Aerosol Spray

An aerosol spray is a dispensing system that creates a mist of fine liquid particles from a pressurized container holding a product payload and a propellant, releasing its contents through a small opening when the valve is pressed. The Norwegian engineer Erik Rotheim patented the first aerosol spray can in Oslo in 1927, received a United States patent in 1931, and later sold the rights to an American company for 100,000 Norwegian kroner; Julian S. Kahn patented a disposable spray can concept in 1939 that went largely undeveloped. The practical aerosol can emerged in 1941, when the American researchers Lyle Goodhue and William Sullivan of the U.S. Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine built a refillable steel can pressurized to 75 pounds per square inch, nicknamed the bug bomb, to protect soldiers from malaria-carrying mosquitoes in the Pacific theater of the Second World War.