When David Owen profiled GOJO Industries for the New Yorker in 2013, the scenes on the factory floor felt leisurely, a depiction of a small-town company that believed in its thoroughly unflashy product and was rewarded by slow but consistent growth. Today, that company has absolutely no time to speak to any reporters; on March 13 it sent a statement that includes this militaristic bit: “We have a demand-surge preparedness team that runs in the background all the time, who have been fully activated and are coordinating our response to the increase in demand.”

GOJO Industries is best known for its signature product, the hand sanitizer Purell. Thanks to the global pandemic COVID-19, Purell—a product which for decades has been very cheap and widely available—has become entangled in stockpiling, price gouging, critical analysis from public health experts, and even competition from DIY recipes. It seems very likely that, these days, the factory floor out in Ohio is a frantic and stressful place.

When we talk about hand sanitizers, we’re talking about non-water cleaners; hand sanitizers are a different branch of the cleanliness tree than soaps, which are thousands of years old and require water. Hand sanitizers are much more recent than that, though exactly how recent, and who invented them, is a frustrating mystery to solve.

The first major discovery of a non-water, non-soap cleaning agent dates to 1875, when Leonid Bucholz of what is now the University of Tartu in Estonia apparently discovered that ethanol—a form of alcohol—has antiseptic properties. His work was the first in the scientific literature, though there’s some evidence that wine or brandy had been used as a medical disinfectant long before then. Ethanol took a little while to catch on, partly because a study just a few years later showed that ethanol was not effective at killing fungal infections; turns out ethanol is pretty good at killing just about everything else, but that fungal study set it back a bit.

But work on ethanol continued, and in 1911, another researcher figured out that 70% ethanol was the most effective dose. In 1936, isopropyl alcohol, a slightly more complex type of alcohol, was shown to be slightly more efficient as an antiseptic than ethanol.

This takes us to Akron, Ohio, in 1946, when husband-and-wife team Goldie and Jerome “Jerry” Lippman founded GOJO, which is almost, though not exactly, an abbreviation of their names. They first developed a product called GOJO Hand Cleaner, which is that industrial orange-smelling stuff you still see in auto repair shops and other places where people get grease on them. It is a cleaner, not a sanitizer, and based with petroleum. It’s not meant to kill germs, but to scrub off oil, grease, and other junk from the skin.

Jerry Lippman patented a few dispensers over the next couple of decades. “Every soap dispenser on the wall today, anywhere in the world, is a descendant of that first dispenser Jerry invented!” reads the history section of the GOJO website. In 1973, thanks to the oil embargo, the price of the raw materials required by GOJO Hand Cleaner spiked, and the company began looking into other possibilities. By 1988, they’d come up with it: a viscous isopropyl hand sanitizer, laced with antimicrobials and other chemicals to make the product more gentle on the delicate skin of the hands.

If you search around the internet, you’ll find claims that hand sanitizer of this sort—an alcohol gel—was invented in 1966, by a Bakersfield, California, student nurse named Lupe Hernandez. The origin of this claim appears to be a 2012 article in The Guardian; all other mentions of Lupe Hernandez came after that article and provide no other information. Facts about Lupe Hernandez are nonexistent: no patent under that name was filed, nor was any hand-sanitizer-related patent under any other name for a decade on either side. Laura Barton, the author of that Guardian article, told me she didn’t recall where that story came from. “I would offer to check my notebooks, but they’re in storage in the U.K., and I’m currently stranded in Greece,” she wrote in an email. It’s certainly possible that an invention by a Latinx nurse—Lupe’s gender varies depending on the article—was simply ignored by a white medical power structure. If that’s the case, the ignorance has been very thorough; I spent many hours trying to find a single mention of Lupe Hernandez prior to 2012 and came up empty.