Purell is ubiquitous but, after it was introduced, it lost money for more than a decade. Photograph by Bartholomew Cooke

In 1988, a family-owned hand-soap company in Ohio invented an alcohol-based hand cleaner, which was meant to be used by health-care workers when soap and water were unavailable. Joe Kanfer, the company’s C.E.O., told me recently, “There were a couple of other alcohol products out there, but they were really ugly. Either they were greasy or they turned your hands white, the way rubbing alcohol does.” Kanfer’s product took a year and a half to develop. It was a clear gel that contained emollients to protect skin, and it was visually appealing because the machinery that squirted it into bottles left bubbles suspended in it. Still, Kanfer lost money on it for more than a decade. “It opened a lot of doors for us, and we sold more soap because of it,” he said. “But, actually, nobody bought it. The salesman would squirt some into a customer’s hands, and then they’d talk and they’d talk and they’d talk, but people couldn’t get their minds around it. They didn’t know what it was for.” Kanfer liked it, though—he kept a bottle on his desk and for years made it twenty-five per cent of his salesmen’s annual sales targets. “That drove the sales guys crazy,” he said. “They couldn’t sell the stuff.”

The product was called Purell. Today, you see it everywhere. My local supermarket has a dispenser at the entrance, a pump bottle at every cash register, and a second dispenser at the exit. My doctor uses it several times during every office visit. Cruise-ship operators squirt it into the hands of passengers as they enter dining rooms and buffet lines, and it’s become a staple at school picnics and birthday parties. George W. Bush was called a racist and a germaphobe for using a sanitizer after first shaking hands with Barack Obama, but Bush was ahead of the curve: he also gave a squirt to Obama, and recommended it as a cold preventative. (It has been estimated that the President shakes hands with about sixty-five thousand people a year.) What was once barely even a product is now a growing product category, worth hundreds of millions annually. Purell is the U.S. sales leader, though at the retail level it now receives significant competition from Germ-X and others. Among the pre-Fashion Week festivities in New York this month was an “evening of pampering,” featuring the fashion designer Cynthia Rowley, in honor of Touch of Foam, a hand cleaner manufactured by Lysol.

The rise of Purell makes some health professionals uneasy. Jessica Herzstein, a physician in Washington, D.C., who specializes in workplace health issues, told me that promoting hand sanitizers may aggravate “our culture’s paranoia about germs.” She added, “I am shocked to hear how many people in our large offices won’t touch the handrails on stairways—as we instruct for safety—because of a worry about contamination.” Still, Herzstein isn’t a hygiene skeptic. Her advice to office workers is to grab handrails fearlessly but to wash their hands or use a sanitizer afterward if they’re worried. The clear consensus among experts is that unclean hands pose a serious health risk, and are one of the main culprits in the spread of infections contracted in hospitals. A 2007 study estimated that, in the United States in 2002, such infections resulted in more than a million and a half patient illnesses and caused or contributed to nearly a hundred thousand patient deaths—about double the number of U.S. deaths currently caused each year by AIDS and firearms combined.

The trouble with hands is that they get into everything, and rapidly move between mouths, noses, eyes, and other people’s hands. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends covering a sneeze or a cough not with a hand, as people my age were taught, but with an elbow or an upper arm. Hands repeatedly ply the notorious infection path that epidemiologists call “the fecal-oral route,” which is usually responsible for the transmission of cholera, dysentery, hepatitis, and typhoid. The danger is acute in medical facilities, since no one touches more pathogens than health-care workers do. You can step on a contaminated object and not cause harm to anyone, but if you poke it with a finger your hand becomes a biological weapon. In the 2011 movie “Contagion,” a chef in Macao initiates a global pandemic by failing to wash before shaking hands with the character played by Gwyneth Paltrow. Nathan Wolfe, a virologist at Stanford, has said that the Japanese bow and a move called “the safe shake,” which involves touching elbows, are potentially less risky than the traditional handshake.

The company that manufactures Purell is Gojo Industries. The name comes from the first names of Goldie and Jerry Lippman, a married couple, who founded the company in Akron, in 1946. During the war, Goldie had worked in a local rubber plant, where the men were content to use benzene to remove carbon black from their hands but the women yearned for something less damaging to their skin. Jerry developed a waterless hand cleaner, and named it Gojo. He and Goldie mixed the first batches in the washing machine in the basement of Goldie’s parents’ house—they were living in the attic—and packaged the finished product in pickle jars that Jerry salvaged from area restaurants. Jerry hawked it to automobile mechanics by going from garage to garage. Before shaking hands with a prospective customer, he would conceal a glob in his palm. The victim would pull his hand back in horror, but then discover, as he wiped it off, that he could see clean skin, sometimes for the first time in years. Gojo is still a staple among people who work with oil, engine grease, and other hard-to-remove substances.

Joe Kanfer, the current C.E.O., is a nephew of the Lippmans, who had no children. When I met him, at Gojo’s headquarters, he told me that he began working there as a young boy, and that one of his first assignments was sitting on freshly glued shipping cartons, to keep the flaps from popping open. (His predecessor in the role was a jug filled with water.) When he was a little older, his uncle sent him to junk yards to scavenge automobile window handles. Lippman used them in wall-mounted Gojo dispensers, which he had invented, in 1950, because garage owners told him that mechanics were walking off with Gojo containers to use at home. The dispensers, Kanfer said, turned Gojo into a profitable razor-and-razor-blade business; today, far more sophisticated dispensers are an important part of the Purell line.

Kanfer has degrees from Wharton and the University of Michigan Law School, and didn’t necessarily expect to make a career at Gojo. But he returned in 1973, partway through law school, when the Arab oil embargo made it nearly impossible for the company to obtain raw materials. Kanfer bought an old dairy, whose storage tanks could be used to stockpile chemicals—including ones that Gojo didn’t need but could trade for ones it did. The company was small, but it was a stimulating place to work. His uncle didn’t mind taking big risks, and was aggressive about introducing new products. He wore two wristwatches, because, as he explained, he needed more time, and he patrolled the factory floor on a bicycle, which is preserved in a niche in the company’s headquarters. Kanfer succeeded him as C.E.O. in the mid-seventies; Lippman remained chairman for another decade and half, and died in 2005, at the age of ninety-two.

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In the early nineteen-nineties, when Purell had been on the market for several years, the company finally attracted a major customer. The Wegmans supermarket chain, based in New York State, decided to make Purell available to customers and employees in its stores, and Kanfer dispatched teams to install dispensers. “We were as excited as could be,” he told me. “It was the first Purell sale of any significance, and we figured that, because of their reputation, it would be a door-opener for others.” But the New York health code required certain employees to wash their hands, and an inspector ruled that an alcohol hand rub was not a substitute for soap and water. Not all the news was discouraging, however. Nurses who had encountered Purell at hospitals began contacting the company to request samples, which they used at home, and by the mid-nineties family friends were calling Kanfer’s wife, Pam, to ask for bottles. “Pam said that no one ever called for anything else,” Kanfer told me. She felt that her friends’ enthusiasm showed that a consumer market for Purell existed, and to prove it she set up a card table in a local food store one Saturday, gave demonstrations, and sold many bottles. Kanfer dismissed the test as unrepresentative—the store’s customers were mainly “health-food types”—but when he repeated the experiment in a local grocery-store chain the results were similar. Eventually, he decided to go ahead. He told me he knew that the company would have to make a major marketing effort, since there were no comparable products and Purell would be competing for shelf space with companies like Procter & Gamble. “You don’t go up against the giants unless you have a category-defining brand,” Kanfer said. “We knew that we had to be Kleenex.”