20 Fortunes Built On Things Nobody Uses Anymore

William Procter, an English candle maker, and James Gamble, an Irish soap maker, became partners in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1837. Cincinnati’s massive meatpacking industry provided them with cheap animal fat known as tallow, which they used to make candles, their first major source of income. During the Civil War, they won Union Army contracts that supplied soldiers with millions of tallow candles, setting up the capital that would power everything else they did. Tallow was also rendered obsolete by the advent of the electric light bulb, forcing them to shift their focus fully to soap.

In 1852, Clement Studebaker and his brother Henry established a blacksmith and wagon business in South Bend, Indiana. During the Civil War, the Union Army purchased wagons and ambulances from them. Business boomed, and the company became the largest vehicle factory in the world, with tens of thousands of horse-drawn wagons, buggies, and carriages produced annually. Clement Studebaker died as a multimillionaire in 1901, before his company had built a single automobile.

William Gibbs, a partner in the English trading company Anthony Gibbs & Sons, had a monopoly on exporting guano, centuries-old droppings of sea birds high in nitrogen and phosphorus that could be used to fertilize exhausted farmland all over Europe and America. From 1842, when the company was awarded an exclusive contract with Peru’s government, the firm made more than £100,000 a year for much of the 1850s, and contemporaries called Gibbs the richest commoner in Britain at the time. He spent his millions building Tyntesfield, a grand country mansion, but guano was eventually replaced by synthetic fertilizer.

In 1877, Thomas Edison invented the tinfoil phonograph. Then he constructed a factory in West Orange, New Jersey, where he mass-produced hollow wax cylinders, the first commercially available medium for recording sound. These cylinders were used to record speeches, brass bands, and popular songs. This was big business that generated a lot of money, and it also helped establish the recorded music industry as we know it today. Edison continued manufacturing wax cylinders until October 1929, years after flat disc records had stolen their thunder.

A young Boston merchant named Frederic Tudor began shipping frozen New England pond ice to the tropics in 1806. Melted cargo nearly bankrupted him for years, until he perfected a double-walled, sawdust-insulated icehouse that could withstand the hottest climates. Decades later, one of his vessels delivered more than 100 tons of ice to Calcutta in perfect condition following a four-month sea journey. Tudor, the “Ice King,” died wealthy in 1864, decades before mechanical refrigeration finally put the natural ice trade out of business.

In the 1830s, Orson and Lorenzo Fowler, two American brothers, were able to capitalize on phrenology, a now-discredited pseudoscience based on the Victorian belief that a person’s character could be inferred by the bumps on their skull. Their company, Fowler & Wells, operated a series of paid “phrenological cabinets,” which dispensed readings, sold plaster head busts, and published charts of the human mind. Other famous clients included newspaper editor Horace Greeley, who came in as part of a popular fad for self-improvement. But neurology has since refuted its theories.

Henry Timken was a German immigrant with a carriage-making company in St. Louis, Missouri, when he decided to address an ongoing annoyance: the need to grease wagon and buggy axles regularly, and the tendency of axles to snap when overloaded. In 1898, he received a patent for a tapered roller bearing, which made the ride easier and allowed wagons to carry heavier loads. The next year, Timken established a roller bearing company that at first sold solely to the carriage trade, many years before the bearing was put to use in cars.

Westfield, Massachusetts (The Whip City), built its economy around a single accessory for horse and carriage travel. Manufacturer Jonathan Pratt mechanized the production of whips, braiding rattan, whalebone, and rawhide around flexible wooden shafts. By the 1890s, around 40 Westfield companies produced more than 20 million buggy whips annually, capturing approximately 90% of the world’s whip market. These companies made fortunes for the town’s factory owners. The automobile, however, wiped out the industry within a generation.

Back in the early 1800s, leeches were used to treat fevers and swelling by attaching them to the skin. In fact, demand was so high for the European leech that it led to population crashes in the wild. Merchants like the American importer Henry W. Walton built leech farms and shipping routes. He packed millions of leeches in wet moss and shipped them in fast sailing ships of the day. Paris hospitals alone used millions of leeches per year. But once germ theory was discovered, bloodletting was abandoned, although sterile leeches are still used in microsurgery today.

Prior to the 1880s, all printed material was set by hand, lead letter by lead letter. But Ottmar Mergenthaler, a German watchmaker who had come to Baltimore, invented the Linotype, a keyboard device that would cast an entire line of type from a single unit of molten lead. When the first commercial model was installed in a major New York newspaper’s pressroom, Thomas Edison reportedly hailed it as “the Eighth Wonder of the World.” And Mergenthaler’s company developed a worldwide monopoly on the manufacture of newspaper-printing machinery.

