social and legal opposition, at the end of the 19th century the condom was the Western world's most popular birth control method. Two surveys conducted in New York in 1890 and 1900 found that 45% of the women surveyed were using condoms to prevent pregnancy. A survey in Boston just prior to World War I concluded that three million condoms were sold in that city every year. 1870s England saw the founding of the first major condom manufacturing company, E. Lambert and Son of Dalston. In 1882, German immigrant Julius Schmid founded one of the largest and longest-lasting condom businesses, Julius Schmid, Inc. This New York business initially manufactured only skin condoms (in 1890 he was arrested by Anthony Comstock for having almost seven hundred of the devices in his house). In 1912, a German named Julius Fromm developed a new, improved manufacturing technique for condoms: dipping glass molds into a raw rubber solution. Called cement dipping, this method required adding gasoline or benzene to the rubber to make it liquid. In America, Schmid was the first company to use the new technique. Using the new dipping method, French condom manufacturers were the first to add textures to condoms. Fromm was the first company to sell a branded line of condoms, Fromm's Act, which remains popular in Germany today. The Fromms was taken over by the Nazis during the war, and the family fled to Great Britain but could not compete against the powerful London Rubber Company. The condom lines manufactured by Schmid, Sheiks and Ramses, were sold through the late 1990s. Youngs Rubber Company, founded by Merle Youngs in late-19th-century America, introduced Trojans. Beginning in the second half of the 19th century, American rates of sexually transmitted diseases skyrocketed. Causes cited by historians include effects of the American Civil War, and the ignorance of prevention methods promoted by the Comstock laws. To fight the growing epidemic, sexual education classes were introduced to public schools for the first time, teaching about venereal diseases and how they were transmitted. They generally taught that abstinence was the only way to avoid sexually transmitted diseases. The medical community and moral watchdogs considered STDs to be punishment for sexual misbehavior. The stigma on victims of these diseases was so great that many hospitals refused to treat people who had syphilis. 1900 to present World War I to the 1920s The German military was the