Chesebrough Manufacturing Company [2] was an oil company, founded in 1859, which produced petroleum jelly under the brand names Vaseline and Luxor.[3] Robert Augustus Chesebrough, a chemist who started the company, was interested in marketing oil products for medicinal use. He produced the first petroleum jelly by refining rod wax, a paraffin-like substance that formed on oil drilling rigs,[4] using heat and filtration. He named the substance Vaseline, from the German word for water (Wasser) and the Greek word for oil (olion). Vaseline was patented in the United States in 1872 and England in 1877.
Chesebrough today is part of the British consumer products company Unilever, which acquired Chesebrough and Pond's (the two of which merged in 1955) in 1986.[1]