Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (19 page)

A century later, in Italy, Leonardo da Vinci devised a thoroughly humane self-turning spit, powered by heat ascending the chimney. A small turbine wheel, built into the chimney, connected to the fired spit. Rising heat rotated the wheel with a speed proportional to the ferocity of the flames. But the centuries-old concept of cooking directly above an open fire was about to be replaced by a revolutionary cooking innovation: the enclosed range.

Kitchen Range: 17th Century, England

Bricking up the kitchen inglenook around the hearth formed the earliest range, which had a heated top surface and side hobs for keeping a kettle or saucepan warm.

In 1630, British inventor John Sibthrope patented a large metal version of such a device, which was fired by coal, a substance that would soon replace wood as the domestic fuel. But the idea of cooking above an enclosed fire instead of above or in an open flame was slow to catch on. And the cooking process itself was slower, since an intermediate element, the range-top, had to be heated.

An American-born innovator set out to develop a compact, efficient range but instead produced two other kitchen appliances.

Count von Rumford of Bavaria was born Benjamin Thompson in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1753. Loyal to the British crown, Thompson served as a spy during the American Revolution, and in 1776 he fled to London, leaving his wife and daughter behind. Knighted by King George III, Thompson studied physics in England, with special emphasis on the application of steam energy. His experiments led to his invention of the double boiler and the drip coffee maker. But his work on a compact kitchen range was interrupted by state business.

Entering the Bavarian civil service, Thompson was appointed the country’s grand chamberlain. In between instituting numerous social reforms, he found time to modernize James Watt’s steam engine and to popularize the potato—long regarded as animal fodder and sustenance for the poor—as a European table food among the upper classes. But his dream of producing a compact, closed-top cooking range became a reality in someone else’s hands. In 1802, while the then-renowned Sir Benjamin Thompson was establishing the Rumford professorship at Harvard University, British iron founder George Bodley patented a cast-iron even-heating range with a modern flue, which became the prototype of British and American kitchen ranges until the present century.

Gas and Electric Ranges
. The same year that George Bodley brought out his closed-top, coal-powered range, German inventor Frederick Albert Winson cooked history’s first meal by gas.

Gas ranges, c. 1890, the year the electric range debuted. Whereas gas models once leaked fumes and exploded, early electric ranges, with crude temperature controls, could incinerate a meal
.

Winson’s device was makeshift, designed merely to demonstrate gas’s cooking possibilities and its cleanliness compared to coal fires. Many of the experimental gas ranges that followed were hazards, leaking fumes and exploding. Thirty years would pass before a truly practical and safe gas range was manufactured in Europe; American homes would not have the clean-cooking innovations in any significant number until the 1860s.

Once homemakers felt safe and comfortable cooking with gas, they were reluctant to abandon it for the kitchen’s newest innovation, the electric range.

The first electric stoves appeared in 1890, and they made almost any meal cooked on them a disaster. With only the crudest of thermostats, heat control was not so much a matter of low, medium, or high as of raw or incinerated. And the price for this unpredictability was steep, since inexpensive home electric rates would not become a reality until the late 1920s. In addition, many homes in parts of America had yet to be wired for electric power. The electric stove proved to be even less popular than the early gas stove had been, and it took longer to become a standard feature of the American kitchen, never superseding gas, as had once been the prediction.

Gadget
. It was during the early years of electric power that any small, handy item for the kitchen acquired the name “gadget,” a word that did not exist prior to 1886. Although the word—as well as the idea it conveys—sounds American to its core, according to popular legend it is French. And
if we were to pronounce it correctly, we would be naming the man who gave us the eponym.

Monsieur Gaget was a partner in the French construction firm of Gaget, Gauhier & Cie., which built the Statue of Liberty to the design specifications of sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi. For the statue’s inauguration ceremonies in 1886, Gaget conceived the idea of selling miniature Liberty souvenirs to Americans living in Paris. Americans abroad bought the replicas and began referring to them as “gadgets,” mispronouncing Gaget’s name. Consequently, the 1986 centennial of the Statue of Liberty also marked the one hundredth birthday of the word “gadget,” though possibly only Monsieur Gaget’s descendants celebrated that event.

Porcelain Pots and Pans: 1788, Germany

The first real cooking utensil made in America was a 1642 cast-iron pot, the now-famous Saugus Pot, produced at the Saugus Iron Works in the old Massachusetts city of Lynn. The crudely fashioned, three-legged pot—with a lid and a one-quart capacity—marked the beginning of the kitchenware industry in America, for prior to that time every metallic item in a colonist’s kitchen was a British import.

Just as American foundries were beginning to produce black cast-iron pots with rough exteriors, the German kitchenware industry was moving toward something totally unheard of—and seemingly impractical—for cooking: porcelain. In 1750, inventor Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justy suggested coating the coarse exterior of iron pots and pans with the smooth, lustrous enamel glazes long used on jewelry. His critics contended that the delicacy of porcelain enamel would never withstand kitchen usage. Von Justy countered with the indisputable fact that hundreds of ancient porcelain artifacts had retained their brilliance and hardness for centuries; some Egyptian ornaments dated back to 1400
B.C
.

For a while, the technical problems of annealing a heat-resistant porcelain to cast iron seemed insurmountable. But in 1788, the Konigsbronn foundry in Württemberg produced the first kitchen pots with a shimmering white enamel finish. The development ushered in a new era in culinary ware, providing homemakers with a wide range of utensils that cleaned more easily than anything previously known. Porcelain was the Teflon of the eighteenth century. One early advertisement punned: “No longer can the pot call the kettle black.”

