely seemed to cooperate. Kitty litter was available in supermarkets by nineteen fifty four by the time that nineteen fifty five article that we cited earlier was written, so just a little more than eight years after its invention, kitty litter sales were expected to top one point five million dollars. Even so, it was still a new enough product that ads continued to explain what it was. One in nineteen fifty five stated quote, kitty litter is a specially produced material which provides a new and better solution to a problem confronted by owners of cats. In short, it does away with the daily, unpleasant, messy sandbox routine. Unlike sand, it dries and deodorizes, and unlike sand, it is not harmful too or pets, and it's inexpensive. Lo soon recognized that if people were willing to spend money for kitty litter, they were probably willing to spend money on other items for their cats. And we'll talk about how he expanded his business based on that idea after we pause for a sponsor break. In the mid twentieth century, cats were not generally pampered in the ways that are very commonplace today. Once cat later caught on quote, we made a list of every conceivable item a well groomed cat could use and rated them as to importance. We keep our cats at the local veterinarians and test each product on them first to determine acceptance. Lowe also cited one particular cat as the true determiner of whether a product moved forward from testing to production. Though there was a group of cats cared for by a veterinarian, there was also a cat at the low offices. Those offices were run out of a home that had been converted to business use, and that cat, a red Point Siamese named Impi, got to test and approve a lot of the innovations that are probably in your home if you have a cat. Mp tried out cat toys, catnips, scratching posts and cardboard scratch pads, and other potential products. By the mid nineteen fifties, thanks to IMPI's hard work as a tester, Low had introduced his own dry shampoo for cats, flea powder disposal trays, and something called a kitty castle, which was not a multi tiered cat condo like the name seems like it might be. It was a small, cozy, decorated box for a cat to curl up in. All of this was apparently in line with Low's own adoration of cats. A reporter in nineteen fifty five claimed to have been riding in a car with Low when a stray cat wandered in front of the vehicle, and said that quote Low came to a quick halt, hopped out, and escorted the feline across the road. By nineteen eighty five, sales of kitty litter and cat accessories through Low's company hit one hundred million dollars. At that time, his Low's branded kitting litter had twelve point six percent of the market share. Tidycat had surged passed it to twenty two point five percent, but that still put ed Low on top. Because he also invented Tidycat, it was launched as a supermarket brand, while he kept Kitty Litter as a brand for specialty pet stores. But he was also willing to spend money on research and promotion. He started spending a reported four million dollars each year in research and development alone. That budget was used to both develop new products and refine the cat litters that the company already sold from the time competitors entered the market with their own versions of kitty Litter, Ed worked diligently to make sure his outperformed any others. This included building a research facility that employed a full team to test litter for oder management, absorbency, and weight. He also built a cattery with a full time population of one hundred and twenty cats to use all of the products while they were monitored and cared for by a team of veterinarians and behavioral researchers. In that La Times article we cited already, Ed stated that all of his expenditures and the expansion of his product line were parts of a long term business plan with massive goal stating quote Low's will not be sold. Low's will go on forever. Low's will become a billion dollar company. We know that we can't become a billion dollar company as a cat box filler. Surprisingly, five years later, he sold the company. On September thirteenth, nineteen ninety, the New York Times ran a brief statement about the company changing hands, which read quote Edward Lowe Industries, the maker of kitty litter catbox Filler, agreed to sell its marketing and manufacturing operations to an investment group. Terms of the sale were not disclosed. The buyer is a group led by the Good Capital Company of New York and night Spreads Incorporated of Chicago. Philip L. Smith, the former chairman and chief executive at Pillsbury and General Foods, will become chairman of the new company, which will be known as the Golden Cat Corporation. Edward Lowe, who invented kitty Litter in the nineteen forties, said he would retire from day to day operations, but retain an equity interest and be a director of Golden Cat. Later on, it was revealed that Lowe had sold the company for two hundred million dollars plus stock in the new company. It was eventually acquired by Ralston Purina before being purchased again by Nesley. Preceding the nineteen ninety sale of the company. It seems as though Edlow's personal life got a little bit complicated. The year before his interview in which he said he would never sell the company, he and his children had a massive falling out. He had four kids, and all of them plus three of their spouses, had been working for the company for some time, and in the early nineteen eighties they started to claim that his behavior had become erratic. Low grew up poor, and once he was successful, he beat up for lost time by spending his money as he wished, sometimes on relatively impractical things like at one point he bought an entire town. But his kids claimed that he had become more than just impulsive, and they attributed the behavior to alcohol misuse. Low in response denied those accusations and accused his kids of trying to steal the company from him, and he fired them all. So this whole family was estrange for years, but they did eventually make up. After he sold the company, ed started the Edward Low Foundation in Big Rock Valley, Michigan. This is an organization that offers education and seminars for entrepreneurs that are past the startup phase and need to build their existing business. Ed died in nineteen ninety five, but the foundation continues. In addition to its original mission, the Foundation now also leads programs to research the best ways to manage land