In 1760, Pierre Lorillard I, a French immigrant, opened a small shop on Chatham Street in Lower Manhattan to process nasal snuff, which consists of finely ground, scented tobacco that is sniffed through the nose, not smoked. This was how wealthy people at the time preferred to consume the plant. He was killed in 1776, during the Revolutionary War. His sons, George and Pierre II, took over and built a big water-powered snuff mill on the Bronx River, laying the foundation for what would become America’s oldest tobacco company still in operation today.

Keystone View Company was established in Meadville, Pennsylvania, by Benneville Lloyd Singley, who mounted pairs of photographs side-by-side on a piece of cardboard, which appeared as a 3-dimensional image when viewed with a stereoscope. Singley then employed traveling agents who went door-to-door all over the world, and he acquired rivals’ entire catalogs, eventually collecting well over 100,000 stereo views. For many decades, Keystone held onto its audience of schoolchildren and families. Singley passed away years later, right as cinema and photo magazines were already starting to pull his audience away.

In 1885, Carl Auer von Welsbach, an Austrian chemist, patented an incandescent gas mantle, a delicate mesh impregnated with rare-earth minerals that glowed when heated in a gas flame. But it was too dim to market, and Welsbach’s first company went under. He continued refining the product, eventually creating a mantle made from a fabric doused with thorium and cerium oxides, which produced a brilliant white light at low gas consumption. The second company he founded pumped out tens of millions of mantles, helping gaslight stay competitive with electric light for decades.

In the 1820s, people wrote with hand-cut goose quills, which lasted a short time and needed constant sharpening. Birmingham cutler Joseph Gillott didn’t invent the steel pen nib, but he built the machinery and heat treatments to mass-produce flexible ones with slits that mimicked a quill’s spring. When he opened his Victoria Works in 1827, he drove down the price of nibs from shillings to pennies a gross, and turned out millions every week. Gillott died in 1872, with a collection of art worth more than £170,000.

Before movies, there were magic lanterns: those brass-and-wood contraptions that projected images from glass slides onto the walls of lecture halls and parlors. In 1842, civil engineer Edward Anthony started a New York photographic supply company and eventually wound up as the nation’s biggest distributor of projection slides. He mass-produced thousands of sets of heavy glass slides, often hand-colored, featuring travel vistas and Bible stories. The arrival of motion picture film rendered the entire enterprise obsolete in the 1910s.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, the average household hand-stitched all its clothes, but soft silver thimbles would be pierced easily by a steel needle. In 1884, Halifax jeweler Charles Horner patented the “Dorcas” thimble, which featured a steel core encased between two plates of silver, making it much harder. The Dorcas thimble sold by the millions in Britain and throughout the British Empire. Horner died in 1896, before factory-made clothing made most home sewing unnecessary.

It used to be a luxury to have a whole shirt washed in the 19th century. However, a respectable gentleman was expected to wear a clean white collar. After Hannah Montague invented the detachable collar in Troy, New York, industrialist George B. Cluett banded together with other area producers to create a firm that mass-produced millions of stiff collars annually. They came to dominate the US market and created the famous Arrow Collar Man ads in 1905. But within a few decades, soft, attached collars had come to dominate men’s fashion.

In the 1850s, when several terrible cholera epidemics swept through Dorset, England, an Anglican vicar named Henry Moule discovered that the source of the disease was cesspools that had stopped flowing. Dry, sifted soil could eliminate the odors and turn the waste into compost. He designed a commode that dropped a scoop of dry dirt over the waste when a lever was pulled. He patented the device, called the Dry Earth Closet, and sold it in the thousands to private houses and army camps until flush toilets and sewers took over.

William Rotch Jr., a Quaker merchant in Nantucket and New Bedford, Massachusetts, operated a whaling fleet, an oil-processing works, and several candle factories before he died in 1838. He worked almost exclusively in spermaceti, an oil extracted from the head of the sperm whale that burns more brightly and cleanly than ordinary whale oil or tallow. Spermaceti lit lighthouses and streetlamps and graced the houses of the well-to-do. It was key to making New Bedford the richest city in North America on a per capita basis. Then petroleum was discovered in Pennsylvania, and the trade collapsed.

In addition to running a shooting gallery in Abilene, Kansas, Charles W. Parker purchased a used carousel in 1892 and immediately recognized its revenue-generating power. The factory turned out “Riding Galleries” powered by steam engines. These rides were designed to be easily assembled and taken apart so they could be moved around by traveling carnivals. A team of skilled, master carvers crafted ornate, wooden horses, lions, and dragons to decorate them. Known as “The Amusement King,” Parker ran traveling shows all across the country and made several million dollars before he died in 1932. Eventually, electric rides and the opening of permanent amusement parks put steam-powered carousels out of business.

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