Cleaner fills inventor with 'Glee'

Clorox and cotton just don't get along.

The popular chlorine bleach "just rips cotton up," Darnestown physicist Lawnie Taylor said. "Any woman that uses Clorox will tell you that this is one of the prices that has to be paid in order to remove stains."

But not anymore.

Taylor has invented Glee, a product he said is the world's first and only liquid chlorine bleach that is gentle on cotton.

"It is truly a breakthrough," Taylor said.

Glee is the same strength as Clorox Ultra Bleach, but it is gentle on cotton and other fabrics. Difficult-to-remove stains such as blood can be sprayed away without scrubbing. And unlike Clorox, Glee does not have to be diluted.

"There is nothing else like that bottle there," Taylor said, pointing to the blue and white bottle.

Taylor's background in science lent itself well to his most recent discovery.

He graduated from Columbia University with a degree in physics. He completed doctoral work at the University of Southern California.

For 27 years, Taylor was a senior engineer for the U.S. Department of Energy. He worked on nuclear waste clean-up, solar energy research and technology information exchange, among other projects. Before that he was a program manager for the U.S. Energy, Research and Development Administration and a senior physicist for Xerox. He retired from the government in 2002.

Taylor said "making a difference" served as a slogan for some of his government initiatives. He has called Darnestown home for 15 years. He has four children. He spends a lot of time cheering for his son at baseball games, swim meets, and concerts. His interest in making a difference has never waned.

"Going along with the status quo and letting the problem continue to exist is silly," Taylor said. "I believe you can improve just about anything."

This tendency to make a difference is evident in his innovation. Clorox's damaging effects on cotton frustrated Taylor, so he used the Internet as a research tool and the laundry room as a laboratory.

"I began to sense there was a way to mute the damaging effect of sodium hypochlorite," he said.

Taylor started experimenting with a formula about 18 months ago. Once he had a testable product, he gave samples to friends and colleagues.

"I got glowing reports back," Taylor recalled. He described the experience of one woman whose husband had stains on his T-shirts.

"She used everything she could before she found Glee," Taylor said. "She tried Clorox. She tried Oxyclean. She tried Shout. Nothing else would take it out, and Glee does." Glee is for use only on white articles.

There is a good reason he calls it Glee.

"The reactions were gleeful!," he said. "When I talk to women in the parking lot, and in the aisles of grocery stores, they almost invariably say, 'Gee, that's a great idea. We need something like that,'" Taylor said.

Taylor held a demonstration of the "great idea" at Selby's IGA market in Poolesville on May 29. In less than three hours, the bottles had sold out.

To demonstrate the product's stain-removing power, Taylor pulled a white T-shirt stained with underarm perspiration out of a plastic bag. One side of the shirt had been treated with Clorox, and one side had been treated with Glee.

"Look how white it is," he said, holding up the results. "It's fantastic!"

Test-marketing of Glee began at Selby's five months ago. It has been restocked several times, Taylor said. A 32 oz. bottle costs $4.29 at the market.

"We're in the very early stages of commercializing it," he said.

The product is not yet on sale anywhere else, but Taylor said Shoppers Food Warehouse and Wal-Mart stores have expressed interest.

"I want to get the name recognition first," he said. "Glee will sell once people ... realize it's truly better than Clorox."

Taylor is introducing Glee through his business, LHTaylor Associates. He has partnered with Germantown-based Advanced Technologies and Laboratories International to produce and market the product.

In May, Taylor and his partners at ATL submitted an application to the General Services Administration to supply Glee to government agencies. His daughter Liza, a project director for a Connecticut marketing firm, helped prepare the proposal.

"I did some research to figure out what areas [in the government] would be best to enter into," she said.

The GSA is now evaluating the proposal.

Liza Taylor said that Clorox's shortcomings are a universal frustration, and that she wasn't surprised that her father found a solution.

"It's always been something that everybody complains about," she said. "It's a problem everyone has at some point."

Lawnie Taylor's innovative spirit extends beyond stain removers. Working with his associate, a laboratory director at the Marmara Research Center in Turkey, Taylor plans to market homeland security technologies to the U.S. government.

"[My associate] has developed homeland security technologies -- detecting suspicious powders in envelopes, detecting buried antipersonnel mines, detecting a live human being buried behind concrete slabs -- and I am working to market those technologies here in this country," Taylor said.

The Department of Homeland Security is currently evaluating his proposal for a technology to detect suspicious powders in envelopes, Taylor said.

For the inventor, beating Clorox at its own game is a remarkable reward.

"It's kind of amazing," Taylor said. "Big multibillion-dollar companies with all their research capabilities and laboratories could not find the solution that a small business could find."