A “snake oil salesman” is a name for a hack who sells under false advertising -
A “snake oil salesman” is a name for a hack who sells under false advertising - usually by claiming that an ordinary product has extraordinary ingredients. The term comes from Clark Stanley, a Texas businessman who sold medicine made out of “snake oil.” In 1893, he even did demonstrations at the Columbia World Expo in Chicago, where he would kill a rattlesnake and squeeze it, labeling what came out as snake oil. It soon became a lot harder for men like Stanley to blatantly lie about what went into their concoctions with the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, which tried to fight mislabeling of products. His snake oil was tested in 1917 and found to contain mineral oil, beef fat, camphor, turpentine, and pepper…and zero traces of snake oil. For this, Stanley was fined 20 dollars [x]. -- source link
#history#american history#vintage#19th century#20th century