Kitty litter

We have two cats and two adult humans in our household. We humans get by with two bathrooms. The cats have three litter boxes: one in the basement for the times they are driven down there by visitors, one in the laundry room for ordinary use and one in the garage because they seem to think it is outside or something. I have no clue, really.  

BusinessWeek has ranked Kitty Litter at #73 in its list of the "85 most disruptive ideas in our history." The number 85 was chosen because the magazine is celebrating it's 85th anniversary. 

It notes wryly that the idea to market clay as cat litter, which happened in 1947, "meant that after millennia of scratching at the door cats could come indoors and stay there. They had long been visitors in American homes; now they were residents. In some ways it has been a hostile takeover: There are millions more cats than dogs in the U.S."

Ed Lowe was working at his father’s delivery business in southern Michigan when he had a brilliant idea: take some fuller’s earth (a type of clay) and sell it to local farmers for chickens to nest. He called it Chicken Litter.

It was 1947. The farmers weren’t interested—which is why Lowe had a big pile of it when a local woman came by. She’d brought her cat in from the January cold and needed some sand for her cat box. On an impulse, Lowe offered her some fuller’s earth instead.

The stuff turned out to absorb the ammonia smell of cat pee. The woman soon came back for more. So did her friends. After enough requests, Lowe put some fuller’s earth in bags, wrote KITTY LITTER on them, and dropped them off at a hardware store. The product sold, and it sold in supermarkets and pet stores. The market grew ever outward, from southern Michigan to the world.

Competitors appeared—after all, it was just dirt in a bag—but Lowe kept expanding the business. The 1954 launch of Tidy Cat, specifically for supermarkets, meant the cat waste category belonged to him.

In 1990, after more than 40 years in litter, Lowe sold the company to a group of investors for $200 million plus stock. He died five years later, the same year that the company was absorbed by Ralston Purina. 

Today the Edward Lowe Foundation sprawls across thousands of acres of southern Michigan. On the grounds are many endangered species of plants and animals: The cerulean warbler sings there, the eastern box turtle swims, and the cut-leaved water parsnip grows. 

But there are no cats.

For the full list of Business Week's distruptive ideas, click here.