A Norwegian Engineer Invented the Aerosol Can in 1926
The aerosol can was invented by Erik Rotheim, a Norwegian engineer who in 1926 applied in Norway for a patent on a pressurised container with a valve, a nozzle and a propellant gas, granted in 1929. His invention failed commercially: the mass-market aerosol was born in the United States during the Second World War, with Goodhue and Sullivan's bug bomb.
Key Dates in the History of the Aerosol
The history of the aerosol fits into a single century. The dates come from the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology, the US National Agricultural Library and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, each linked in its section.
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 1926 | Rotheim applies for the patent in Norway |
| 1929 | Norway grants patent number 46613 |
| 1931 | The United States grants patent 1800156 |
| 1933 | First production, at Alf Bjercke's factory in Oslo |
| 1939 | The company making the cans goes bankrupt |
| 1940s | Goodhue and Sullivan create the bug bomb |
| 1974 | Molina and Rowland warn that CFCs damage the ozone layer |
| 1987 | The Montreal Protocol is signed |
Erik Rotheim's Patent and Why It Failed
Rotheim set the principle every aerosol still uses: a product and a propellant gas sealed under pressure, released as a spray when a valve opens. According to the Norsk Teknisk Museum's record, his Norwegian patent dates from 1929 and the US one from 1931.
The business did not work. The museum gives three reasons: making the containers was too expensive, the nozzles clogged and the propellant he chose, dimethyl ether (DME), was costly and dangerous. Rotheim died in 1938 and the company producing the cans went bankrupt the following year.
DME did not disappear. Today it is one of the propellants aerosols are made with, alongside LPG and CO₂, in cans and valves that did not exist in the 1930s.
How Was the Bug Bomb Born in the War?
The aerosol found its first mass use in the Second World War. Lyle Goodhue and William N. Sullivan, researchers at the US Department of Agriculture, created the bug bomb, a portable container that sprayed insecticide with a liquefied gas.
According to the US National Agricultural Library, which holds Sullivan's papers, the invention helped reduce casualties from mosquito-borne diseases in the Pacific. His studies later became the basis of the World Health Organization's standards for disinsecting aircraft.
After the war, the format moved from military to household use in the United States, and from there to the rest of the world.
Why Did Aerosols Stop Using CFCs?
Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were the propellant of many aerosols for decades. In 1974, Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland published in Nature that these very stable gases could reach the ozone layer and destroy it. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences recalled it when it awarded them the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Paul Crutzen, noting that CFCs were used in spray bottles, refrigerators and plastic foams.
Molina and Rowland realised that the chemically inert CFC could gradually be transported up to the ozone layer, there to be met by such intensive ultra-violet light that they would be separated into their constituents, notably chlorine atoms.
That work led to the Montreal Protocol, signed in 1987 under the auspices of the United Nations to phase out the gases that destroy ozone. Aerosols switched propellants: hydrocarbons such as LPG, DME and compressed gases such as CO₂.
Almost a century later, Rotheim's principle is intact and everything else has changed: the propellant, the valve and the can. Ilerspray formulates and fills aerosols with LPG, DME or CO₂, in aluminium or tinplate from 50 to 750 ml, for companies that want a product under their own brand: that is how its aerosol contract manufacturing service works.
