In the back room of their drugstore, one of the brothers developed an adhesive formula from castor oil, resins and wax that didn't soak through the paper carrier, and which had a much longer shelf life than typical flypaper. Their innovations --a vast improvement over the widely-accepted formula --were patented in 1887, and paved the way for "Tanglefoot", and its extraordinary growth. Before too long, the product was the world's best selling flypaper, and The Thum Company occupied a large manufacturing plant built in Grand Rapids, shipping flypaper all over the U.S. and exporting to Great Britain, Italy, Spain, South Africa and even Russia. As business boomed, the product line grew to include many similar non-toxic insect management products.

The innovative "Tree Tanglefoot" product, introduced in the early 1900's, was a breakthrough for home gardeners, commercial growers, farmers and researchers. The gooey substance stopped crawling insects in their tracks, preventing them from climbing trees to feed on fruit or foliage, or to deposit their eggs. Yet flypaper --for homes, businesses and farms --remained Tanglefoot's best-known product.

The Thum Brothers sold the business in 1909 and retired to Southern California. During the next two decades, Tanglefoot became as generic a word for flypaper as Kleenex® did for facial tissues, and in 1923, the O&W Thum Company changed its name to The Tanglefoot Company. They continued to improve their sticky technology as a means of managing destructive insects without the use of pesticides.

Ironically, the demand for flypaper in the U.S. began to wane shortly after the time of the company's name change. With automobiles and trucks rapidly replacing horses as the preferred conveyance, there was far less manure. As science began to discover the role of flies in carrying diseases, the population became much more sanitation-conscious.