You can only skim past the newspaper questioning your weight so many times before you’ve had enough. Today, it was finally time to look into this chewing gum I’ve seen for months. SILPH. Offering big promises. And turns out, even bigger jail time.

The product was called Silph. A weight loss chewing gum. And once I started pulling more and more clippings, I genuinely could not stop, because the copywriting is some of the most entertaining material I've found this entire year.

The headline rotated, but the formula never did. "Girls, How Does Your Figure Compare With These?" ran next to photographs of impossibly thin women in bathing suits and evening gowns. "Too Fat?" appeared in massive type, usually followed immediately by the solution. "Men and Women Use Silph to Reduce." "Latest Way to Reduce — SILPH." "How Beautiful New York Actresses Get Slender With Silph Reducing Gum — Fat Rolls Off While You Chew." As long as you were always near a bathroom probably…

The promise was always identical. No diets. No exercises. No dangerous drugs. Just three or four pieces of gum a day, chewed like ordinary chewing gum, and the fat would simply disappear. One ad explained the mechanism with admirable confidence: Silph contained "extracts of sea plants and herbs which have a peculiar and wonderful effect on eliminating excess fat." Another assured readers it contained no thyroid and was guaranteed absolutely harmless.

The testimonials piled up across every version of the ad, recycled and reprinted for years. Miss Gertrude Nunnelly lost 14 pounds. Mrs. Chas. Tyrrell lost 13 and was "still going down." Mrs. M.S. Howe of Troy, Ohio took one dollar's worth of Silph and lost 10 pounds. Miss Mable Sears of Sabino, Ohio claimed 50 pounds gone, adding that there was "not any excuse for anyone being overweight now."

New York's most beautiful actresses, models, and chorus girls were supposedly chewing it constantly. Tynia, "beautiful actress from Earl Carrol's Vanities," said it kept her slender and well. Miss Bonna O'Dear, identified as a "beautiful Vanities girl," credited her figure entirely to Silph. The slogan, printed across multiple iterations of the campaign in large block type: "Chew SILPH and be SYLPH-LIKE."

One particularly direct ad simply read, in enormous type: "FAT PEOPLE SHOULD CHEW SILPH IT'S HARMLESS!" Sometimes subtlety wasn't the strategy.

Wow. I mean how is this amazing product not around today?! Well turns out it was too good to be true. Shocking, I know.

Here's what the sheer repetition of these ads actually tells you, beyond the entertainment value. This wasn't one clever ad running once. This was a sustained, expensive, nationwide campaign running in newspaper after newspaper across multiple years, with new testimonials and new headlines constantly cycling through.

That kind of saturation costs real money. And when federal prosecutors finally caught up with the operation, the numbers explained exactly where that money was coming from.

In March 1927, a federal grand jury in New York indicted two men, Willis E. Learned of Westfield, New Jersey and Earl F. Callan, on charges of using the mails to defraud. Assistant United States Attorney Webster identified Learned as the owner and Callan as the manager of a group of concerns that advertised and sold Silph fat-reducing gum, "San-Gri-Na" tablets, "Dr. Folt's Soap," and colored bath salts — all of it supposedly possessing, in the prosecutor's words, "almost magical reducing powers."

The numbers were striking. People who believed themselves overweight had paid roughly $500,000 a year to companies in which Learned and Callan were interested. Of that, $300,000 went straight back into advertising. Three out of every five dollars collected was spent convincing more customers to send money. That's not really a weight loss company. That's an advertising company that happened to be selling chewing gum.

The case against the products themselves was almost comically specific. The bath salts were ordinary Epsom salts, tinted for appearance, seven ounces sold for $1.50. The soap was conceded to be genuinely good toilet soap — just entirely without reducing properties. The tablets were a laxative compound containing thyroid. And the gum, the centerpiece of the whole operation, was found to have no practical value for taking off excess weight.

None of this was news to the Postmaster General. Nearly a year before the indictment, he had already banned the company and its affiliated names — Madam Claire, Madam Elaine, Scientific Research Laboratories — from the US mail entirely, declaring the operation fraudulent. Local post offices reported residents' letters to the company being returned daily, stamped accordingly.

And then there's the headline newspapers actually ran when that ban came down: "Plump Girls Are Sad; Silph Co. Fails Them."

“Fat dowagers and over-plump young damsels will now write in vain to the Silph Co. and allied concerns in New York for aid in the solution of obesity problems.”

Forget Edgar Allen Poe. That is poetry.

Not "Postmaster General Cracks Down on Fraud." Plump girls are sad. As if the real story was heartbreak, not fraud. The York Dispatch ran a near-identical version: "York Plump Girls Sad; Ban on the Silph Co." Two papers, two cities, the same framing — treating the victims of a mail fraud scheme as a punchline rather than people who'd been taken for fifty cents a box on a false promise.

The Dispatch did note, almost as an aside, that it had rejected Silph's advertising "some time ago when the real nature of the business was discovered." At least one newspaper figured out the scheme before the federal government did, and simply stopped running the ads. Most papers made a different calculation — the ads kept running for years, which is exactly how the company could afford to keep running them.

A hundred years later we're still being sold tablets and pills to make us thinner. Some things really don't change. Mostly because the math still works exactly the same way, and headline writers still can't resist a pun over a fraud story.

See you tomorrow

-Chris