Vicks VapoRub: The Drugstore, the Flu, and the Father of Junk Mail

In eighteen ninety-one, a pharmacist named Lunsford Richardson and his partner John Fariss bought the W. C. Porter drugstore in downtown Greensboro. Richardson had graduated from Davidson College with the highest honors in Latin. He was a careful, systematic man who believed in the pharmacist's capacity to do what physicians could not always do: give people something that actually worked on a cold.

Richardson spent his back room experimenting. In eighteen ninety-four he introduced what he called Vicks Magic Salve, a compound designed to treat croup in children. It contained menthol, camphor, eucalyptus oil, and other ingredients in a petroleum base. You rubbed it on the chest. The warmth of the body released the vapors. The airways opened. Parents who had sat up all night with a croupy child found that the salve helped.

By nineteen twelve, his son Smith Richardson had renamed it VapoRub. By nineteen seventeen, the company was mailing samples by the millions, which is how Lunsford Richardson became, inadvertently, the father of junk mail. He convinced the United States Postal Service to deliver samples addressed simply to Box Holder. Every mailbox in a town received one. Other companies noticed. The mass-mailing advertising industry followed.

Then came nineteen eighteen. The influenza pandemic killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. Nothing sold VapoRub like the flu. Sales rose from nine hundred thousand dollars to two million nine hundred thousand dollars in a single year. The Greensboro plant ran around the clock. Lunsford Richardson did not live to see it. He contracted influenza himself and died in August of nineteen nineteen, a victim of the pandemic his product had helped so many others survive.