W.H. Dibble was certainly an inventive fellow, having previously patented a dentist’s contraption to simultaneously pry patients’ mouths open while draining away their saliva, but his hemacite products were not quite the amazing innovation that he led others to believe. Like a true American, what he had really done was nick a foreign idea and improve upon it. Long before Dibble’s 1877 application, the Parisian writer Francois Lepage secured an 1855 patent for what he called bois durci: a pressurized mixture of sawdust and cattle blood or, less economically, egg whites. Lepage founded the Bois Durci Company and exhibited its wares at the Great International Exhibition of 1862, back when Dibble was still tinkering with ways to suck the spit out of dental patients. Bois durci went on to turn up in a variety of 19th century inkstands, plaques, picture frames, and furniture; Edison even used it for the housing on early telephones. Even bois durci was not the first use of blood in buildings. Cattle blood had long been used in “blood cements,” as, for that matter, had albumen from eggs, milk, and cheese. One Chinese recipe called for 100 parts slaked lime, 75 parts bullocks’ blood, and 2 parts alum. Floors in South Africa gained a black marble-like polish with the use of blood, and an early London tennis court acquired its hard and glossy surface in the same way; it has even been used as an additive in roofing material. It seems there is no part of a house that cannot be manufactured, in part, from blood. Hemacite certainly captured the attention of Victorian architects. By the turn of the century, though, Dibble’s firm had already suffered a factory fire, moved shop to a new building, and changed its name to Trenton Brass and Machine Company. The old Hemacite Company was as much a victim of changing times as fire: new plastics like Bakelite were in the offing, pushing aside the quaint notion of sawdust mixed with blood. The rechristened company soldiered on for many more decades, surviving the Depression and a postwar strike, and until recently still supplied fittings to plumbing contractors. But even Trenton Brass is gone now, and with it the last faint trace of Dr. W.H. Dibble and his Hemacite Company. But old hemacite house fixtures, strong and durable as they are, live on. So the next time you find yourself running short on bouillon, you may take this token of advice: consider boiling your doorknobs.