Wanna see a super cool (Victorian era?) insecticide tin? Edgar A. Murray's FLY DOOM. This giant can contained a full pound of powdery bug DOOM, and seriously, everything about it is just so great, from the variously enormous lettering styles, the "DEATH TO FLIES" tagline, the terrific Halloween color scheme, and the fact that the guy who invented this DOOM not only trade marked the word "DOOM", but he also put his signature right on the label. Edgar A. Murray meant business! The entire back of the can contains detailed DOOM instructions of how to properly use FLY DOOM --I mean, apparently it's safe enough to use around "meat blocks", just make sure you burn all the flies after they've been murdered! You could also purchase other cans to DOOM roaches, moths, bed bugs, and rats too! DOOOOOOM 'em all!!!
I guess this was the granddad of Raid.
ReplyDeleteConcerning the Halloween colors, here is a poem I might have posted before-
Black and Gold
Everything is black and gold,
Black and gold, tonight;
Yellow pumpkins, yellow moon,
Yellow candlelight;
Jet-black cat with golden eyes,
Shadows black as ink,
Firelight blinking in the dark
With a yellow blink.
Black and gold, black and gold,
Nothing in between -
When the world turns black and gold,
Then it's Halloween!
~Nancy Byrd Turner
100% Arsenic. Safe around babies!
ReplyDeleteI'll tell you, I've never been angry enough at flies to shut all the windows and spread around some powder in a bright orange tin with the word "DOOM" on it! Ticks, yes!
Dang, three bucks a can musta been an arm and a leg back then in (possibly) Victorian Times. No wonder half the instructions are about how very little must be used to kill off all the flies. "Don't worry! It's a surprising number of puffs!"
ReplyDeleteI assume "meat blocks" are fly traps. Something to put into the corner of the room to keep flies from bothering the people, incidentally attracting even more flies into the house to begin with. Perhaps they were already routinely poisoned, or strategically positioned adjacent to sticky fly paper, etc. Honestly, with so many anti-fly tech, I'm not so sure I'd be flooding the atmosphere inside my sealed home with poisoned powder no matter how nice the can. Flies are annoying but sheesh. Then again, we sure used a lot of powdered flea killer when I was a lad. If that left the toxic corpses of insects laying around I didn't know about it. I certainly didn't round them up and burn them.
Not a lot in Google about Mr Murray's DOOM products - but an auction site showed that it had quite a bit of printed matter that came with a can of Rat Doom, including a letter, postmarked 1906, stating how the "phosphorus in this form unites with the gastric juices and causes sever suffering..." which sounds like something straight out of Haunted Horror.
ReplyDeleteLink is here: https://holabirdamericana.liveauctiongroup.com/item.aspx?i=50917446&mobile=0
It is weird how very little online info there is about this stuff.
ReplyDelete