Arm & Hammer is a registered trademark of Church and Dwight, an American manufacturer of household products. The logo of this brand is a muscular arm holding a hammer. Originally associated only with baking soda and washing soda, the company began to expand the brand to other products in the 1970s using baking soda as a deodorizing ingredient, including toothpaste, laundry detergent, underarm deodorant, and cat litter. The Arm & Hammer brand is one of the longest-running and most recognized U.S. trademarks.
The Arm & Hammer logo dates back to the 1860s. James A. Church ran a spice business known as Vulcan Spice Mills. According to the company, the Arm and Hammer logo represents Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and metalworking.
It is often claimed, incorrectly, that the brand name originated with tycoon Armand Hammer, who owned a considerable amount of Church and Dwight stock in the 1980s and served on its board of directors. In fact, Hammer was named after the "Arm and Hammer" symbol of the Socialist Labor Party of America (SLP), in which his father, a committed socialist, had a leadership role at one time. The Arm & Hammer brand was in use some 31 years before Hammer was born, so Hammer's purchase of stock in the company appears to have been either an attempt to get the company to take "his" name off its baking soda or an odd attempt by Hammer to make the persistent claim true rather than having to constantly explain the lack of relation.
Industrial-strength bicarbonate cleaning products are labeled under an Arm & Hammer subsidiary division, ARMEX.
Famous quotes containing the words arm and/or hammer:
“Summoning a child’s voice from a webfoot stone,
Never never oh never to regret the bugle I wore
On my cleaving arm as I blasted in a wave.
Now shown and mostly bare I would lie down,
Lie down, like down and live
As quiet as a bone.”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)