stewardship. In the last several decades, there has been increasing concern about the long term viability of clay based cat litter. According to the American Veterinary Medical Association, as of twenty twenty four, there were seventy three point eight million cats kept as pets in the US, and while not all of them are indoor only cats with litter boxes, a lot of them are. And that has made cat litter a multi billion dollar market. But where is all that clay coming from and what happens to it after it's used. Well, there are eleven states that have open pit mines that extract clay for cat litter, and that clay is a finite resource. And there's an additional issue. Seventy five million tons of Fuller's earth, which is the clay used for cat litter and other absorbent applications was mined in twenty twenty four. According to the US Geological Survey, that clay gets us once and then thrown away, which would theoretically mean that it was returning to the earth. But usually these clays have been treated with chemicals to help them clump and resist odor, and things like fragrance have also been added, so all of that is just going into the nation's garbage jumps. Per a twenty fifteen Washington Post article about it quote, the rise of commercial cat litters may even explain why indoor cat populations grew so quickly, to the point that felines have overtaken canines is America's most popular pet. At the same time, cat litters made consumers dependent on a supply chain that converts a natural resource to waste. Aside from environmental concerns, one of the lasting legacies of the invention of cat litter is that it helped expand the number of households that were willing to keep cats as pets, and that opened the door to other inventions. The next one is brief because there's not a whole lot of information about the enter readily available. But on January eleventh, nineteen sixty eight, a man named Frank L. Crow filed a patent for the first cat tree. His patent, which was granted on November twenty fifth, nineteen sixty nine, starts with the following quote disclosed herein is a cat tree embodying a plurality of cat landing stations or platforms carried by a sectional pole adapted to be mounted in a vertical position in a selected room of a dwelling, with a base engaged against the floor to hold the tree against rotation, with a spring loaded plunger engaged against the ceiling, and with the platforms covered with a rough textile material which provides a scratching claw sharpening surface. Crow's patent notes that his invention is designed to solve two primary problems, cats ruining furniture by clawing it and cats climbing the curtains. He notes that his cat tree is a decorative accessory as well as a function, and that it can be matched with any decor. I have thoughts on this that any cat person that owns a cat tree might be having as well. We'll talk about it on Friday. The application that crofiled touted the ease of assembly and how much this tree could be customized to fit the space and needs of a cat, including the addition of dangling toys to the platforms. The platforms, per Crow's design, were intended to be replaceable, so you could update worn out pieces without having to buy a whole new cat tree each time it showed wear and tear. Crow also wanted the placement of the platforms to be thoughtful to enable rapid movement by a house cat from one to the other. Quote. The invention is characterized in that the cat landing stations or platforms are of crescent shape or equivalent non circular configuration, and are arranged and angularly displaced steps succession, such as to facilitate ascent and descent from one platform to a six platform. A preferred shape being a crescent shape developed by a scalloped cutaway of one side of a circular platform so as to attain a maximum aesthetic effect in the assembly and cass rejoiced. Coming up, we're going to talk about another invention that became hugely popular very quickly, in helping people deal with pet messes. Dog people were coming for you. But first we're going to hear from the sponsors that keep the show going so the last inventor we'll talk about today was like the first, we talked about, a man of many inventions who did very well for himself in the pet products industry. In nineteen sixty, Alan Simon opened a chain of stores in Brooklyn called Puppy City, and like most modern pet stores, these sold food and pet accessories and also offered grooming services. But then in nineteen seventy, Simon decided he didn't just want to sell pet products. He wanted to invent them, and he invented a lot of them. But one of his original set of inventions became hugely popular and really served as the corner stone for a new business, and that was the Wei Wi pad, similar to the way sand was supplanted by kitty litter. Alan Simon had noticed that while working in the pet retail business that the newspaper that people often used to keep accidents off the floor while house training a puppy was not all that effective. In an interview he gave in twenty nineteen, he said the dogs would urinate on the newspaper. So one day I got the idea of using a hospital pad, and we chemically treated a hospital pad, and I came up with a seven pack and we had a TV ad for ten seconds. It was free house breaking Wi pads with every purchase. So it went from a seven pack to a fourteen, to a twenty five, to a fifty, to one hundred, and then it went to like twenty five million dollars in we Wei pads. Simon's invention did make cleanup from housebreaking puppies a whole lot easier, and soon it was used for a lot of other things too. People use these absorbent pads under litter boxes, under food and water dishes, in carriers, and the list goes on. Their utility in so many uses helped boost their steady adoption among people with pets. Simon often gave interviews to the press in which he summed up his impressive business history succinctly, but also making it clear that he had achieved a lot. And a quote he gave to DuJour magazine while talking about the launch of the newest business, he said, simply quote, I manufactured and invented over two hundred products, including the original and world renowned we Wei pads and the Alan Pooper Scooper. Over the years, we grew into one of the largest manufacturers in the pet industry. To manufactur make sure we wee pads, Simon founded a new company called four Pause, which also made the other pet products that he invented. He held so many patents for various items. One