But the porcelain innovators had not anticipated one surprising public reaction. The glistening pots, pans, and ladles were simply too attractive to use for cooking only. Thus, for a number of years, German housewives proudly displayed their porcelainware as objets d’art—on knickknack shelves, atop pianos, and on windowsills for passersby to appreciate.

The British, in sharp contrast, took the artful German breakthrough and
gave it a highly practical if thoroughly mundane application: they produced the first porcelain-enamel bedpans and urine bottles for hospitals and homes. Again, it was the material’s nonstick, nonstain surface that contributed to the utensils’ rapid acceptance.

It was not until the final year of the American Civil War that porcelain-enamel cooking utensils were manufactured in the United States—initially in three cities: Sheboygan, Wisconsin; Woodhaven, New York; and St. Louis, Missouri.

Aluminum Ware: Early 19th Century, France

While the Germans were cooking in porcelain and the British were using it to sanitize homes and hospitals, Napoleon Bonaparte in France was serving his guests on the world’s first aluminum plates—which then cost more than gold ones. The newly mined metal sold for six hundred dollars a pound, and by the 1820s Europe’s nobility was packing away some of its goldware and silverware to highlight aluminum plates, cups, and cutlery.

Aluminum, however, rapidly lost its social luster. Aggressive mining of the metal, coupled with electric extraction techniques, caused its price to plummet to $2.25 a pound in 1890. Despite the lower price, American homemakers had yet to discover the advantages of cooking with aluminum. Two events—a technical advance and a department store demonstration—would soon change that.

On February 23, 1886, twenty-two-year-old inventor Charles Martin Hall, a recent college graduate in science, was experimenting with aluminum in his laboratory in Oberlin, Ohio. Hall’s notebooks record that on that day he perfected a procedure for inexpensively producing an aluminum compound that could be cast into cookware. Hall founded his own company and began manufacturing lightweight, durable, easy-to-clean cooking utensils that yielded a remarkably even distribution of heat and retained their sheen. Their durability suggested a trademark name:
Wear-Ever
.

Hall’s products met formidable opposition. American housewives were reluctant to abandon their proven tinware and ironware, and the country’s major department stores refused to stock the new product, whose benefits sounded too fantastical to be true. The turning point came in the spring of 1903. At the persuasion of a buyer, the renowned Wanamaker’s store in Philadelphia staged the first public demonstration of aluminum’s cooking abilities. Hundreds of women watched in amazement as a professional chef cooked apple butter
without stirring
. Once the onlookers were allowed to step forward and assure themselves that the ingredients had not stuck to the pan or burned, orders poured in for aluminum cookware. By the time of Charles Hall’s death in 1914, his line of Wear-Ever products had spawned a new aluminum-cookware industry, transformed the American kitchen, and rewarded Hall with a personal fortune of thirty million dollars.

S.O.S. Pads: 1917, San Francisco

In 1917, Edwin W. Cox of San Francisco was a door-to-door salesman whose line of merchandise included the new, highly touted aluminum cookware. Sales were mediocre; West Coast housewives had not yet been sold on the latest in pan technology. Cox found it difficult even to get into a kitchen to demonstrate his products. He needed a gimmick. So, in the best salesmen’s tradition, he decided to offer each potential client a free introductory gift for allowing him to display his line.

From experience, Cox knew that a major cooking complaint was the way food stuck to pans. Why not develop a pad that combined the abrasiveness of steel wool and the cleansing ability of soap?

In his own kitchen, Cox hand-dipped small, square steel-wool pads into a soapy solution. When each pad dried, it was redipped, and the process was diligently repeated until every pad was saturated with dried soap.

As he began calling on housewives, he found that the yet-unnamed pads opened doors—and boosted sales. Each woman received one free sample. Most women asked for more. Many called his home to learn where additional pads might be purchased. Within a few months, demand for the pads outgrew Cox’s ability to dip and dry them in his kitchen. Edwin Cox stopped selling pots and pans and went into the business of manufacturing soap pads.

In need of a catchy name for the new product, Cox turned to the housewife he knew best—his wife. In her own kitchen, Mrs. Cox referred to the pads as “S.O.S.” for “Save Our Saucepans,” and because she believed (incorrectly) that the letters stood for the universal distress call at sea, “Save Our Ship.” Needless to say, Mr. Cox took his wife’s suggestion—though S.O.S. is a misnomer on two counts.

The actual Morse code distress signal, accepted by international agreement among the world’s nations, is not an acronym for “Save Our Ship,” “Save Our Souls,” or any other popular salvation phrase. In fact, it is not an abbreviation for anything.

When New York University art professor Samuel Morse, a painter turned inventor, devised his telegraphy code in 1835, he attempted to choose combinations of dots and dashes that were relatively easy to memorize. A few years later, when the international committee sought a distress signal that would be easy to recall in a time of crisis, and could be transmitted by an amateur with only the slightest knowledge of Morse code, they decided on a simple combination of threes: three letters, each represented by three marks. Three, they felt, was a universally favored number.

In Morse code, only two letters of the alphabet are represented by three identical marks: three dashes for
O
, three dots for
S
. Thus, the universal distress signal (and the name of the soap pads) could have been “OSO.” Dashes, however, are longer electrical signals to transmit than dots. An
urgent message should be broadcast as quickly as possible and consume as little as necessary of the transmitting device’s energy. Consequently, the only three-letter, three-dot, three-dash, rapid, energy-efficient call for assistance could be “SOS.” Without punctuation. Mrs. Cox’s error, though, has not hurt the sale of soap pads.

Dishwasher: 1886, Shelbyville, Illinois

“If nobody else is going to invent a dishwashing machine, I’ll do it myself.”