Soren Sorensen Adams
Danish-American inventor of novelty products
Soren Sorensen "Sam" Adams (May 24, 1879 – October 20, 1963) was a Danish-American inventor and manufacturer of novelty products, including the joy buzzer.
Biography
He was born Søren Adam Sørensen in Kolind, Syddjurs, Denmark, in 1879 to Hans Sørensen, a clog maker, and his wife. They moved to the US when Soren was two, and settled in the Scandinavian community of Perth Amboy, New Jersey where his father operated a saloon. In 1904 Adams found himself employed as a salesman for a dye company. One of the products he sold caused workers to sneeze, and Sam found a way to extract this derivative from the dye and called this new powder Cachoo. He was inundated by requests for this product from his friends and so, he decided to sell his interest in a hotel in York, Pennsylvania, and used the money to launch the Cachoo Sneezing Powder Company in Plainfield, New Jersey.
Within a few years, the sneezing powder craze that swept the country had subsided, and Sam set out to innovating new products. He also changed the name of the company to S.S. Adams Co. to reflect that it was no longer a one product company. The Exploding Cigarette Box, the snake nut can, itching powder, the stink bomb, and the dribble glass all entered the Adams line in the next decade.
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This entry incorporates text from “Soren Sorensen Adams” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.