How  Toothpaste Became a Mainstream Product
The social mechanisms and agents operating business channels to broadly affect change in behavioral norms through obtuse, distributed influence and produce widely held beliefs with financial results for large companies and economic outcomes across an entire industry, doesn&#x27;t interest me as much as other aspects surrounding the story of twentieth century medical and cosmetic products.<p>Namely, what toothpaste is, how it works, and the prevailing clues offered as bellwethers for its effectiveness as a preventative treatment.<p>This is the story of how to make something happen, whether it&#x27;s useful and valuable to the individual or not. I&#x27;d rather see that story prefaced or intermingled with the details of a product&#x27;s true utility, before hearing about the complicated and concerted effort to bring such a product to market (warts and all). I don&#x27;t feel that such details are beyond the scope of a story of commercial success. Far from it. The mechanics of genuine utility are of paramount relevance, at least eye-to-eye with the behind-the-scenes schmoozings of success.<p>Missing from the story are the odd details that reveal flouride&#x27;s role in dental health, and its hazards and side effects as a medication. Also missing, is the detail regarding the industrial scale source of flouride&#x27;s precursors, glossed over, even with the mention of at least one aluminum company, and hints implying a nod to the war effort, prior to the start of the second world war.<p>It&#x27;s also short on specific dates, skipping across broad periods, mentioning mostly decades as eras of activity or progress.<p>Flouride and dentistry are weird topics with a lot of trivia, but this article only explains the activities of businessmen operating from advantageous positions, which for the most part, given the hindsight of the article lend an almost obvious and deterministic view of the outcome of their success. It reads like the musings of an amateur hunter relishing the idea of a canned hunt.<p>Without including the low-level hard science of why toothpaste is effective, this story casts toothpaste in a role as seemingly empty as perhaps the Juicero juicer [0], or any number of other hollow products sold via infommercial or trumpeted alongside buzz words like <i>Internet of Things</i>.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Juicero" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Juicero</a>