In a quiet Toledo shed in the late 1880s, country doctor Allen DeVilbiss tinkered with a problem: how to spray treatments into his patients’ throats without cotton swabs. The device he built would eventually find its way onto every dressing table in America — and reshape the way the world wore perfume.

This month on The Scent Archive, we trace the strange journey of the atomizer from medical instrument to luxury object: from French pharmacies to Parisian perfumeries, from a wooden shed in Ohio to Art Deco glass empires, from doctor’s bag to dressing table. Along the way: the cholera epidemic that made spraying feel sanitary, the Venturi effect that made it possible, and the visionary son who transformed his father’s invention into a cultural phenomenon.

Allen DeVilbiss didn’t invent the atomizer. He didn’t even mass-produce the first one. What he and his son Thomas built was something arguably more consequential: the idea that every woman deserved one.

In this episode

• The Latin roots of “perfume” (per fumum — through smoke) and why fragrance was burned long before it was sprayed

• The 1832 cholera epidemic and France’s hygiene obsession

• The Venturi effect and the physics of mist

• French vaporisateur makers — Rimmel, Legrand, Gache — and the ecosystem DeVilbiss entered

• The Toledo shed where it all began

• Thomas DeVilbiss and the leap from medical tool to luxury perfumizer

• A million perfumizers a year by the 1920s

• The Art Deco empire (and the company basketball team called The Sprays)

Sources & further reading

• Érika Wicky, “Pschitt!: A Cultural History of the Perfume Vaporizer,” Dix-Neuf 28, no. 3–4 (2024): 298–316. DOI: 10.1080/14787318.2025.2468558.

• Marti DeGraaf, DeVilbiss Perfume Bottles and Their Glass Company Suppliers, 1907 to 1968 (Hardcover, October 28, 2014).

• Thomas Dills DeVilbiss, History of the DeVilbiss Family (1927)

• Allen DeVilbiss, U.S. Patent 378,357 (Feb. 21, 1888)

• Thomas A. DeVilbiss, U.S. Patent 938,648 (Nov. 2, 1909)

• BGSU DeVilbiss archives

Next month

The Parisian orphan who built the most famous perfume house in the world.