New Pig Corporation

A pig is born.

While people were dancing the night away, our founders were working up a sweat cleaning the oil and grime off tanks, equipment, walls and floors in dirty factories. The worst job was shoveling up the loose, oil-soaked cat litter around the bases of leaking machinery. The clay pellets stuck to everything. It was a nightmare. And it was everywhere. When they started losing money on these jobs, they decided to find a better way to soak up the oily mess.

They cut up pantyhose and stuffed them with everything from sawdust to rice hulls. Then they laid these sausage-like things into pools of oil to see what would happen. Time and again, they were disappointed with the results — until they tried the ground corncob they used to blast oil off factory walls. It worked.