Cotton Swab
A cotton swab is a short spindle with one or both ends coated with an absorbent cotton padding. Such swabs have long been used for various cosmetic and personal hygiene tasks, particularly for cleaning the ear. The cotton swab was invented in the 1920s by a Polish-born American named Leo Gerstenzang. Leo had observed that his wife used a toothpick stuck into a piece of cotton to clean their baby's ears at bath time. Leo was concerned that the wooden toothpick might splinter and cut the baby's ear or that the cotton might come off the stick and become lodged in the ear. He decided to design a ready-made cotton swab that could be used on babies with less risk of injury. Thinking that such a product would appeal to many parents, Leo formed the Leo Gerstenzang Infant Novelty Company to market his swab and other baby related products. It took him several years to solve certain design problems, like how to secure equal amounts of cotton on each end of the swab. Eventually, he not only developed a successful product but he even created special packaging for his swabs. The package was designed to be opened with one hand so a parent holding an infant with one hand could easily open the box and extract a swab with the other. Once Leo had perfected his product, he looked for a commercially viable name. Because he designed his product to keep infants happy as their ears were safely cleaned, he chose the name Baby Gays. In 1926, he changed the name to Q-Tips Baby Gays, claiming that the "Q" stood for quality. Eventually, Baby Gays was dropped from the name and the swabs became known simply as Q-Tips. Today Q-Tips is a registered trademark of Chesebrough-Ponds, Inc