Health Edco’s ‘smoky’ past

Millions remember 1969 as the year Neil Armstrong took a giant leap for man-kind. But while Armstrong was awkwardly bouncing across the moon’s surface, a young doctor from Oklahoma in the central US named Dr Wayman Spence was taking an important leap of his own. It would be one that would ultimately change the way millions of people thought about their health.

Scraping together $15,000 of his own money, Dr Spence took a leap of faith and had a set of moulds made for a strange little product he’d recently invented. It was simply called the Lung Ashtray. As the story goes, Dr Spence, an early champion of the anti-smoking movement and founder of Health Edco, was at a social gathering when a woman lit a cigarette nearby. Dr Spence told her, half-jokingly, ‘Someone ought to give you an ashtray shaped like a pair of lungs. I bet you’d stop smoking this very minute!’

By the time he got home that evening, his offhand comment had transformed into an idea for a product. Dr Spence quickly sketched out an ashtray with a pair of transparent lungs mounted on top of it. One of the lungs would be hollow, so that when a lit cigarette was left in the tray, the smoke would filter through the lung, leaving behind a syrupy deposit of tar.

The mould maker who took on the project looked at the eager young doctor like he had lost his mind. Dr Spence would have the last laugh, though. Within a matter of months, the Lung Ashtray had gained nationwide attention, particularly after an anti-smoking advocacy group sent the ashtrays to every member of the United States Congress.

Even before becoming known as a developer of tongue-in-cheek health education products, Dr Spence had carved out a reputation for inventing medical devices, including the first sports med insole for athletic shoes (which he eventually sold to a little upstart shoe company called Nike). With proceeds from some of his medical inventions, Dr Spence formed the Spenco Medical Corporation in 1967. Spenco’s first catalogue modestly featured 26 products.

When the Lung Ashtray came along, it not only marked the birth of the cool health education product, but, in many ways, it also heralded the beginning of Health Edco, created as a division of Spenco in 1969.

Over the next few years, Dr Spence would create hundreds of other unique health education products, branching out into subjects such as alcohol, drugs, reproductive health, and breast cancer awareness.

From its simple beginnings in the late 1960s, Health Edco’s product line has grown to include more than 1,700 different items, most of which are designed and built in our main facility, a sun-baked little outpost on the Texas prairie. And, even though we’re proud to have maintained the friendly, down-to-earth attitude Dr. Spence instilled in the company from the very beginning, Health Edco has also established its position at the forefront of the health education industry. We’ve done that by hiring the most creative people in the business, by staying on the cutting edge of health information, by experimenting with new chemicals and materials, and by constantly looking for ways to offer the freshest, most compelling products on the market.

Health Edco UK was born when the demand for our products in Europe grew so quickly that the UK needed its own division with its own catalogue. In recent years, Health Edco has been developing and creating health education products specifically for the UK market.

Four decades after he first sketched out his Lung Ashtray, Dr Spence’s ‘footprints’ are still visible everywhere you look—in the friendly way a sales rep answers a customer’s question, in the buzz of excitement heard on our production floor each morning, and most especially in the inventive, one-of-a-kind products you’ve come to expect from Health Edco.