researchers,
Lyle Goodhue and William Sullivan There is a high chance that the concepts of aerosol go as far back as 1790. The first aerosol spray can patent was granted in
Oslo in 1927 to
Erik Rotheim, a Norwegian chemical engineer, and a United States patent was granted for the invention in 1931. The patent rights were sold to a United States company for 100,000
Norwegian kroner. The Norwegian Postal Service,
Posten Norge, celebrated the invention by issuing a stamp in 1998. In 1939, American Julian S. Kahn received a patent for a disposable spray can, but the product remained largely undeveloped. Kahn's idea was to mix cream and a propellant from two sources to make whipped cream at home—not a true aerosol in that sense. Moreover, in 1949, he disclaimed his first four claims, which were the foundation of his following patent claims. It was not until 1941 that the aerosol spray can was first put to effective use by Americans
Lyle Goodhue and William Sullivan of the
United States Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine, who are credited as the inventors of the modern spray can. Their design of a refillable spray can, dubbed the
aerosol bomb or
bug bomb, is the ancestor of many commercial spray products. It was a hand-sized steel can charged with a liquefied gas under 75 pounds of pressure and a product to be expelled as a mist or a foam. A public-service patent was issued on the invention and assigned to the
Secretary of Agriculture for the free use of the people of the United States. Pressurized by liquefied gas, which gave it propellant qualities, the small, portable can enabled soldiers to defend themselves against
malaria-carrying
mosquitoes by spraying inside
tents and airplanes in the
Pacific during
World War II. Goodhue and Sullivan received the first Erik Rotheim Gold Medal from the Federation of European Aerosol Associations on August 28, 1970, in Oslo, Norway in recognition of their early patents and subsequent pioneering work with aerosol sprays. In 1948, three companies were granted licenses by the United States government to manufacture aerosol sprays. Two of the three companies, Chase Products Company and Claire Manufacturing, continue to manufacture aerosol sprays. The "crimp-on valve", used to control the spray in low-pressure aerosol sprays was developed in 1949 by
Bronx machine shop proprietor
Robert H. Abplanalp. In 1974, Drs.
Frank Sherwood Rowland and
Mario J. Molina proposed that
chlorofluorocarbons, used as propellants in aerosol sprays, contributed to the depletion of Earth's
ozone layer. In response to this theory, the
U.S. Congress passed amendments to the
Clean Air Act in 1977 authorizing the
Environmental Protection Agency to regulate the presence of CFCs in the atmosphere. The
United Nations Environment Programme called for ozone layer research that same year, and, in 1981, authorized a global framework convention on ozone layer protection. In 1985,
Joe Farman,
Brian G. Gardiner, and
Jon Shanklin published the first scientific paper detailing the hole in the ozone layer. That same year, the
Vienna Convention was signed in response to the UN's authorization. Two years later, the
Montreal Protocol, which regulated the production of CFCs was formally signed. It came into effect in 1989. ==Aerosol propellants==