Brillo is a trade name for a scouring pad, used for cleaningdishes, and made from steel wool impregnated with soap. The concept was patented in 1913, at a time when aluminiumpots and pans were replacing cast iron in the kitchen; the new cookware blackened easily. The company's website states the name Brillo is from the Latin word for "bright", although no such word exists in Latin. In Spanish the wordbrillo means the noun "shine"; however, German, Italian, French, and English do have words for "shine" or "bright" beginning with brill- deriving from Latin words for beryl.
History
In the early 1900s, in New York, a cookware peddler and a jeweller, were working on a solution to the blackened cookware. Using jewellers' rouge, with soap and fine steel wool from Germany, they developed a method to scour the backsides of cooking utensils when they began to blacken. The method worked, and the peddler added this new product, soap with steel wool, into his line of goods for sale. Demand for the steel wool, copper spun and soap with the jewellers' rouge increased quickly, and the peddler and the jeweller decided to patent the product. Because they lacked the money to pay for legal services, they offered attorney Milton Loeb an interest in their business instead. Loeb accepted, and in 1913, he secured a patent for the product under the name Brillo. The partnership that formed between the peddler, the jeweller and the attorney became known as the Brillo Manufacturing Company, with headquarters and production operations in New York City. By 1917, the company was selling packaged boxes of six pads, with a cake of soap included. During World War I, it helped with needed efforts of field operations. In 1921, the company moved its production facility to London, Ohio. It was only in the 1930s that soap was contained within the pad. The company merged with Purex Industries in 1962. The Dial Corporation acquired Purex Industries in 1985. Church and Dwight acquired the Brillo business from Dial in 1997. In 2010, Armaly Brands of Walled Lake, Michigan, primarily a manufacturer of sponges, purchased the Brillo business from Church & Dwight. At that time there were about 50 employees, down from a high of about 150 in the 1990s.
Production
Brillo is manufactured in London, Ohio.
In art
The most famous example of Brillo in pop art is works by Andy Warhol in 1964. Warhol did artwork on boxes with the 60's Brillo logo. Much like Warhol's Campbell soup piece, the Brillo piece has since been gaining a cult following since the piece was displayed at an China art show called Legends: Warhol/Basquiat through November 8- 10 of 2019 in the Shanghai International Artwork Trade and through November 16-23 of 2019 in Sotheby's Hong Kong Gallery. Artist MADASKI subverted the works of Warhol in his If I Had A Dream exhibition with Pollock-graffiti like textures.
