How a father’s love and a pandemic created a household name

For most people, memories of childhood coughs and colds are synonymous with a menthol-smelling ointment in a dark blue jar with a turquoise cap.

For more than a century, Vicks VapoRub has been a household name across continents. How it became one has roots in the Spanish flu pandemic in the early 20th century.

The story begins with an act of fatherly love.

In 1894 in the state of North Carolina in the eastern United States, the nine-year-old son of a pharmacist named Lunsford Richardson was sick with croup, a respiratory infection that causes a bark-like cough.

Desperate to find a treatment, Richardson began testing out mixtures of aromatic oils and chemicals at his pharmacy and produced an ointment that helped his son.

But this was not Vicks VapoRub – at least not yet.

Seeing that his ointment had worked for his son, Richardson started to sell it for 25 cents a jar. The strong-smelling product consisted of menthol, camphor, eucalyptus and several other oils blended together in a petroleum jelly base. The ointment helped open blocked noses, and when rubbed on the chest, the vapour soothed a cough.

Richardson initially named his concoction Vick’s Croup & Pneumonia Salve. An enthusiastic gardener, he thought of the name after seeing an advertisement for seeds of the Vicks plant, whose leaves smell like menthol when crushed. He also borrowed the name from his brother-in-law, Dr Joshua Vick, a trusted doctor in their town of Greensboro. He felt “Vick” was “short, easy to remember and looked good on a label”.

In 1911, 17 years after the salve was created, Richardson’s son Henry Smith, the one who once suffered from croup, was steering the family business. He renamed the product Vick’s Vaporub Salve from Vick’s Magic Croup Salve, the name under which it had been sold since 1905. That year, the packaging was also changed from transparent glass to the distinctive cobalt blue.