Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (20 page)

With that determined proclamation, Josephine Cochrane, wife of an Illinois politician in the 1880s, set out to invent a major kitchen appliance—though not because Mrs. Cochrane was fed up with the humdrum chore of dirty dishes; she was a wealthy woman, with a full staff of servants. A blueblood from Chicago, living in the small prairie town of Shelbyville, Illinois, Josephine Cochrane frequently gave formal dinners and she
was
fed up with dishwashing servants breaking her expensive china. Every party ended with more shattered dishes, which took months to replace by mail. A machine seemed like the ideal solution.

In a woodshed adjoining her home, Josephine Cochrane measured her dinnerware, then fashioned individual wire compartments for plates, saucers, and cups. The compartments fastened around the circumference of a wheel that rested in a large copper boiler. As a motor turned the wheel, hot soapy water squirted up from the bottom of the boiler and rained down on the dinnerware. The design was crude but effective, and it so impressed her circle of friends that they dubbed the invention the “Cochrane Dishwasher” and placed orders for machines for their kitchens. They, too, viewed the device as a solution to the vexing problem of irresponsible help.

Word spread. Soon Josephine Cochrane was receiving orders from Illinois hotels and restaurants, where volume dishwashing—and breakage—was a continual and costly problem. Realizing that she had hit upon a timely invention, Mrs. Cochrane patented her design in December 1886; her washer went on to win the highest award at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair for, as the citation read, “the best mechanical construction, durability, and adaptation to its line of work.”

Hotels and restaurants remained the best customers for Josephine Cochrane’s large-capacity dishwashers. But in 1914, the company she had founded came out with a smaller machine, for the average American home. To management’s astonishment, the average American housewife was unimpressed with the labor-saving device.

Part of this reluctance was technological. In 1914, many homes lacked the quantity of scalding water a dishwasher then required. The entire contents of a family’s hot-water tank might be insufficient to do just the dinner dishes. Furthermore, in many parts of the country the water was “hard,” containing dissolved minerals that prevented soap from sudsing enough to
spray-clean the dishes. Elbow power was required to get dinnerware sparkling.

But there was another problem that no one in Mrs. Cochrane’s company had anticipated. Josephine Cochrane, who had never washed a dish, assumed that American housewives viewed dishwashing as a disagreeable chore. However, when her executives polled housewives, hoping to learn why the home models weren’t selling, they discovered that while numerous household duties were dreaded (principally laundering the family clothes), dishwashing was not one of them. Quite the contrary. The majority of the women questioned in 1915 reported that doing dinner dishes was a welcome relaxer at the end of a hard day.

Mrs. Cochrane’s company (which later would merge with an Ohio manufacturing firm to produce the popular Kitchenaid dishwasher) adopted another advertising angle: A major reason for purchasing a dishwasher was the proven fact that a machine could use water far hotter than the human hand could bear. Thus, dishwashers not only got plates and glasses cleaner; they also killed more germs. Sales still did not appreciably improve. The home market for dishwashers would not become profitable until the early 1950s, when postwar prosperity made leisure time, glamour, and an emerging sense of self, independent from husband and children, major concerns of the American housewife.

Home Water Softeners: 1924, St. Paul, Minnesota

One feature that home owners in many parts of America take for granted today is soft water—that is, tap water which has been treated to remove ions of calcium and magnesium so they will not form an insoluble residue in pipes and will not link up with soap to form an unsightly, dandruff-like precipitate on dishes and clothes.

Soft water, though, did not flow in every home’s pipes in the early part of this century (and it still doesn’t). In many parts of the country, water was “hard.” And hard water, as we have seen, was one reason for the slow sales of early dishwashing machines. One man had a profound effect on the quality of America’s water.

Emmett Culligan did not set out to invent water softeners. He wanted to be a wealthy real estate tycoon and was headed in that direction until disaster rerouted him.

