DDT is good for me-e-e! (Pennsalt advertisement, Time, 30 June 1947)
A full-page advertisement for Pennsalt's DDT products, run in Time on 30 June 1947. A cow, a dog, a housewife, an apple and a potato take turns singing the slogan. Rachel Carson published Silent Spring fifteen years later, and the United States banned DDT for agricultural use in 1972.
Pennsalt ran this in Time on 30 June 1947, two years after DDT was released for civilian use. A cow, a dog, a housewife, an apple and a potato take turns singing the slogan. The copy beneath is not coy about the range of application:
...exhaustive scientific tests have shown that, when properly used, DDT kills a host of destructive insect pests, and is a benefactor of all humanity.
The panels underneath set out where it was going: beef cattle, home interiors, orchards, potato crops and food processing plants, each with a small illustration and a note on results.
Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962 and the United States banned DDT for agricultural use in 1972. The advertisement now circulates as a joke about how much the past got wrong, which is a slightly generous reading of it. Pennsalt was not mistaken about where the chemical was going. They drew a diagram of it.
Provenance
- Original source
- https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DDT_is_good_for_me-e-e!_-_DPLA_-_48811fe65e5af060c9ebaca79d73b410.jpg
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- This copy
- 2.2 MB · 3348 × 4580 pixels · archived here
- Rights
- Public domain, per the file's own licence record on Wikimedia Commons.
- SHA-256
76b639df24376483f39f9e1c48f9280b0de508587c82afe063a74e29ed147a7c
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