The Origin of S.O.S Pads
(continued)

So he dipped and dipped and dipped and dipped... Soon he could dip no more. His (?) kitchen was beyond that much dipping. His sales for these pads exceeded that of his pots. What did he do? He gave up selling pots and set up a real factory.

This product still did not have a name. Somehow, the name 'Steel Wool Dipped in Soap Cleaning Pads' was not chosen, though most obvious. Enter Mrs. Edwin Cox with a solution. She had called them S.O.S pads in her kitchen, meaning "Save Our Saucepans", and the rest is cleaning history.

Many people think that an error was made in the name's punctuation (note the missing period at the end of S.O.S). This was actually done on purpose. It seems that S.O.S. (with the period) is the famous distress signal and cannot be trademarked. By removing the last period, the name was unique and could then be registered with the Patent Office.

As a side note, most people think SOS, the universal distress call, means "Save Our Ships" or "Save Our Souls", but neither is correct. In reality, the three letters do not stand for anything. When Samuel Morse developed the Morse Code, he needed a simple distress call, one that those with little knowledge of the code could do. Only O and S consist of three identical signals. The O is three dashes and the S is three dots. Since a dot is shorter than a dash, he decided on SOS to minimize the time to transmit.

Source: Useless Information by Steve Silverman (http://home.nycap.rr.com/useless/)

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