Your favorite celebrity endorses a product.

You're not exactly sure what it is, but you got to get your hands on it to right now.

Is station wagon saving time on the Web?

Shopping can be one of the most fun pastime, and there was even a time when shopping was good for you.

In fact, it could have saved your life.

In the 19th century, Americans had a different concept of what it meant to be clean.

They often didn't have running water, they didn't have flush toilets.

And you don't have easy running water.

The kind of cleanliness you can attain is limited, so people would Washington Basin.

They might use some soap that Grandma had made with why, but they did not have an easy time of it keeping their bodies or their homes clean.

And they certainly didn't have shelf full of products designed to help them stay hygienically pure.

Basically, life for many people was just dirty.

But starting around the 18 twenties, people start realizing that living in filth wasn't so good for their health.

Infectious diseases began to go up in number in the United States.

In the 18 hundreds, particularly in large cities, thin scientific evidence started showing that microscopic organisms, or germs often found in dirty homes and cities, were the cause of disease.

This acceptance of the germ theory of disease waas flow to come because it depended on a belief that something you couldn't see wise making you sick.

Oddly enough, enthusiasm for the germ theory did not come from the medical profession, but from advertisers of products.

The commodification of the germ theory of disease kind of came in two waves.

The first phase was in the 18 eighties and into the 18 nineties, around toilets because of diseases like cholera and typhoid.

Public health authorities realized, was spread by fecal matter from sick people going into drinking water.

I know it's really disgusting, but that is what was happening.

Some of the early products that were sold to protect people from those germs included water filters and plumbing innovations.

Some really fancy ones, too, days to follows research that shows the spread of germs through personal contact, coughing, spitting, sneezing.

They realize that that person to person contact is significant in the spread very deadly diseases.

Advertisers jumped on this on and use those concerns to sell furniture.

When you look at interior decorating in this time period, you can see a massive ship away from the Victorian to um or clean kind of style.

So instead of buying a velvet chair, you would want to buy ah wicker chair that could be more easily cleaned.

You would wanna have hardwood floors and not carpets that couldn't be taken up because the drugs were very, very bad rugs that you could not take out and be very, very bad.

Of course, when you have all this swanky new furniture, you have to make sure it's clean and germ free.

And advertisers were more than ready to sell their cleaning products, and they sold them just about anyway.

They could, even by co opting someone's name, blistering antiseptic.

The most widely used antiseptic in the world kills germs instantly.

Listerine is named after Joseph Lister, who was a surgeon who really cut down on post surgery infections.

So if you were going to name a product after someone Lister was a good choice.

He had no control over this.

Those were the days when you could appropriate someone's name without asking them.

So overnight, the Lister name went from hospitals to store shelves toward off colds.

Gargle with that list arena and protect yourself.

There was nothing in your life that blistering couldn't be used to make better.

Advertisers also targeted people's insecurities, often within the cultural norms at that time to sell their products, claiming, for instance, that their mouth washed could help you with your social life.

Poor march.

She'll never hold a man until she does something about her breath, and people totally bought it.

Advertisers also caught the eye of a group more genuinely geared toward the public interest.

Our public health educators see that advertising is becoming a potent way to get people to buy certain products.

So let's adapt the tactics of this new advertising, which reduce the amount of words and started to use graphics pictures line drawings to draw the i N.

They also used catchy slogans.

Jingles protection can be yours when, um, you knives any of the advertisers methods to sell ideas and behaviors between the public health authorities and the product advertisers.

They did a pretty good job getting the concept out there that the basic cause of infectious diseases were these microbes.

This'll, media revolution and consumer revolution occurred simultaneously with this scientific and public health revolution.

It develops in other countries a swell.

But the United States is really one of the great purveyors of this advertising designed to get people to buy products, advertising agencies, the beginnings of Madison Avenue all deep from the same decades that the germ theory was coming to be accepted by selling cleaning products, furniture and toilets.

Advertisers helped make homes cleaner and move the needle and improving public health all while making a buck.