For years, internet users have shared a rumor that Robert A. Chesebrough, the chemist and inventor who founded the Vaseline brand, ate a spoonful of petroleum jelly every day until he died at age 96. Some posts also claimed that when Chesebrough was suffering from pleurisy, an inflammatory condition of the tissues that line the lungs and chest cavity, he ordered a nurse to cover his body in petroleum jelly, leading to his recovery.
For example, one 2024 Reddit post (archived) mentioning both parts of the claim received around 69,000 upvotes and 2,000 comments at the time of this writing.
Examples of rumors about Chesebrough's unconventional uses of petroleum jelly also appeared on social media platforms including X (archived) and Facebook (archived), as well as in multiple other Reddit posts.
In short, there was evidence to support some — but not all — of the claim. In a letter the inventor wrote to the Spring Lake (New Jersey) Gazette six months before his death, Chesebrough, then 96, indeed attributed his longevity to eating Vaseline every day. The relevant section of the letter can be seen in the Newspapers.com clip below.
How a Market for Vaseline Was Created
Article from Mar 2, 1933 Spring Lake Gazette (Spring Lake, New Jersey)
In it, Chesebrough wrote of Vaseline, "I take more than a teaspoon daily and I believe I owe to it my approaching 97 years of age."
Although Chesebrough's own words support the part of the claim concerning his daily ingestion of Vaseline, we have so far been unable to locate any primary or authoritative secondary sources corroborating the part of claim about Chesebrough allegedly treating a case of pleurisy by having a nurse cover his body in petroleum jelly.
For this reason, we rate the claim a mixture of true and unconfirmed information. We will update our rating if strong evidence for this second part of the claim surfaces.
Tracing the claims
As outlined on the official Vaseline website's "Our History" page, Chesebrough developed the idea for petroleum jelly, the generic name for the substance later marketed as Vaseline, when oil drilling began in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859. A chemist with previous experience producing kerosene from whale oil, Chesebrough took special interest in a byproduct of petroleum called rod wax, which Titusville oil workers had begun using as a salve for cuts and burns.
In 1865, Chesebrough filed the first of several patents for methods for purifying petroleum into petroleum jelly, which he began selling under the brand name Vaseline in 1870.
The earliest publication to contain the full claim investigated here was an article titled "Mr. Chesebrough's Wonder Jelly," which was published in Coronet magazine in November 1953. Without any mention of how he found this information, the article's author, Mort Weisinger, wrote,
So great a faith did Robert Chesebrough have in the therapeutic value of his product that he swallowed a spoonful every day of his life. … In his late fifties, ill with pleurisy, he made his nurse anoint him with the substance from head to toe — and promptly recovered. Chesebrough died in 1933 at 96. On his deathbed, he boasted that he owed his longevity to his habit of taking a daily dose of the jelly.
Over the following decades, these claims appeared in whole or in part in popular books, newspaper articles, blog posts, in "Ripley's Believe It or Not," and even on the Britannica website. However, none of these appearances pointed readers toward an authoritative or primary source for the claim.
This was the case even for a mention of the claim that appeared in a 2017 issue of JAMA Dermatology, an academic journal published by the American Medical Association. In their citation for the claim, the authors of the piece pointed toward "Panati's Extraordinary Origins of Ordinary Things," a book first published in 1987, which does include the claim but provides no source for it in the "References" section at the end of the book.
Snopes was able to track down the newspaper article verifying the part of the claim concerning Chesebrough's daily consumption of Vaseline by scouring obituaries published after the inventor died in September 1933. One obituary, published in the Spring Lake Gazette, noted that Chesebrough, a Spring Lake resident at the time of his death, had "frequently" contributed articles and letters to that paper.
A survey of Chesebrough's contributions to the Spring Lake Gazette turned up the aforementioned March 2, 1933, letter in which he both described his daily Vaseline ingestion and explicitly claimed he believed it was the source of his longevity. Chesebrough died in September of that year, several months after the letter was published.
None of Chesebrough's letters to this publication contained any mention of Chesebrough curing himself from an attack of pleurisy by having a nurse slather him in petroleum jelly, and as of this writing we have not been able to locate any other sources published during or soon after Chesebrough's lifetime that might corroborate this part of the claim.