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Sunlight. When U. S. washers think of Lever Bros., they may perhaps think of how 98% of Hollywood cinemactresses use Lux, or of how Lifebuoy soap removes Body Odor. Some oldtime U. S. washers may think of the oldtime question: Good morning, have you used Pear's Soap? Yet, though Lux, Lifebuoy and Pear's all are Lever Bros, soaps, they are not the Lever Bros. soap. Leading Lever Bros, product is Sunlight Soap. The main Lever works are at Port Sunlight on England's Mersey River. Almost unknown in the U. S. is Sunlight, largest selling soap in the world. Not much better known was the late William Hesketh Lever, Lord Leverhulme (1851-1925). Yet he had an excellent claim to the title of World's Greatest Merchant and was certainly in the front rank of the World's Greatest Advertisers. It was also Lever Bros. search for raw materials that resulted in the first great industrial concession made by a nation to a manufacturer, and it was Lord Leverhulme who developed the Belgian Congo more successfully than it had been exploited under the vigorous but scarcely humanitarian methods of Belgium's Leopold II.
William Hesketh Lever was born in Bolton, Lancashire in a three-story brick building the natural unloveliness of which was later emphasized by the addition of an extremely inappropriate bay-window. His earliest childhood recollection (1854) was the burning in effigy of Emperor Nicholas of Russia, for at that time the Crimean Wrar was going on and it appeared extremely important that the Russians should not take Constantinople. His father, James Lever, had risen from a grocer's apprentice to a retail and finally to a wholesale grocer. The family was solvent rather than affluent and William's boyhood allowance consisted of first one and later two shillings per week. At the age of 19, he entered his father's store, where one of his first duties was the cutting up of long bars of soap. At that time, the soapmaker was never the soap-seller. Manufacturers sent out soap-bars which whole- salers made into cakes and stamped with their own names. After some years in his father's business, William Lever decided that the possibilities of expansion were too limited, and, with his brother, James D'Arcy Lever, became a maker and seller of soap alone. He picked out "Sunlight" for his brand name and had it copyrighted throughout the world before he made a single bar.
Sunlight Soap, made from vegetable oils and superior to the tallow soaps then (1885) generally in use, was almost immediately successful, became inside of three years the largest selling soap in the United Kingdom. In 1887 Soapman Lever reclaimed a large area of swampy land along the Mersey River and built Port Sunlight, perhaps the earliest instance of the paternal industrialism it represents.
The remaining history of Lever Bros., after the establishment of Port Sunlight, is largely the history of expansion through branches. Mr. Lever globe-trotted all over the world. Wherever he traveled he left behind him, in strategic spots, a Lever Bros, branch or a Lever Bros, subsidiary. France, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, the U. S.—even China was not too far distant. In 1906 he tried to arrange a consolidation of leading British soapmakers, but the late great Lord Northcliffe raised such an antitrust turmoil that the project was abandoned. Thereupon Mr. Lever sued Lord Northcliffe and other