Ant Buttons
date: label: date made
content: 1941-1961
name: label: maker
content: Harris Products Company, Inc.
notes: label: Description
content: Red cardboard package with white and black checked border and red and black printing. The box features the trademark image of an ant and a roach feeding at an ant button (it looks like a bottle cap) with a dead fly nearby. "ANT BUTTONS KILL" is printed on the ant button. A skull and crossbones "POISON" symbol appears on one side of the package and a Good Housekeeping seal on the other side: "Guaranteed by Good Housekeeping as advertised therein." The box of six buttons cost 25 cents. Printed on the package: "Destroys whole colonies of ants in their nests," "Kills Flies, Many Insects, Mice," and "The original bottle cap Insecticide." The box contains one wax paper package of ant buttons.
label: Description
content: Directions and additional product information are printed on the back of the package. To use, ant buttons must be moistened with water and kept moist ("in softened liquid form") at all times.
label: Description
content: Sara Harris established the Harris Products Company in Miami, Florida, in the 1930s for the manufacture and sale of the insecticide “Ant Buttons.” Ant Buttons had been advertised for sale since January 1929. According to Harris’s 1977 obituary, the Ant Buttons were originally made by her husband, Morris Harris, to address an ant problem in their Petersburg, Florida, drugstore. Mr. Harris produced an arsenic-based solution and poured it into metal bottle caps -- thus “the original bottle cap insecticide” was born. After the Harris’s divorced in 1933, Mrs. Harris focused on the company and expanding Ant Button sales. In the early to mid-1970s, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) seized the product and charged the company with selling non-registered and misbranded pesticides. The prosecution followed the adoption of the new Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act (FEPCA) passed in 1972. Harris Products Company could not comply with the federal regulations (including product licensing and child-proof packaging) and Ant Button production ended.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
place: label: place made
content: United States: Florida, Miami Beach
setName: label: See more items in
content: Medicine and Science: Medicine
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 2010.0213.029
label: catalog number
content: 2010.0213.029
label: accession number
content: 2010.0213
label: catalog number
content: 2010.0213.029
objectType: label: Object Name
content: insecticide coll object
label: Object Name
content: insecticide
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: sodium arsenate, 1.71%; inert ingredients, 98.29% (product ingredients)
label: Physical Description
content: cardboard (packaging material)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 3/8 in x 5 1/4 in x 2 3/4 in; .9525 cm x 13.335 cm x 6.985 cm
label: Measurements
content: overall: 2 3/4 in x 5 3/16 in x 3/8 in; 6.985 cm x 13.17625 cm x .9525 cm