Weird Facts about Windex®

• The brand-name Windex is a combination of the word window and the suffix -ex, short for the word express, denoting the power of this solution to clean windows quickly.
• In 1933, Harry Rogers Drackett invented Windex window cleaner (originally packaged in cans because the solvent was flammable). Drackett and his fatther, Philip W. Drackett, had invented Draño drain cleaner in 1923.
• In 1936, Windex was introduced and marketed as an automobile windshield cleaner.
• The first Windex formula was colored blue to appeal to consumers and was packaged in six ounce glass bottles. The popularity of Windex prompted other glass cleaner manufacturers to color their glass cleaning products blue as well.
• After World War II and the invention of modern surfactants, the Drackett Company reformulated Windex as a non-flammable cleanser, packaging the product in a glass bottle with a plastic sprayer.
• In the hit 2002 comedy movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the immigrant father of the bride, played by Michael Constantine (who starred as principal Seymour Kaufman on the television sitcom Room 222), proudly embraces American culture by obsessively using Windex as a cure-all for every problem he encounters, including psoriasis, poison ivy, baldness, warts, and acne.
• The Drackett Company actually patented the shape of the Windex spray bottle.
• S.C. Johnson & Son, better known as Johnson Wax because of its popular floor wax products, bought the Drackett company in 1992, aquiring Windex.
• In 2011, Fortune magazine declared Windex an “American ideal.”
• Windex shares the suffix –ex with such other popular brand-name products as Balmex, Blistex, Cutex, Desenex, Kleenex, Kotex, Playtex, Purex, Pyrex, Rolex, Tilex, and Timex.
• In 2016, the Italian fashion label Moschino introduced a new fragrance, Fresh Couture, packaged in a Windex-shaped bottle. The perfume, sold exclusively at Bloomingdale's, retailed for $82.
• Fingerprints on a bottle of Windex lead to the arrest of a burglar in Delray Beach, Florida, in 2016. The perpetrator used Windex to remove his fingerprints from the displays in the cellphone store he burglarzied, but forgot to remove his fingerprints from the bottle itself.
• In , actor Michael Constanti, who stars as Gus Portokalos in the 2002 movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding and its 2016 sequel, told Hellinic News of America: “I’m actually sick of Windex. There must have been hundreds of bottles sent to me, and then there were all those people who asked me to autograph their Windex bottles.”