Some days (yesterday) 100 year old newspapers give you an article about women on dog leashes as fashion, and then people on the internet think it’s made up. I assure you, it’s not.

And other days the newspaper gifts you an ad for a bathing suit that makes it physically impossible to drown, sold out of a men's wear store on 14th Street in Washington DC, and then never heard from again.

Today is that day.

The Washington Times from June 16th, 1926 carries a quarter-page advertisement for something called the Saftee Suit. The headline, in large bold type across the top, reads: "You Can Do Everything But Sink!"

The product is exactly what that sounds like. A bathing suit — a regular bathing suit, the kind you'd wear to the pool or the beach — that is positively guaranteed to keep you afloat. The ad is careful about what it isn't: no cork, no inflation, no bulky apparatus of any kind. Just a smart garment weighing between twelve and twenty ounces, designed to allow perfect freedom for swimming, diving, and floating while making it essentially impossible to go under.

Children could wear it in perfect safety, the ad noted. The company behind it was Fletcher and Fox, a men's wear store at 1129 14th Street NW, reachable at Main 1112.

The concept is straightforward enough that it's almost surprising nobody had done it before — or at least nobody had marketed it this directly. A life jacket is a life jacket. A bathing suit is a bathing suit. The Saftee Suit was apparently both at once, without the bulk or mechanics of either, and without cork or air bladders doing the work. The ad doesn't explain the technology, which in retrospect feels like it might have been part of the problem. Maybe it didn’t actually hold kids up. That would be an issue.

What I could piece together is thin. The company filed as an LLC in 1925 — the year before this ad ran. This advertisement in the Washington Times is the clearest evidence I've found that the product actually existed and was being actively sold. After June 1926, the trail goes cold. No follow-up coverage. No patent documentation I could locate. No record of the Saftee Suit making it into wider distribution or becoming the standard beach accessory it perhaps should have been.

Maybe the technology didn't work as advertised. Maybe Fletcher and Fox couldn't scale production beyond Washington DC. Maybe the summer ended, the ad budget ran out, and nobody picked it back up in the spring. Maybe a bathing suit that guaranteed you wouldn't drown turned out to be a harder sell than it looked on paper.

I genuinely don't know. Which is its own kind of answer.

You can do everything but sink. Unless you’re the Saftee Suit company.

See you tomorrow

-Chris

Sources
Washington Times, June 16, 1926.