Another in a series of posts about famous summer residents of the Jersey Shore.
Millionaire business owners often spend their retirement at the shore. The inventor of Vaseline was fortunate to have over twenty-five years in Spring Lake from 1907-1933. This is the story of one of the community’s most prominent residents of the early 1900s.
Robert Augustus Cheesebrough was a 22-year-old chemist. His specialty was refining spermaceti oil. The oil, derived from an organ in the head of a sperm whale, aids the whale in its deep dives for food. The 45-ton whale can let in cool water to solidify the substance. When ready to resurface, the whale uses body heat to liquefy the oil, helping it climb from the depths like a hot air balloon. The whale also uses the organ for echolocation.
The oil had special industrial uses that nearly drove the whale to extinction. The caviar of whale oils emits a bright white flame when in a lamp. It burned odorless compared to other whale oils, and it provided superior lubrication for special precision parts like fine clockworks. It was the most valuable of whale products.
By the mid-1800s, whale oil in general and expensive spermaceti oil were being eclipsed by other, more abundant fuels. When petroleum was discovered in Pennsylvania in 1859 by Edwin Drake, Cheesebrough was sent to his Titusville field to examine possibilities to refine similar products.
What Cheesebrough observed at the well head was a thick nuisance substance that gathered around the well shafts. The friction of drilling brought about this goo. The drillers called it Rod Oil. They put it on cuts and burns. By keeping out water, the substance helped keep wounds clean and dry.
Cheesebrough took the material and tinkered with ways to replicate the crude refinement found on the drill shaft. Eventually, he had a nearly clear, odorless substance he called Petroleum Jelly.
After serving with the 7th Regiment in the Civil War, where he protected Washington D.C., Cheesebrough returned to New York and his lab to try and commercialize his invention.
He found apothecaries who would sell the substance as a wound salve. With the success of the product established, he began to set up a factory in Perth Amboy in the early 1870s. He named his product Vaseline, a combination of the German word for water and the Greek word for oil.
Cheesebrough found many additional uses for the substance, from diaper rash to makeup remover, moisturizer, lubricant, and rust protector. He ate a spoonful daily and actively marketed his miracle substance.
Vaseline became one of the most successful consumer products of the late 1800s, and its popularity spread with the growing American population into the 20th century. The product line included items from hair tonic to headache medicine. Cheeseborough was one of the wealthiest men in the country when he sold the business to John Rockefeller's Standard Oil.
The oil trust owned 91% of oil refining in the United States. Cheesbrough was ready for retirement. In 1907, he purchased property along the ocean at Pitney Ave. in Spring Lake.
Cheesebrough was an active member of the Spring Lake community, participating in the garden club, growing prize-winning lima beans and corn. He threw lavish parties and was well regarded by his employees, who cared for the house when he was away, and were permitted to throw parties of their own at the estate. He had four automobiles in Spring Lake valued at over $25,000 burned in a garage fire in 1917. He spent his last years writing letters to the editor in support of his views on various government policies.
Standard Oil was forced to divest its Cheesebrough Manufacturing as part of an antitrust settlement in 1911. This action only made the Rockefellers and R.A. Cheesebrough wealthier. The company thrived as an independent entity for another 70 years, purchasing Pond’s cold cream company, before selling Cheesebrough Ponds to Unilever for $3.1 billion in 1986.
Robert's wife Margaret died in 1887, and never enjoyed Spring Lake, but the wealthy widower spent his Spring Lake summers with his children and grandchildren. His son William was one of the flashiest spenders around and sailed his mahogany yacht out of Long Branch. He bragged it had a capacity for over a ton of ice. William died of heart disease in 1917. None of Cheesebrough's five children lived as long as the inventor. He credited his spoonful of Vaseline ritual for his long life, living until he was 96 in 1933, when he died at his estate at Pitney and Ocean.
