Sani-Flush was introduced by the Hygienic Products Company of
Chicago, Illinois in 1911 as a toilet bowl cleaner; since 1922 it had also been promoted for flushing "rust, scale and sludge" from automobile radiators. Advertisements from the 1920s onward depicted a housewife in an apron using the product to disinfect the bowl and remove odors; it "cleans closet bowls without scouring" with "no drudgery whatsovever". The brand was sold to
American Home Products; that company's subsidiary Boyle-Midway was sold to Reckitt & Colman (now
Reckitt Benckiser) in 1990. The primary direct competitor to Sani-Flush was
Vanish, a brand of toilet cleaning crystals marketed in the US by
Drackett, which was later acquired by the SC Johnson Company. Widely stocked in grocery and hardware stores, the product was a well-known household name and occasionally mentioned in children's jokes like "If
Santa gets stuck in your chimney, use Santa Flush" and the apocryphal advertising slogan "Sani-Flush, Sani-Flush, cleans your teeth without a brush. All you do is pour it on; one, two, three, your teeth are gone." Mixing Sani-Flush (an acid) with a chlorine bleach (hypochlorite) like
Drāno or
Liquid-Plumr can be deadly as it releases the poisonous gas chlorine. On April 8, 1964 a
Winn-Dixie food store in
St. Petersburg, Florida was evacuated and eleven people hospitalized when a combination of these two incompatible products was used to clean a floor. Sani-Flush is mentioned several times in
William S. Burroughs' novel
Naked Lunch, where the product is used to "cut" (dilute)
cocaine or where it is substituted for
morphine by a
pharmacist. The original product quietly disappeared from store shelves circa-2009; the US trademark was cancelled in 2013. Unlike rival
Vanish, whose mark now serves to market other formats of toilet cleaner from the same manufacturer, the Sani-Flush name in the
US was simply abandoned. "Sani-Flush" and "Sani-Flush Puck" retain their
registered trademark status in
Canada, but refer to a different toilet cleaner. ==See also==