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Unopened Box Of Lifebuoy Bath Soap
The first picture shows the front of the box of Lifebuoy soap. The second picture shows the back of the box, which talks about the benefits of using Lifebuoy soap.
Lifebuoy was introduced by Lever Brothers in 1895 in England. Originally a carbolic soap containing phenol, different varieties were later introduced without the medicinal carbolic smell.
Lever Brothers
Starting with a small grocery business begun by his father, William Lever and his brother James entered the soap business in 1885 by buying a small soap works in Warrington. The brothers teamed up with a Bolton chemist, William Hough Watson, who became an early business partner. Watson invented the process which resulted in a new soap, using glycerin and vegetable oils such as palm oil, rather than tallow. The resulting soap was a good, free-lathering soap, at first named Honey Soap then later named "Sunlight Soap". Production reached 450 tons per week by 1888. Larger premises were built on marshes at Bromborough Pool on the Wirral Peninsula at what became Port Sunlight. Though the company was named Lever Brothers, William Lever's brother and co-director James never took a major part in running the business. He fell ill in 1895, probably as a result of diabetes, and resigned his directorship two years later.
By 1900 "Lifebuoy", "Lux" and "Vim" brands had been added and subsidiaries had been set up in the United States, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, Germany and elsewhere. By 1911 the company had its own oil palm plantations in Belgian Congo and the Solomon Islands. Lever Brothers Ltd also acquired other soap companies including A&F Pears, Gossage's of Widnes, Watson's of Leeds, Crosfield's of Warrington, Hazlehurst & Sons of Runcorn and Hudson's of Liverpool. The town Leverville (the present-day Lusanga) was founded in the Bandundu district of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, named after William Lever.
Lever Brothers rode the cresting late-Victorian consumer revolution to build a vast worldwide industrial empire. Four years after William Lever's death in 1925, his enterprises were amalgamated as Unilever. By 1930, it employed 250,000 people and in terms of market value, was the largest company in Britain.