Who invented the multi-compartment toothpaste tube that makes toothpaste striped?
This is one of those simple inventions that has been helping manufacturers to sell toothpaste for decades. We have to go back almost 50 years to find US patent number 2,789,731 and UK patent 813,514, both in the name of Leonard Lawrence Marraffino. He licensed his invention of striped toothpaste to Unilever, and this company subsequently marketed the first commercial version, which was called Signal in the UK. Colgate-Palmolive’s US patent number 4,969,767, granted in 1990, describes a scheme for adding stripes of two colours. Here, the central pipe is surrounded by a wider but shorter pipe, which creates a space for a second coloured paste. Tiny holes, once again, deliver this paste onto the surface of the white paste.