In his hometown, Porter, Minnesota, the twenty-four-year-old Culligan bore the nickname “Gold Dust,” for the sizable fortune he had amassed in real estate since leaving college in his sophomore year. His forte was unwanted prairie land, which he would sow to flax, selling field and crop at a handsome profit. Before he turned thirty, his landholdings were worth a quarter of a million dollars.

Then in 1921, a severe farm recession drove down the price of agricultural products and precipitated a rash of farm failures. The value of Culligan’s
property plummeted. Unable to repay loans, he declared bankruptcy and moved his wife and newborn infant to his parents’ home in St. Paul.

One afternoon, Emmett Culligan encountered a boyhood friend who had been experimenting with ways to soften water, a challenge that had intrigued many inventors. Culligan’s friend demonstrated his “conditioning machine.” It used a natural sand, zeolite, to filter ions of magnesium and calcium from hard water.

The friend explained that the zeolite exchange resin contained sodium ions that literally swapped places in water with the undesirable ions. When the zeolite became exhausted—that is, when most of its exchangeable sodium had been replaced by magnesium and calcium—it could be restored by washing with a strong solution of common table salt, sodium chloride.

Intrigued by the principle, Culligan borrowed a bag of zeolite. At home, he poured the chemical into a perforated coffee tin and passed hard tap water through it. Then he used the filtered water to wash his baby’s diapers. Their resulting softness convinced him and his wife that any parent made aware of the improvement would never again put an infant into a hard-water-washed diaper. On the spot, he resolved to stage a business comeback based on water softeners.

Culligan launched his water softener firm in 1924, producing filtering machines that sold for two hundred dollars. Despite the steep price, sales were impressive and the “Gold Dust” boy was back in the money.

Surviving another setback (the market crash of 1929), he devised a marketing strategy based on the telephone company’s practice of leasing equipment to sell a service. Home owners could rent an expensive water-softening machine for a modest monthly fee of two dollars.

Culligan’s business grew quickly, and by 1938 he had franchises throughout the Northeast. A decade later, the dealership network was national. Homemakers used filtered water to hand-and machine-wash clothes and dishes, with noticeable improvements in both. Then a clever ad campaign, featuring a hard-water housewife shouting, “Hey Culligan Man!” swept the country. Acquiring the popularity of the latter-day “Where’s the beef?” the phrase helped turn home water softeners into a multimillion-dollar business.

Teflon Utensils: 1954, France

Although Teflon was the serendipitous discovery of an American chemist, it took the cooking ingenuity of the French to produce the world’s first nonstick Teflon frying pan. Once the item was, so to speak, hot in Paris, American manufacturers, who had disbelieved the possibility of a no-stick cooking surface, scrambled to place orders.

The Teflon tale begins with a small dinner in Baltimore in 1958. Thomas Hardie, foreign correspondent for United Press International, accepted an invitation to the home of a friend who had recently returned from Paris.
The meal was prepared in an amazing French skillet to which not a particle of food stuck—even though the friend had avoided using butter or oil. Hardie marveled at the pan’s coating, which he learned the French called Tefal, though the product was an American “plastic” manufactured for industrial purposes by Du Pont under the name Teflon. Why, wondered Hardie, wasn’t such a pan available in America?

Hardie flew to France.

At the Tefal factory outside Paris, he met the company’s president, Marc Gregoire. Gregoire had first heard of Teflon in the early 1950s—also through a friend, one who had devised a way to affix a thin layer of the Du Pont plastic to aluminum for industrial applications. An avid fisherman, Gregoire began coating his tackle with the substance to minimize sticking and tangling. His wife conceived the idea of coating cookware. At her request, he coated one of her frying pans, then another. That was several years before Hardie’s arrival. Now French stores were selling more than a million Tefal-coated pans a year.

Hardie returned to the United States with several pans and even greater disbelief that the miracle product had not yet hit America’s shores. For the next two years, he called on every major cooking-utensil manufacturer in the country. Not one expressed the slightest interest. Convinced that an American market existed for Teflon cookware, he cabled Gregoire to ship him three thousand pans. When they arrived, he sent a complimentary sample and instructions to one hundred major department stores. Not a single buyer placed an order. No one believed the pans were stick-free.

