Fifty years ago, a wizard with bushy eyebrows hunched over the bathtub in his Brooklyn apartment, intensely mixing poisonous chemicals. Gradually, a deep blue emerged. It stained the bathtub, but it would also come to revolutionize barber shops across America and, ultimately, the globe. Barbicide had been born.

And hundreds of millions of coiffures would be the better for it. No longer would barbers wipe dirty combs on a handy rag or, perhaps, their trousers. Forever after, combs and scissors would hang in suspended animation in foot-high cylindrical jars in which no germ or fungus could survive.

The father of Barbicide, Maurice King, also improved the lot of haircutters everywhere by inventing another liquid, one that dissolves the hair off synthetic brushes. But Barbicide is his enduring achievement -- a Brooklyn invention that claims an exalted place in the borough's bounty of business ingenuity, whose products include Ex-Lax, the teddy bear, Brillo pads, and, depending on your history book, the hot dog.

Ben King, Maurice's son and the president of King Research Inc., wrote the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History to inquire if it would like to exhibit a jar of Barbicide -- combs and scissors included -- and followed up with a donation to the museum's upkeep, the size of which remains private. On Friday, the company made its gift in a ceremony that included a barbershop quartet. (The Smithsonian refused to permit a toast with blue Kool-Aid in Barbicide jars.)