Toilet Seat
notes: label: Description
content: Elmer Rocker (1914-1993) was a Jewish entrepreneur who, in January 1950, patented a plastic toilet seat and assigned the rights to Century Plastic Products, Inc. That firm, owned by Rocker and located in Cleveland, Ohio, had begun advertising the Puritan plastic seat the previous summer, terming it more beautiful and more sanitary. Several high-end department stores began advertising the Puritan 600 toilet seat in 1954, noting that it was “molded of new Puralite under 200,000 pounds of pressure to make it tougher, more resilient than wood” and comes in several colors. Our example is green and carries a Puralite inscription.
label: Description
content: Ref: Elmer Rocker, “Toilet Seat,” U.S. Patent 2,493,362 (Jan. 3, 1950), assigned to Century Plastic Products, Inc., in Cleveland, Ohio.
label: Description
content: Century Plastic Products, Inc. ad in Good Housekeeping 128 (June 1949): 281.
label: Description
content: Goldsmith Bros. ad in New York Times (Jan. 1, 1954), p. 72.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
setName: label: See more items in
content: Medicine and Science: Chemistry
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 1993.0421.13
label: accession number
content: 1993.0421
label: catalog number
content: 1993.0421.13
objectType: label: Object Name
content: Toilet Seat
physicalDescription: label: Measurements
content: overall: 2 in x 16 1/2 in x 16 in; 5.08 cm x 41.91 cm x 40.64 cm
label: Measurements
content: overall: 20 in x 16 1/2 in x 2 1/4 in; 50.8 cm x 41.91 cm x 5.715 cm