Contraception: When the condom became a mass product

D The swim bladders of fish consist of a very thin and tear-resistant membrane. Perfect for slipping over your penis and tying with a bow before sex. “Fish bladders are preferable to rubbers in that they are significantly more durable and finer, i.e. less tactile when used than rubber, and influence on feelings is almost completely ruled out,” says a condom sales catalog from 1908. Rubber condoms had already been invented back then, but they were two millimeters thick for multiple use and had a seam on the side. It couldn’t be finer.

That changed in 1912, when former cigarette salesman Julius Fromm dipped a penis-shaped glass bulb in rubber solution and invented the seamless condom. Fromm’s life path from desperately poor Jewish migrant to wealthy entrepreneur could be a dazzling German Dream story. But like many such stories, the Nazis violently rewrote them.

Fromm was born in 1883 in what was then a Russian-occupied part of what is now Poland. His family lived in poverty and moved to Berlin’s Scheunenviertel, north of Alexanderplatz, when he was 10 years old. A run-down area where many destitute Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe lived. The Fromms changed their first names and Israel became Julius. The large family lived by rolling cigarettes. When Fromm was 15 years old, his father died, and a little later his mother died too. Now he had to look after his little siblings. In addition to selling cigarettes, he studied chemistry at night school. Because he had one goal: make better rubber condoms. In his one-man company, he experimented with different compositions and tested the condoms by inflating them and ultimately sold them in drugstores.

It wasn’t that contraceptionbut the fear for the health of soldiers that helped the condom’s breakthrough. In the soldiers’ brothels during the First World War, the combatants were not supposed to become infected with sexually transmitted diseases, which is why condoms were distributed. The social changes of the Weimar Republic were also good for business. In the 1920s, the one-man business had grown into a company with factories that produced millions of condoms called “Fromms Act”. Fromm, now naturalized, invented condom machines and advertising slogans such as: “The competition is bursting”. At times its market share was 95 percent.

According to historians and relatives, Fromm hoped for a long time that his company would get through National Socialism unscathed. But in 1938 he had to sell the company, which was worth an estimated 8 million Reichsmarks, for just 200,000 Reichsmarks. The condom company went to the godmother of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. Fromm emigrated to England and died there unexpectedly on May 12, 1945. His family says: His heart suddenly stopped with happiness that the war was over and he could soon return to Germany.

The seamless condom is the newest to date marketable invention in the field of male contraception. That progress is slow in this areahas a tradition: the fish bladder condom was reported as early as 1,200 BC in ancient Greece. So it stayed on the market for around 3,000 years.