ABSTRACT
Wade Advertising’s biggest claim to fame, however, was its relationship with Miles Laboratories and its Alka-Seltzer brand. Wade’s fortunes seemed to rise and fall based on its relationship with this account. Alka-Seltzer got its start when Franklin Miles, a physician in Elkhart, Indiana, took some of the formulas he used successfully in his practice and began to produce and merchandise them for the home health market. Among the products
was a bromine sedative syrup, a product he called Restorative Nervine, which he started marketing in
; other remedies followed, including an analgesic and a laxative. From
to
, under the direction of Charles and Hub Beardsley, the original Nervine was reformulated in effervescent tablet form, and AlkaSeltzer was born.
