Cartilage Company

The Cartilage Company was a Rochester, New York-based mail-order distributor of a proprietary method, the Cartilage Treatment, credited to one K. Leo Minges, that promised to increase the height of its users. The company enjoyed world-wide success over a decade, using advertising methods following much the same model as other E. Virgil Neal-Thomas F. Adkin allied concerns, and ultimately met the same fate as those concerns, being prosecuted in the United States and denied postal access on fraud charges.

Selected Patents

 * US762832, Physical Development Apparatus. 14 Jun. 1904, filed 23 Sep. 1903. "An appliance of this character is especially designed to assist physical exercises for the purpose of increasing the height or promoting growth in a person by acting upon the cartilage of the system by stretching or subjecting the body and limbs of the patient to a tension, and while I have illustrated the present embodiment as applied to such a purpose and including certain details in construction to obtain such an end it is to be understood that the same maybe applied to the patient ed to indicate the amount of force exerted thereon by said devices, and means attached to said support for producing a stretching action upon the patients body." https://patents.google.com/patent/US762832A