Talk:Hooper's Hooch

The link to William Hooper in this article is incorrect. The William Hooper who is referenced by Hooper's Hooch was born on March 18,1818 at Chapple Farm, Dolton, North Devon, England. After apprenticing as a chemist in Exeter he moved to London and began as a chemist and druggist at 7 Pall Mall East in 1840.

Here is an extract from a family history dated 1955 by his grandson Douglas Stanley Hooper.

"William's business as a Pharmaceutical Chemist, improving medical preparations from plants, was prospering. He had a branch at 55 Grosvenor Street and a laboratory in Scotland Yard. He had met a Dr. STRUVE, a German chemist, who wanted financial backing to put a mineral water on the market at the Spa, Brighton. From this sprang the firm of Hooper, Struve & Co., Ltd., operating from Pall Mall East. He gained knowledge of what was required in surgical goods and invented, among other things, india-rubber water beds and cushions made without cloth, mainly for use in hospitals. He was one of the first chemists to deal in Chloroform and other anaesthetics. He supplied Lister with his first bottle of Chloroform and also the waterbed for King Edward VII when he was Prince of Wales and had typhoid at Marlborough House. It is said that his assistant died of Laudanum poisoning and a pair of horses belonging to Queen Charlotte died from Chloroform administered by him. Whether this was accident or design is not recorded! At this time he was churchwarden of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, in spite of an early non-Conformist upbringing. In 1853, in partnership with Mr. Fry, with premises on Mitcham Common under the name of Hooper & Fry, he started an india-rubber manufacturing business, supplying hundreds of hospitals and similar institutions with his rubber beds. After Mr. Fry's retirement he devoted his attention to the use of india-rubber as an insulator for telegraphic conductors, for which he took out patents in 1859 and subsequently."