Electric toothbrushes have been around for decades, but I’ve just found on the supermarket shelves a disposable electric toothbrush.

Normally retailing at £5.99 but being sold at half price in Sainsbury’s, it’s Procter & Gamble’s Oral-B® Pulsar™. It contains a battery, which won’t last more than a few months but then neither does a manual toothbrush in normal use. On the head, some (yellow) bristles topple over as you move the brush back and forth, while the others are the customary stiff guardsmen. More radical, on looking at the underside of the head there is a double S-shaped groove along its length making it clear that the head flexes or oscillates in use, hence the battery. The handle is somewhat bulkier than usual.

The only controls are a plus and a minus button. “Patents pending” is the only hint about the technology’s origins. Apparently it was launched in the USA in October 2006. More than 90% of the public use manual toothbrushes and this is clearly an attempt to win them over. 15 patent applications are involved, say the company on its web site.

It’s difficult to say which of these is the most important patent, but I’ve chosen among the many with the same title, “Complex Motion Toothbrush”, US 6952854, my Patent of the Month.

The company states that the product contains one AAA Duracell battery that lasts approximately four to five months with typical everyday usage, and claims that the toothbrush is fully disposable. I wonder if the fact that a battery is contained in it is true, with ever-tighter rules on recycling. Clearly, the product has to be cheap or it wouldn’t be a worthwhile product.

The work on this product had in fact been done by another company. Procter & Gamble used to be best known for other household products, and not those to do with cleaning teeth (though it did have a presence, with Crest® among other products). In 2005 they took over Gillette for $57 billion. Gillette was the largest company in the field of shaving products, and had expanded into toothbrushes. Gillette had other household products such as batteries and deodorants. All this extended Procter & Gamble’s range of small, cheap products used in everyday activities round the home, which would typically be sold in supermarkets and the like, and made them the world’s biggest “consumer products” company. Gillette also gave the company a presence in some developing countries that they had lacked. The company’s shares are now worth about $200 billion. The company has about 37% of the American market for “oral care”, which is worth $6 billion annually.

The history of Procter & Gamble goes back a long way. William Procter was an English immigrant and James Gamble an Irish immigrant who had separately set up businesses (candles and soap, respectively) in Cincinnati, Ohio. They decided to merge when each happened to marry sisters by the name of Norris, and the company was formed in 1837. It’s still based there. 

There has been a huge amount of activity in the area. A casual check suggests that Gillette had patented about 50 inventions in the field of toothbrushes, while Procter & Gamble is already responsible for 100 (but this would include some where their name was substituted for Gillette on newly published patent documents). Many are indeed for electric toothbrushes. Many do not realise that for apparently trivial (but lucrative) fields such as this one the patent literature is the best source for details of how things work, rather than scientific or technical papers.

Having said that, in this case scientific papers could add a new dimension to searching. It was casually mentioned in one of the sites I came across in a Google search that the product had been clinically tested. This definitely interested me: what proof is there that the product is actually better than a manual toothbrush ? This mention suggested the free PubMed Web database at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez, which indexes a great number of medical papers. I was gratified to find that there are 143 mentions of “toothbrushes” together with “oral-b”. Some were written by the laboratories of the companies. A big problem is evidently making sense of the different names used as brands, such as Oral-B Triumph, an electric toothbrush. I have no idea what the differences are between the similar sounding brand names. Possibly “Triumph” is used as an American variant to the name.

Or perhaps, not. In searching the Ebsco business news database, I came across a gem. It is a short item in Campaign, 2 June 2006. It states that Noel Bussey is angry at being “lied to” by advertising for the Oral B Pulsar toothbrush, created by agency BBDO New York. The advertising apparently contains the line “The whole world has a pulse”. Bussey points out that this is “Rubbish. No, it doesn’t”. He looked around the office and was able to disprove this statement in seconds. “Notepad, mouse mat, copy of Campaign, pen, stapler, Rolodex… none of these things has a pulse. It just seems like lazy writing to make something up because it matches the product.” Maybe, but it’s probably good advertising.

And how I did I find using the product ? I expected the head to flex, and the bristles to move, but if so it was not noticeable. There was a low whining sound and it vibrated (rather unpleasantly, I must say) in my hand, and of course on my teeth. I admit that I am unlikely to buy a replacement.