That Used To Do What?!

Plenty of products we use every day have interesting little back stories to them. For instance, we bet your fourth grade self could find no greater joy than discovering that Q-tips were originally called "Baby Gays." But what is even more interesting than that is how some world-changing inventions were created for a completely different, and often stupid, purpose.

5. Lysol Was a Terrible Gynecological Snake Oil
The next time you get the chance, take a look at the warning label on a bottle of Lysol. The first one that catches the eye is "Do not spray on skin." A close second: "Extremely flammable." Now, let's play a fun game: Bearing these in mind, see if you can read the rest of this entry without cringing. Boy, are you doomed to fail.
The Original Use: There really is no way to put this gently: Lysol used to be peddled as a genital disinfectant for the ladies. When the product first came out in the 1920s, it was marketed as a feminine hygiene product and, we kid you not, a form of birth control by way of vaginal douching. Lysol ads proclaimed a plethora of benefits for pretty much every gynecological need, making claims that were 100 percent, natural horseshit. The ads were, however, backed up by a bunch of prominent European doctors no one had ever heard about (because they were completely made up). The American Medical Association eventually called the makers of Lysol out, but by then their product had already been the leading form of female birth control from 1930 to 1960? The obvious problem that somehow got completely ignored for decades was that Lysol is very much a caustic poison. If you apply it to your skin, which more or less all the women were doing for freaking 30 years, it burns and itches like there is no tomorrow. Which they of course attempted to cure by applying more Lysol.

4. Bubble Wrap Used to Be Wallpaper
We would probably live in a much more productive world if it weren't for bubble wrap. In addition to being one of the best products for packaging fragiles, it was everyone's favorite procrastination material before the Internet came along. Popping those air bubbles under your thumbs has to be one of the most satisfying simple pleasures in life. Hell, even today popping bubble wrap is so addictive they're actually making electronic devices to simulate the experience. Lucky for us, then, that no one thought to make wallpaper out of it or anything. Humanity would've gone extinct in no time, as everyone would've just stayed home, popping their walls.
The Original Use: The first thing you need to realize is that necessity isn't always the mother of invention -- sometimes inventors just invent something that seems cool, even if they have no idea what to do with it. For instance, aluminum foil was invented by the French in 1903, but nobody figured out that you could wrap food with it until two decades later (before that, they used it to mark racing pigeons). Bubble wrap is like that -- a couple of dudes figured out how to manufacture the stuff, and then they were like, "Well, now what?" That's when inventors Alfred W. Fielding and Mark Chavannes decided their wondrous new material could be sold as "bubble wallpaper" and they started peddling it for the new, hip generation as the "must have" interior decoration thing. The world took a look at what they had to offer, laughed heartily and didn't even consider buying it (which is weird, because a bubble wrap house is all we can think about now). Undeterred, Fielding and Chavannes' company Sealed Air set their sights on a new market: greenhouse insulation. It failed miserably once again. And there, the bubble wrap story would have ended ... if it hadn't been for IBM. The up-and-coming technology giant had just launched their 1401 computer model and needed a way to keep the expensive equipment safe in transport. Fielding and Cavannes noticed that they had a warehouse full of stuff that was essentially tiny airbags, thought "Eh, what do we have to lose?" and somehow managed to convince IBM that the best possible way to keep their incredibly valuable high-tech computers safe was to wrap them in old, unsellable wallpaper. Bubble wrap found its niche as a packaging material and was an instant, huge hit. And the rest, friends, is procrastination history. But the really strange thing is this isn't the only time the wallpaper industry has popped out something this huge ...

3. Play-Doh Was a Wallpaper Cleaner
Perhaps no toy relies more on imagination than Play-Doh. There it sits, a blob, waiting to be fashioned into anything a child can imagine: a snake, a worm, a bowl, an ashtray. A differently shaped blob. Those five things. So, of course such an abstract and creativity-enhancing toy must have a really, really weird-ass background to make it on a list like this.
The Original Use: Wallpaper stain remover. It was a goddamn wallpaper stain remover. Play-Doh came into existence as a nameless, unpleasantly off-white wallpaper-cleaning compound sold by a company called Kutol. However, it hit a speed bump in the form of vinyl wallpapers, which, unlike bubble wrap wallpaper up there, were actually a big thing in the 1950s and played merry hell with the wallpaper-cleaner industry, as they provided consumers with the ability to clean their new wallpaper with just a little water and soap. Their product rendered obsolete, things looked bleak for Kutol -- until they learned by chance that a nursery school was using their remover goop to make Christmas ornaments. Not being ones to look a gift horse in the mouth, or for that matter think things through, Kutol immediately removed the detergents from their goop, renamed themselves the Rainbow Craft Company (despite the product only coming in that fucking off-white color at the time) and began selling their wallpaper remover as a toy. Eventually, other colors came along and the product was rechristened Play-Doh. And that is how the only toy empire was born from the practice of letting toddlers play with household cleaning chemicals.

2. Corkscrews Were Military Tools for Removing Bullets
The Original Use: Actually, that's not a corkscrew. It's a gun worm, one of the few products that sound like a video game enemy. There was a time when guns were, to put it bluntly, worth slightly less than their weight in manure. Bullets got stuck in muskets all the time, which was a problem because if your bullet got stuck it meant you were unable to fire until it was free, and someone was probably shooting back at you. The gun worm was developed to remove those stuck bullets and other blockages, and were therefore essential in stopping you from getting killed.

1. WD-40 Spray Was Used to Protect Nuclear Missiles
We're going to get into some advanced chemistry here: Water causes metal to rust. So if you want to keep metal rust-free, you need something to repel or displace the water. In 1953, a little-known company from San Diego called Rocket Chemical Company set out to make a water displacement formula to end all water displacement formulas. They got their shit together on their 40th try and named it with an abbreviation of "water displacement, 40th attempt," a random note a chemist had scribbled in his notebook, because that's what happens when your marketing budget is an apple core and a broken shoe string. That eventually got shortened to WD-40. Then they put their new hit product to its intended use: intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles. See that, boss? This is what we've been trying to tell you: There are all sorts of benefits to letting your employees steal.

Posted in: