A San Diego rust preventive and a contested origin story.

WD-40 began as a product of the Rocket Chemical Company, a small business in San Diego, California. English Wikipedia dates the company’s founding to September 1953, and the name of its product is an abbreviation: the WD-40 Company’s own history page explains it as Water Displacement, 40th formula.

Who devised that formula is told in two ways. The company and many books and newspapers credit Norman B. Larsen. The historian Iris H. W. Engstrand, writing in The Journal of San Diego History in Fall 2014, credits Iver Norman Lawson, who she says formed Rocket Chemical in the early 1950s with colleagues including Cyril E. “Cy” Irving. In her account, Lawson worked in the evenings in a makeshift laboratory above his garage in San Diego’s Hillcrest district, trying mixture after mixture until the 40th attempt worked, and then turned the formula over to Rocket Chemical for marketing and distribution. Engstrand writes that Lawson was acknowledged at the time, but that his name later became confused with that of Larsen, who was president of the company in 1957 and 1958.

Both accounts agree on Larsen’s contribution to the product people now recognise. Engstrand writes that Larsen expanded the product’s uses by repackaging it in aerosol cans, and that The San Diego Union quoted him as seeing a big potential in the rust inhibitor, from protecting auto chrome to freeing locks.

The early customers were industrial. Engstrand describes Cy Irving taking the product to the Union Oil Dock on San Diego’s embarcadero, where the tuna seiners were serviced, and the seiner owner Sam Crivello becoming an early investor. The company worked from sites in Chula Vista and National City before moving to Kearny Mesa in 1955. According to the article, The San Diego Union reported that WD-40 was used to protect the outer skin of the Atlas missile from rust and corrosion; Wikipedia names the missile’s maker as Convair.

From missile skin to the kitchen drawer.

The move to shoppers came quickly. Engstrand writes that Rocket Chemical entered the consumer products field in October 1957 and expanded into a plant in Mission Valley. On 20 September 1958, she reports, Cy Irving, by then president, told The San Diego Union that the company was turning out pushbutton spray cans of WD-40 multi-use product on a newly installed aerosol can-packing line, and that the product was handled by retail outlets across San Diego County. Wikipedia dates the product’s availability to consumers in San Diego to 1958.

The formula itself was treated as a secret. According to The New York Times, in its July 2009 obituary of former chief executive John S. Barry, the formula was never patented so that its ingredients would not be disclosed. Wikipedia, citing the company’s British news pages, says the original copy of the formula was moved to a bank vault in San Diego in 2018.

The company took its product’s name in 1969. Engstrand writes that John S. “Jack” Barry became president and chief executive of Rocket Chemical in October 1969, and that one of his first suggestions was to rename the business WD-40 Company, remarking that it did not make rockets. In 1973, she writes, WD-40 Company went public on the Nasdaq exchange, while WD-40, “in its blue and yellow aerosol cans with red tops,” remained its only product.

That can is the heart of the identity. The same article opens by calling WD-40 “the blue and yellow can,” and a photograph from 1975 shows Barry demonstrating new packaging. Engstrand records that the propellant was switched from fluorocarbon to hydrocarbon in 1976, and later from hydrocarbon to carbon dioxide, while the colours on the outside stayed the same.

The product also crossed the Atlantic. In July 1985, according to Engstrand, WD-40 Company opened its own manufacturing plant in Milton Keynes, England, where it made WD-40 concentrate that a subcontractor then packaged. Jerry Schleif, who had joined in 1969, became president and chief operating officer in 1990, and the company added 3-IN-ONE Oil and the lubricant T.A.L. 5 to its range.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group make motor oils, lubricants and performance parts: the fluids that go into an engine and the components that enthusiasts and workshops fit to cars, from ignition and fuel parts to brakes and suspension. Brands in this trade sit at many different points, from founding families whose surname is still on the product to names that now belong to oil majors, industrial groups or listed holding companies, and a single name can be sold on a supermarket shelf, in a parts store and on a race car.

A motor-oil or parts brand’s identity is usually carried by a can, a box, a colour and a sticker on a racing livery, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factories or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

One can, then a fortress of brands.

The company’s next chapter was led from Australia. Engstrand writes that Garry O. Ridge, a native of Sydney who had joined as managing director in Australia in 1987, was named president and chief executive in 1997. Under Ridge, she says, the company moved from a “brand fortress” built on one product to a “fortress of brands,” and Ridge liked to describe the business as being in “squeak, smell and dirt.” In April 2001 it bought Global Household Brands, and Wikipedia today lists names such as Lava, Spot Shot, 2000 Flushes and GT85 in the portfolio.

The flagship packaging kept evolving within the same look. Engstrand credits the Ridge years with the Smart Straw, a can with two spraying options, and the No-Mess Pen, a small portable applicator. In 2007, she writes, the company opened a direct sales office in Shanghai.

The headquarters stayed in San Diego. Engstrand records the company’s move in 1974 to Cudahy Place, and Wikipedia describes WD-40 Company as a San Diego-based manufacturer of household and multi-use products, listed on Nasdaq under the symbol WDFC. The name on the door is still the name of the product on the shelf.

For a design guide, WD-40 shows how a technical name — letters and a number from a laboratory notebook — can become friendly through repetition, and how one fixed combination of blue, yellow and red can carry a brand through changes of propellant, nozzle and leadership. Compare Valvoline and Armor All, two other American names from the garage shelf. For this guide we use a can blue, a label yellow and a cap red with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep WD-40’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.