Thousands of housewives bought thousands of packages of Ivory Snow, of Supersuds or of Rinso, last week, with never a thought of who made those incipient soap bubbles, much less how they were made. But in the new Federal Building in South Bend, Ind., the process of spraying soft soap through a nozzle and having it dry before it falls engaged the million-dollar attention of a battalion of lawyers who represented four-fifths of the entire U. S. soap business. Brilliant Newton Diehl Baker led the mass-attack of Procter & Gamble (Ivory Snow) and Colgate-Palmolive-Peet (Supersuds) against Lever Brothers Co. (Rinso) for alleged infringement of patents.
Filed nearly four years ago, the complaint asks for injunctions, an accounting of Rinso profits, additional punitive damages and the destruction of all Rinso machinery. For the British-owned, U. S. managed defendant, Chicago's Frank Parker Davis, famed patent lawyer, was ready to do his part.
Across the hall from the court room, a library was hastily converted into a theatre where reels of soapmaking film were screened for the benefit of Federal Judge Thomas Whitten Slick, whose brother Albert runs a big South Bend laundry. As the trial progressed last week the court adjourned across the street to an office building where Lawyer Baker had installed complete laboratories. There white-coated chemists practiced the art of soapmaking at long tables groaning with beakers, bottles, vials, tubes. Most elaborate in the history of the Northern Indiana district court, the trial was expected to last three weeks.
Anybody with a few pennies and a big pot can make soap from fat and caustic soda. The only trick is to make the soap strong enough to take off the dirt but not so strong as to take off the skin. Selling soap is another matter. And soap is moulded, colored, perfumed, chipped, flaked, powdered and blown through the end of a nozzle for the sole purpose of making a housewife buy one soap instead of another. Indeed, the defense went further last week, arguing that the form of Ivory Snow, Supersuds or Rinso had little to do with their extraordinary success: it was only the advertising that counted.
Nevertheless, the biggest U. S. soap company and the second biggest were determined to fight it out against the third biggest, which is an important affiliate of Britain's utterly fabulous soap trust. P. & G. and Colgate had acquired the patents with an eye to competing with Lever's Rinso; but no sooner was the product on the market, said the plaintiffs, than Lever began to alter the form of Rinso, eventually hitting on practically the same process. Last week Lever contended that spray-drying was an old, old idea, that its own patents went back for half a century.