From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1806 

When the Brand Historian was still treading the boards and explaining the importance of innovation to a variety of corporate academies, he was fond of quoting the aphorism that Frederick the Great, King of Prussia was said to have lost the battle of Jena in 1806 – which was a bit tough on the flute playing maestro, because he had been dead for twenty years. But of course, this story was just a smart ass of way saying that the reason why the Prussian army lost this key battle was because it had failed to evolve its previously successful tactics when faced by Napoleon’s new system Grande Armée complete with integrated battle corps and highly mobile artillery. 

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But in 1806, it wasn’t only Napoleon who was innovating. This was also the year that Noah Webster published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English language which was massively influential in solidifying and popularising standards of American spelling typified in words like program rather than programme and honor rather than honour. The American Republic was just 20 years old, and as Webster’s book hit the shelves and mapped out a course for the American language, Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery were heading back to St. Louis having mapped out the vast new frontier acquired following the Louisiana purchase. And back in New York, another innovative journey of exploration was about to begin: this time into the world of personal care.

The story began in England in the 1790s with Robert Colgate, a Kent farmer with some dangerously radical beliefs who supported the political revolutions that had first gripped the British colonies and now France. It was perhaps fortunate that Robert was a good chum of William Pitt the Younger, the fantastically able Tory statesman because he was able to tip Robert the wink before the agents of the Crown arrived to arrest him for sedition. Joining the long trail of radical dissenters heading westwards, Robert and his family sailed for Baltimore where he abandoned farming to found a tallow chandelling business. 

His son William proved himself to be a good business partner, and in 1806, the year of Jena and coincidentally William Pitt’s death, Colgate opened a new enterprise in Dutch Street, Lower Manhattan. Mr Webster’s Dictionary of Compendious English defines tallow as 

“a sort of animal fat particularly that which is obtained from animals of the sheep and ox kinds. The fat of swine we never call tallow but lard or suet.”

 Despite its dubious origins, tallow was a vital commodity in the manufacture of candles whose contemporary importance cannot be underestimated. As Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe bemoans: 

“I was at a great loss for candles, so that as soon as ever it was dark, which was generally by seven o’clock, I was obliged to go to bed.”

Candles in the early 19th century had all the characteristics of a promising classic consumer packaged goods market – everybody needed them and would want to use them on a daily basis. Tallow was also an important constituent of soap before palm and olive oils became the norm and soon William Colgate’s business was advertising its Soap, Mould and Dipt candles of the first quality. The business boomed with Colgate building his reputation further by personally delivering orders. 

It would be another 60 years before Colgate’s sons launched Colgate Dental Cream, the aromatic and palatable dentifrice, as Webster’s might put it, which has painted the whole world red and made it smile. Like so many successful start-ups, the story of Colgate & Co combines a heady mixture of a brave decision, a desperate gamble, a willingness to try new things and, in pursuit of a customer, a capacity for sheer hard work.

Chamber Music in Vienna and Manhattan

Violin Concerto in D Beethoven