Brillo Pad is a trade name for a scouring pad, used for cleaning dishes, and made from steel wool impregnated with soap.

It came at a time when the introduction of aluminium pots and pans -replacing cast iron- was creating a quiet revolution in the kitchen. But easily blackened by coal fires, the shiny newness of the cookware didn't last long.

A cookware peddler and his brother-in-law, a jeweller, approached New York lawyer Milton Loeb for assistance in protecting their invention- made of German fine steel wool and jeweller's rouge. But Loeb did much more, flinging himself into the pan scouring business and coming up with the Brillo trademark -from the Latin word for 'bright'.

Patented in 1913, by 1917 the Brillo Manufacturing Company were selling packaged boxes of six pads and a separate bar of soap. It was only in the 1930s that the soap was contained within the pad. The brightness of the world's pots and pans was now assured. Bret Field.

• Andy Warhol, famous for making pop art out of commercial designs, built a statue replicating a stack of Brillo shipping cartons, made out of wood rather than cardboard.
• Brillo Pad is also Private Eye's nickname for Andrew Neil.