A lesson in good marketing

Did you know that Zipper is a brand and not the name of the product?

When thinking about a certain product, we can all point to a brand that is the most known. But sometimes, a brand will be so popular that it will become the generic name of the product. Let’s have a look at 10 brands that have become a synonym for the product’s name.

A staple in the wintertime, Chapstick is actually a well-known brand of lip balm that has been around since the late 19th Century. With a trajectory that long, it’s no surprise that the name has become synonymous with the product.

What family has not been saved by a Crock-Pot on a busy day? This appliance lets you cook food at a steady temperature and a slow pace, and its actual name (slow cooker) reflects that. However, the Crock-Pot brand of slow cookers is so popular that it is used as a generic name.

Jacuzzis are a great way to destress after a hectic week and to relieve body pains. However, what we colloquially call ‘a jacuzzi’ is in fact a hot tub (sometimes called a whirlpool tub). The Jacuzzi company not only sells hot tubs, but also products such as mattresses and towels.

You might know this one: kleenex are not really called kleenex, but facial tissues. The Kleenex brand offers a wide range of products, most of them paper-based, with tissues being one of the best-known.

What do you use for transferring archives and data between computers? If you said ‘Memory stick’, you are wrong (unless it's from the brand Sony). The proper generic name for this device is flash memory storage device.

The name ‘ping pong’ is so common that we sometimes forget that the sport’s actual name is table tennis. Ping Pong is a trademarked name, nearly a hundred years old.

The use of ‘scotch tape’ as a generic name is so widespread that it even appears in some dictionaries. However, its correct name is clear adhesive tape, which sometimes is from the Scotch Tape brand.

The prized possession of many mothers around the world, the Tupperware brand is one of the best-known when it comes to kitchen products. Its containers are particularly famous, and the brand name is often used for any plastic container.

No one can argue that the word zipper is part of the common lexicon and it’s used in a generic sense. But the word has been trademarked by the Universal Fastener Company since 1917. Similar products from different brands should be called ‘separable fasteners’.

The use of this word as generic involves a legal battle between Wham-O (the original trademark owner) and another toy company that argued that the word ‘frisbee’ had been incorporated into the common language as generic. The court ruled in favor of the original company, so off-brand frisbees are still legally called flying disks.

Treasures with a history

Medieval Jell-O? These inventions are a lot older than you realize!

Jell-O, Swiss Army Knives, roller skates, lighters… It’s hard to picture these items existing hundreds of years ago, isn’t it? And yet, some of the treasures that make modern life easier have indeed been around, in some cases, for millennia. Read on to learn when these 11 items were actually first invented!

Gelatin desserts existed centuries before Jell-O! Medieval cooks used boiled animal collagen to make shimmering molds for banquets. The brand Jell-O came in 1897, when Pearl B. Wait in New York flavored powdered gelatin with fruit syrups.

It’s hard to imagine the video game giant existing before electricity. But Nintendo was founded in 1889 in Kyoto as a playing card company. For decades, it produced hanafuda cards, then toys, and only entered electronics in the 1970s.

Long before disco rinks or inline blades, a Belgian inventor named John Joseph Merlin assembled the first roller skates in 1760, skating into a London ballroom (and famously crashing). Early versions had fixed metal wheels and very poor steerability.

Famously, lighters predate matches. But do you know exactly how long lighters have existed? The first usable one appeared in 1823, invented by a German chemist. The first friction match only appeared 3 years later.

That’s what we call the famous red multi-tool standardized by Victorinox in 1891. But archaeologists discovered a Roman folding tool from around 200 AD made of silver and iron, with knife, spoon, fork, spike, and spatula. It might not have been mass-produced or standardized, but it certainly was there first.

We may associate dishwashers with mid-20th-century suburban kitchens, but the first one dates to 1886, when Josephine Cochrane built a hand-cranked model to save her fine china from clumsy servants.

The 20th century was still far away when the first working escalator was patented. The year was 1859, yet it was introduced at Coney Island only 30 years later—as an amusement ride!

It’s not a thing of the 90s! Its roots go back to 1969, when ARPANET connected four U.S. universities for military-funded research. The web’s 1991 debut by Tim Berners-Lee made it public and visual, hence the illusion that the "Internet" appeared overnight.

Do you associate concrete blocks with modernity in your mind? Think again! The Romans used advanced volcanic-ash mixes to build huge, durable structures (like the Pantheon dome or aqueducts). The Ancient Roman techniques even give clues on how to make longer-lasting concrete today.

We are not talking about electronic printers. Think about the movable type technology: It goes back in history way, way farther than Gutenberg’s system.

Printing with woodblocks and even early movable type existed in China long before the 15th-century European printing that Gutenberg perfected and popularized.

The great ancestor of GPS was probably the magnetic compass used for navigation. The discovery that magnetic force could be used to calculate the position of the poles occurred over 2000 years ago during the Han dynasty, in China.