A patent-medicine house in northern Indiana, and a tablet launched in 1931.

Alka-Seltzer came out of a company that was already almost half a century old. English Wikipedia’s article on Miles Laboratories says the business began as the Dr. Miles Medical Company, founded in Elkhart, Indiana, in 1884 by Dr. Franklin L. Miles, and that it built a mail-order trade around a patent tonic called Dr. Miles Restorative Nervine before the 1890s were out. The same article says the company renamed itself Dr. Miles Laboratories in 1932 and simply Miles Laboratories in 1935, so the product was born under one name and grew up under two more.

English Wikipedia dates the launch of Alka-Seltzer to 1931, citing the New York Public Library’s Book of Answers (1992), and says the tablet was developed by the company’s head chemist, Maurice Treneer, citing Jim Cox’s Sold on Radio (2008). Wikipedia describes it as an effervescent tablet originally marketed by the Dr. Miles company, which also helped direct its development. A timeline Bayer published on the brand’s website for its 75th anniversary, archived in 2007, gives the same year, 1931, for the introduction.

Advertising arrived almost as soon as the product did. Bayer’s anniversary timeline says comic-strip characters were used to advertise Alka-Seltzer in serial form on buses and subway cars in the early years, and an older company page, “The History of Speedy Alka-Seltzer”, archived in February 1998, credits those strips to the artist George French. Wikipedia lists three radio programmes carrying the brand’s name in the same period: Alka-Seltzer Comedy Star of Hollywood, National Barn Dance and Alka-Seltzer Time.

Packaging changed over the decades as well. Wikipedia says the tablets are sold in foil packets of two, and that before 1984 they were also sold stacked in cylindrical glass bottles; Bayer’s timeline gives 1984 as the year the glass tubes were discontinued, to cut breakage. The move from a stacked glass tube to a flat foil sachet changed the brand’s physical form.

From the Miles company to Bayer.

The brand stayed in Elkhart for nearly half a century. English Wikipedia’s Miles Laboratories article says the company operated independently from 1884 until 1979, when Bayer AG bought it together with its subsidiary Miles Canada, and that Miles then ran as a wholly owned Bayer subsidiary until 1995. The Alka-Seltzer article, for its part, dates Bayer’s ownership of the brand to 1978. Bayer has owned Alka-Seltzer since that purchase.

Wikipedia frames the deal as a return. The German group’s American and Canadian aspirin business had been seized as enemy property during the First World War and sold off, and the Miles purchase, the article says, gave Bayer a way to re-establish itself in North America. Along with Alka-Seltzer it took over Miles’s other consumer names, among them One-A-Day and Flintstones vitamins and Bactine. The history of the Bayer name in the United States is told in our Bayer Aspirin guide.

The Miles name itself then faded. According to Wikipedia, Bayer moved the American headquarters of Miles from Elkhart to Pittsburgh in 1992 and to New Jersey in 1994, and on 1 April 1995 it retired the Miles name from all products and facilities, the year after it had acquired Sterling Winthrop. Between 2011 and 2012, Wikipedia says, the former Miles campus in Elkhart was vacated and its remaining buildings demolished. The corporate names that carried Alka-Seltzer to the 1990s have gone, while the 1931 product name remains in use.

Over the decades the master brand has been stretched into a family. Wikipedia names Alka-Seltzer Plus as a sister brand for cold and flu products, many of them made with acetaminophen rather than aspirin, and says the Plus range is sold in daytime and night-time formulas. Bayer’s anniversary timeline lists further names introduced over the years, among them Alka-Seltzer Gold in 1974, Alka-Seltzer Extra Strength in 1987 and Alka-Seltzer PM in 1998. In each case the hyphenated two-word name leads and a short descriptor follows, so the brand name stays in front on every carton and sachet.

Design and documentation.

The medicine cabinet is a rule-bound place for a packaging designer to work. A pharmacy-aisle carton has to carry a brand name, a product name and a product category on its front face, and it has to do so beside text whose wording, order and minimum type size are set by a regulator rather than by the designer. In the United States that text is the Drug Facts panel, a fixed sequence of headings in a prescribed layout, and every carton, bottle label and blister card in the category has to make room for it.

That leaves the designer a narrower field than in many consumer categories: colour blocking, a wordmark, a band or stripe that signals a line extension, and the shape of the pack itself. Blister packs add a second printed surface, the foil backing. Bottles and caps carry the same system at a smaller scale.

Each guide that follows looks at who started a brand, who has owned it since, and how its cartons, labels and advertising have changed, and it describes products only by name and category as the company lists them.

A puppet called Speedy, then a run of comic spots from Madison Avenue.

Television gave the brand a face. The archived 1998 company page on Speedy says the character was born in 1951, when A.G. “Jeff” Wade II, head of Wade Advertising in Chicago, wanted a childlike spokesman for the new medium. Chuck Tennant of the Miles advertising department called an artist friend, Robert Watkins, who sketched a baby-faced boy with red hair and a hat shaped like a tablet. The figure was originally called “Sparky”, the company says; Miles’s sales manager Perry L. Shupert renamed him Speedy after that year’s promotional theme. English Wikipedia, citing Mary Cross’s A Century of American Icons (2002), also credits Watkins and Tennant of Wade Advertising and Shupert’s naming.

Speedy was a stop-motion puppet. The company page says the spots were animated at the Swift-Chaplin studio in Hollywood under the stop-motion specialist Miles Pike, that the working model was sculpted by Duke Russell, that the voice was supplied by the radio actor Dick Beals, and that one Speedy commercial was taped on 16 March 1953. Bayer’s anniversary timeline describes the figure as having a tablet for a body, with a hat and a wand, and says he was retired from regular advertising in 1964, later returning for occasions such as the 1980 Olympics alongside Sammy Davis Jr. Wikipedia records a further revival in a 2008 campaign directed by David Hulin, and miniature Speedy figures in 2009 commercials with the US Ski Team.

The account moved from Chicago to New York in 1964, the company page says, and the tone of the advertising changed. Snopes, in a 2013 article drawing on Mary Wells Lawrence’s memoir A Big Life (in Advertising) (2002), describes a campaign by Jack Tinker & Partners that opened with a montage of stomachs of every shape filmed at stomach level, set to the song “No Matter What Shape (Your Stomach’s In)”, and a spot showing nothing but two tablets dropping into a crystal glass; Miles introduced portable foil packs holding two tablets in the same period. The Los Angeles Times reported on 26 August 2012 that the copywriter Howie Cohen and art director Bob Pasqualina of Wells Rich Greene wrote “Try it, you’ll like it” for the brand in 1971, and that “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing” came from Cohen’s own remark after a dinner following a London shoot. Bayer’s timeline dates the “spicy meatball” spot to 1969 and introduces “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz” in 1979; Snopes credits the jingle’s music to Tom Dawes, formerly of the Cyrkle, with the adman Paul Margulies among the campaign’s creators.

For a design guide, Alka-Seltzer shows how a hyphenated coined name can be carried by transit-car comic strips, a tablet-bodied puppet and a string of comic lines, while the pack moved from a glass tube to a two-tablet foil sachet. Compare it with Bayer Aspirin, its owner’s own aspirin brand, and Tums, another American antacid named in the radio era. For this guide we use fizz blue and deep navy with signal red and foil silver on paper and a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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