Eventually, he persuaded the housewares buyer at Macy’s Herald Square store in New York City to take two hundred pans. Priced at $6.94, the pans went on sale December 15, 1960, during one of the city’s severest snowstorms. Seventeen inches of snow blanketed the city and the mercury quavered at nine degrees Fahrenheit. Nonetheless, New Yorkers weathered the blustery elements in such numbers that Macy’s’ stock sold out in two days. The store clamored for more pans. And so did American housewives. When the Paris factory could no longer meet the American demand, Hardie formed his own company and in 1961 built a highly automated factory in Timonium, Maryland. By this time, every American kitchen utensils manufacturer was planning its own line of Teflon-coated cookware.

A new item had entered the kitchen.

All this activity delighted Dr. Roy Plunkett, the soft-spoken Du Pont chemist who had accidentally discovered Teflon, while experimenting with coolant gases, the kind used in refrigerators and air conditioners.

On the morning of April 6, 1938, at Du Pont’s laboratory in New Jersey, Plunkett examined a container that had been stored overnight. It should have held a very cold gas, but instead he found the new gas had congealed to form a waxy solid that had affixed itself to the container’s wall. He was amazed at its slipperiness and utter imperviousness to all sorts of corrosive chemicals he subjected it to.

He named the compound Teflon, short for its chemical name: tetrafluoroethylene.

The Guinness Book of World Records
would later list Teflon as the slipperiest substance on earth, having the “lowest coefficient of static and dynamic friction of any known solid.” The slipperiness has been measured as equivalent to that of two wet ice cubes rubbing against each other in a warm room. After ten years of further research, the Du Pont chemical was introduced for industrial applications in 1948. Never was there talk at that time about putting it on frying pans.

Today Teflon is used in space suits and computer microchips; it replaces arteries of the human heart and serves as a heat shield during a rocket’s reentry into the earth’s atmosphere. And Teflon has also been applied to the Statue of Liberty’s fifteen thousand joints to slow her aging. Around the home, a Teflon coating on light bulbs minimizes shattering, and on a car’s brakes it reduces the wear and tear of friction. For his discovery, Dr. Roy Plunkett was inducted into the National Inventors’ Hall of Fame in 1985.

Brown Paper Bag: 1883, Philadelphia

There are few things simpler and more functional than the paper bag. Picasso painted on them. The artist Saul Steinberg has used them to create elaborate masks. And Americans consume them at the rate of forty billion a year. As simple and indispensable as the paper bag is, the invention as we know it today—with its convenient flat bottom and pleated sides—is, surprisingly, only one hundred years old.

Charles Stilwell, the inventor of the brown paper grocery bag, was born on October 6, 1845, in Fremont, Ohio. He enlisted in the Union Army at age seventeen, and served in the Civil War. It was shortly after his discharge that Stilwell began to tinker with inventions, and one of his earliest successes, in the summer of 1883, was the first machine to produce paper bags. Bags existed before Stilwell’s time, but they were pasted together by hand; their V-shaped bottoms prevented them from standing on their own; and they were not easily collapsible or conveniently stackable.

Stilwell’s design was a marvel of simple engineering. He named the flat-bottom, pleated-sides bag S.O.S., for “Self-Opening Sack” (the bag could open instantly to its full shape with a snap of the wrist). And its pleats, or gussets, which allowed the bag to open quickly, also permitted it to collapse and stack neatly. But the feature that endeared it to grocers and market baggers was its ability to stand upright, fully opened, by itself.

The biggest boom to the Stilwell bag came with the birth of the American supermarket in the early 1930s. Never had a single store offered a wider selection of foods and household products—all to be carted away in humble brown sacks. As supermarkets multiplied in response to the country’s expanding population, demand for Stilwell’s flat-bottom bags grew proportionally.
Versatility, strength, and low cost made them a nationwide, then worldwide, institution. Today America’s 28,680 supermarkets alone purchase 25 billion bags a year.