Brillo Pad

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Brillo Pad is a trade name for a scouring pad, used for cleaning dishes, and made from steel wool impregnated with soap.

It came at a time when the introduction of aluminium pots and pans -replacing cast iron- was creating a quiet revolution in the kitchen. But easily blackened by coal fires, the shiny newness of the cookware didn't last long.

A cookware peddler and his brother-in-law, a jeweller, approached New York lawyer Milton Loeb for assistance in protecting their invention- made of German fine steel wool and jeweller's rouge. But Loeb did much more, flinging himself into the pan scouring business and coming up with the Brillo trademark -from the Latin word for 'bright'.

Patented in 1913, by 1917 the Brillo Manufacturing Company were selling packaged boxes of six pads and a separate bar of soap. It was only in the 1930s that the soap was contained within the pad.

[edit] Trivia

• Andy Warhol, famous for making pop art out of commercial designs, built a statue replicating a stack of Brillo shipping cartons, made out of wood rather than cardboard.
• Brillo Pad is also Private Eye's nickname for Andrew Neil.