of the interesting things about a lot of his patents is that they are completely void of the florid language and over explained design and function that we often see in patent application documents. Most of them follow a very simple template style of writing, with a very basic name for the invention, and then a description and a claim that basically add up to just look at the pictures. They didn't all go that way. One particular invention was an improvement on an automatic pet food dispenser, and it had a lot of supplementary writing to explain it. It started out by explaining the pet food dispensers that preceded it by noting quote. A typical device of this type includes an elongated serving tray which is adapted to rest on a flat surface, such as the floor. A hollow storage container is secured to the tray at once end of the tray and is raised above the bottom wall of the tray. An opening is provided in the bottom wall of the storage container to permit a dry or liquid pet food placed inside the container to drop down into the serving tray by force of gravity. As the pet consumes the food from the tray, it is replaced by fresh food from the storage container. But to Simon, the problem here was that you couldn't take the apparatus apart, and as his patent application goes on to explain, loading it was a messy process. His dispenser could be taken apart, and it had a screw top lid for filling the food reservoir. These kinds of auto feeders are still common today. I have one. In nineteen ninety three, he received a patent for a new type of cat litter scoop. This is simply called scoop for cat litter, and the claim section simply reads the ornamental design for a scoop for cat litter as shown and described. So this is more like what I was talking about. How there of them tend to be like? None of that's none of that's spending time writing a long descriptions. This cat scoop is unique because it has prongs on its underside, so the part that would touch the litter boxes, you're scooping, presumably to help dislodge any clumped material that might stick there. One from two thousand and eight is simply called dog toy, and the claim and description are almost comedically brief. They read quote the ornamental design for a dog toy as shown and described. Figure one is a front view of the dog toy in accordance with the invention, the rear view being identical there too, and figure two is a top plan view of a dog toy according to the invention, the bottom plan view being identical there too. The toy that's not really being described here is a ball. It's common enough to find in a pet store today. It looks like a round knot of multiple strands of some kind of material, presumably plastic. I had to say presumably, because that's not outlined in the patent doesn't really say. Another that he applied for in twenty ten, but which wasn't issued until twenty fourteen for some reason, was a bristled grooming glove. As the name implies, it is a glove with spines on it to groom and animal using a pet motion, so sort of a glove and a brush had a baby. Simon's version because others had invented similar things, but his had a closure band around the risk to keep it securely on the groomer's hand. This and the others that we mentioned are just a handful of the hundreds of designs and inventions that he came up with and manufactured. From the start of Four Paws, Simon was able to grow the company to a business that made thirty million dollars in revenue each year. It also acquired other companies that made pet products, including Cosmic Pet and Mustang Pet Products. Then, in nineteen ninety seven, he sold Four Paws to Central Garden and Pet for fifty five million dollars. In twenty fourteen, Alan Simon launched a new venture, Pet Products dot Com. This was an online aggregator that connected small local businesses like his first pet store, to customers online. The company also has directories so people could find veterinarians in their area. One of the reasons the company cited for its business approach is that while large online retailers had driven a demand for consumer convenience, when it comes to pets, people still need a local resource they can turn to for care and community, and there was a recognition that some of those small local businesses were going to struggle if there was not a way for them to simultaneously have online sales offerings. Watching interviews with Alan Simon and they're a number you can find online. He was very obviously a straightforward New Yorker. Uh. He has exactly what you think of in your head when you think what does a guy from New York sound like. He reportedly was very generous. He gave both to charity and just to individuals who needed a hand. He is also quoted as saying, with determination and hard work, anyone, even a kid from Brooklyn like me with a learning disability, can be successful and make their dreams come true. Alan died on January sixth, twenty twenty two. It kind of seemed like he worked right up to the end. And that is our discussion of pet products today. I have listener mail, sort of. I tried to read this listener mail and I cried too many times. So you're going to get an abbreviated, abridged description of a listener mail from our listener erin and I just wanted to acknowledge Aaron, your email is beautiful. I am sorry for your loss. That's literally all I can say, because I keep falling apart. So just know that I have read your letter and it touched me deeply. Then Aaron says, thank you so much for all you do to entertain and educate. You keep me company on my runs and my way to work. It makes me miss my history classes at college. When I dreamed of being a teacher, life had other plans. As a pet, Ta, I give you Sailor, my dad's dog, but he loves me best. He's a nine year old Standard Schnauzer that loves to play catch, can jump straight up and down, and is just a good boy. Thanks. This dog so cute. Listen, Schnauzers can be so much because they are very high energy, and I think Sailor is the same. But they also are some of the sweetest, silliest dogs with just the most beautiful little faces. So thank you, thank you, thank you, Aaron. I'm sorry I could not read your email too much for my little heart, but I really appreciate you sending it. If anybody else wants to send an email and make me cry, it isn't that hard, but I beg you be gentle. You can do that at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of ihe art Radio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.