Snake Oil Sales Are Booming into the 21st century
Professions which have existed for over 300 years are vanishingly rare.
Cobbling, prostitution, and snake oil sales are three notable examples. Demand for cobblers, however, is decreasing fast. The third and most interesting of the three is soaring to new heights on tools and techniques which have transformed the industry.
The first recorded mention of snake oil elixirs come from a patent granted in 1712 for Richard Stoughton’s cure-all miracle potion. What happened to its inventor or his particular blend of bitters has since been lost to history. The idea though, caught on fast. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries sales of ‘snake oil’ remedies spread throughout Europe and into the United States where the practice stuck around until the early 1900s.
Typically these were blends of mineral oil and spices, herbs, and often amphetamines, cocaine, alcohol, or opium too. Selling mysterious and unmarked potions fell out of common use as the Food And Drug Administration began to take shape.
Radioactive Wellness
In place of snake oil, the brand new science of radioactivity captured the public’s imagination. The products often advertised many of the same cure-all benefits and features in products which would occasionally glow as a unique selling point. Radioactive elements became a go-to marketing tool for cure-all solutions and miracle cures until the early 1940s.
Radioactive toothpaste, hair cream, cosmetics, condoms, wool, energy drinks, and even suppositories were marketed to all. it was a largely successful strategy too. While the advertised benefits were pure hype, the products within were sometimes genuinely radioactive. They remain so in the hands of careful collectors today.
Decades later and the roles of radiation is now reversed in modern culture. It’s now far more likely to be used as a buzzword to invoke fear and paralysis than conjure up thoughts of health and wellness.
When it comes to miracle cures and magical potions, the old cowboy film trope remains remarkably accurate today. A wise-looking rogue with dubious credentials rolls into town with bold claims of mysterious science which couldn’t possibly ever hold true.
Before the end of the act the wisened figure is riding into the sunset as the first victims are beginning to realise how they’ve been duped. A tale still taking in suckers well into the modern-day.
Modern Snake Oil Sales — A Tech Masterclass
Con artistry today has the tools and techniques available to reach an audience at a scale which even Charles Ponzi could only ever dream about. A slick video, mocked together on a cheap laptop with generous lashings of CGI wizardry and a slick marketing campaign is all that’s needed to dupe millions of dollars from thousands of people.
Crowdfunding platforms have empowered the modern snake oil salesman to sell pseudo-scientific gibberish to the public with unparalleled ease and reach.
Ludicrous products without even passing scientific merit have done astonishingly well. Notable examples include ‘electromagnetic blocking’ stickers, devices which claim to alter brainwaves like a TV remote, and a “pain-relieving” sticker which advertises itself as a semi-magical cure to almost every medical ailment.
One of the most grievous early examples made claims so flawed and strange it seemed almost certain to be a Youtuber’s “social experiment” or criminal’s money-laundering scheme. The product labelled itself an ‘artificial rebreather gill’, understanding none of the listed terms. It claimed to provide the user with the ability to breathe underwater from a device barely larger than a modern vape pen.
The device, looking like a prop from a 3rd rate sci-fi film, claimed 30x smaller battery with more power and faster charge than anything available on the market today. Impressive, for bicycle handlebars glued to a vacuum cleaner outlet.
If the headline claim alone hadn’t scared you off investing earnestly, or socialising with those who did, the basic maths behind their other bold claims simply didn’t add up either.
The outrageous claim, of filtering oxygen from water in real-time, would require pumping almost 2-litres per second through the handlebars — assuming 100% efficiency, ideal water conditions, and a human’s resting oxygen requirements. A mid-sized garden water fountain connected to mains power would work hard keeping up a comparable flow-rate.
The device is laughable before we even consider the energy requirements, processing, or regulation of extracting and providing oxygen from water.
Yet, despite the absolute ridiculous implausibility of the claim, the project reached a massive backing and soared into being one of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns at the time. In the weeks and months following, the £900,000 raised eventually had to be returned to backers in early 2016 as the maker relaunched, rebranded and set to work on a device with far more modest claims.
Credible Sources
When it comes to who to blame for the success of glaringly bad science and outright fraud, there’s plenty to go around. Most platforms are either complicit or oblivious to peddling tech-quackery for a reasonable cut of the proceeds. Tech journalism too is playing at least as large a role in uniting con-artists with victims.
Perhaps the next most infamous example in crowdfunding falls at the feet of Waterseer — a firm launched and marketed to millions at around the same period. The product claimed to be capable of capturing 37 litres of water per day from the air using only power supplied by a wind turbine integrated within its own footprint.
The result, the campaign claimed, would be capable of supplying clean drinking water to populations in hot, dry climates. Its claimed capabilities claimed were as mathematically ludicrous as the “artificial gill” project.
The basis for the technology, the humble de-humidifier, has been around for a long long time. It’s advantages and drawbacks well-understood.
Basic mathematics show that the energy requirements to just produce the required water output, even in naturally humid environments, would be prohibitively expensive. Add to that the costs and energy associated with processing the water to be safe to drink and the process and product looks ludicrously implausible.
Neither basic science, mathematics, or reality could stop tech journalists from promoting the project to an audience of tens of millions of people. Brands such as TIME magazine, WIRED, and BBC news dedicated several articles each to the press release which promised to solve the water crisis with decades-old tech that seemingly nobody thought to apply to the problem before.
Each brand’s considerable weight and reputation in the mainstream news and tech market was lending badly needed credibility to a project with fundamental reality problems. The seeming lack of concern for regurgitating flimsy press releases time and again across various projects, startups, and junk science peddlers is perhaps signs of a larger problem.
Waterseer raised hundreds of thousands of dollars through various crowdfunding platforms. For that money, the firm managed to furnish a cheap off-the-shelf dehumidifier into a £1200 rebranded dehumidifier for its investors.
Like snake-oil salesmen of old, these tech marvels which launch with so much bluster and ceremony wither down their claims and disappear into the background just as ten thousand investors are starting to realise that they’ve been had.
Despite having more access to more information at any one time than any other time in human history, a centuries-old con which preys on misunderstanding and ignorance is just as successful as it was 300 years ago. Without a fix, a way to re-think, re-shape, and address ways to improve fundamental scientific literacy it will happen again for another 300 years too.
