New Jersey may be called “The Garden State,” but what many people don’t realize is that it is also home to many of the gag products we’ve grown to love. According to NJ.com, sneezing powder, the dribble glass, the joy buzzer, and the snake in a jam jar all got their start in their state.
All [of these products] were invented or developed, manufactured and marketed by Samuel Sorenson Adams, whose family emigrated from Denmark and settled in Perth Amboy in the 1870s.
He launched S.S. Adams Co. in 1906 with Cachoo Sneeze Powder, made from a manufacturing byproduct he came across while working at a dye factory, where workers were routinely seized by colossal sneezing fits.
The joy buzzer, a refinement of an earlier gag, proved to be one of the company’s most popular and enduring gags. An auto parts manufacturer, who was a pal of Adams, introduced the noise-maker to Henry Ford, according to a 1946 profile of Adams in the Saturday Evening Post.
“The next day, Ford went through the River Rouge plant and devoted the entire day to giving electrical handshakes to foremen and minor executives of the Ford Motor Company.”
Thanks to the joy buzzer, Adams moved his business in 1928 from Asbury Park to a three-story factory in Neptune, where today it still produces some of the gag gifts, including the classic snake in the jam jar, and much of Adams’ magic line on decades-old punch presses and plastic injection molds.
Foaming sugar, onion-flavored chewing gum, the bug in the ice cube, and various fake bodily outputs (human, canine and avian) – S.S. Adams still sells ’em all.
Photo by m.caimary