Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (23 page)

The first pop-up toaster for the home, the Toastmaster, arrived on the scene in 1926. It had a timing adjustment for the desired degree of darkness, and when the toast reached the preselected state, it was ejected, rather forcefully. The device stirred so much public interest that March 1927 was designated National Toaster Month, and the advertisement running in the March 5 issue of the
Saturday Evening Post
promised: “This amazing new invention makes perfect toast
every time!
Without watching! Without turning! Without burning!”

That was not entirely true.

The machine’s overall operating temperature grew hotter and hotter with each subsequent slice of bread toasted. The first slice, when Toastmaster was coolest, was underdone. The second and third slices were usually as desired. The fourth and later ones grew darker and darker. In fine print, the operating manual recommended running the toaster once without bread, just to warm it up; then, later, letting it cool down slightly. But these were quiddities, to be ironed out by technicians. The automatic toaster had arrived.

Whistling Teakettle: 1921, Germany

Teakettles were used by primitive societies, as were whistles. Among Mayan ruins, archaeologists have unearthed two-thousand-year-old clay pots with multiple whistle spouts. When water pours out of one hole, another emits a faint, thin whistling noise. Whether or not the devices were history’s first whistling teakettles is unknown. But history does record that in 1921, while touring a German teakettle factory, Joseph Block, a retired cookware executive from New York, conceived such an idea.

Growing up in New York, Block had watched his father design a pressurized potato cooker that whistled at the end of the cooking cycle. Years later, at the Westphalia, Germany, teakettle plant, that memory spontaneously awakened in Block’s mind and suggested a variation. Intrigued by the idea, the Germany factory produced thirty-six whistling teakettles—which went on sale at Wertheim’s department store in Berlin at nine o’clock one morning and sold out by noon.

The following year, the kettle debuted in America, at a Chicago housewares fair. For the duration of the week-long show, Joseph Block kept at least one demonstration kettle whistling continuously. The sound drove store buyers to other exhibits, but not before many of them placed orders. Wanamaker’s in New York took forty-eight kettles and discovered that the whistling one-dollar novelty attracted customers in droves from other counters into the housewares department. And the retired Joseph Block found himself back in business, selling department stores across the nation 35,000 whistling teakettles a month.

Block was the first to admit that his invention made no great contribution to the American kitchen, but it did bring a smile of amusement to the lips of those who stopped to listen to the high-pitched sound, especially children—who may have duplicated the reaction of Mayan children to their pots that whistled.

Coffeepot: 1800, France

Coffee has been a favorite food (the beans were chewed for four hundred years) and beverage ever since its discovery by an Ethiopian goatherder named Kaldi in
A.D
. 850. But no commercial device such as a coffeepot existed for brewing ground beans until the introduction of the French biggin in 1800. During those intervening centuries, in the many countries that prodigiously consumed coffee, people prepared the drink simply by boiling ground beans in water and pouring the mixture through a filter of their own design. Bags of grounds came with the standard instruction to boil until the coffee “smelled good.”

The biggin, simple as it was, became a welcome kitchen accessory.

Created by nineteenth-century French pharmacist R. Descroisilles, it consisted of two slender metal containers—available in tin, copper, or pewter—separated by a plate containing holes, the filter. Around 1850, French manufacturers introduced the first porcelain-enameled biggins.

The quest for a perfect cup of coffee. The Filter Pot, c. 1870, modeled on the Biggin; Coffee Warmer; Coffee Boiler (lower right), in which grounds were boiled until the brew “smelled good,” then the liquid was strained
.

The first American adaptation of the biggin was patented in 1873. The single-chamber cylinder contained a filter that was pressed down through the mixture of grounds and hot water, forcing the grounds to the bottom of the vessel. Unfortunately, filters were not always flush with the container’s walls, and a gritty drink might result. The problem annoyed one woman enough to drive her to invent a better cup of coffee.

Melitta
. In 1907, Mrs. Melitta Bentz of Germany began experimenting with different materials to place between the two chambers of a biggin-like coffeepot. A circle of cotton fabric cut out and placed over the pot’s own metal filter worked for a time, but the fabric soon shredded. She hit on a near-perfect kind of heavy-duty, porous paper in 1908 when she cut out a disk from a desk ink blotter, and the Melitta filter system was on its way toward commercial development.

In America at that time, sales of all kinds of coffeepots were slow and manufacturers conceived an idea that would be popular until the late ’20s—the combination of several functions into one appliance. A prime and successful example was the Armstrong company’s Perc-O-Toaster. It toasted bread, baked waffles, and perked coffee. But it was the percolator part that Americans loved best, and it was the percolator that in America won out over all competing types of coffeepot in the first half of this century.

Chemex
. Next in the never-ending quest for the perfect cup of coffee came the Chemex, in 1940. The brainchild of a German chemist, Dr. Peter Schlumbohm, it embodied the Bauhaus design philosophy: a table must be a table, a chair a chair, and a coffeepot should do nothing except make great coffee.

Schlumbohm, who immigrated to America in 1939, adapted a trusty piece of scientific laboratory equipment: a heat-tempered Pyrex pot. He added no more than an inverted conical top that held filter paper and a measured amount of finely ground coffee beans.

At first, major appliance makers turned down Schlumbohm’s design. Chemex, they argued, looked too simple to actually work. Finally, he persuaded a buyer for Macy’s Herald Square store in New York City to take a Chemex home overnight and prepare coffee with it the next morning. Before noon, he received a phone call and an order for a hundred pots.

Corning Glass, developers of Pyrex, agreed to produce Chemex, but by then World War II was in full force and the company notified Schlumbohm that they could not legally manufacture a new product without priority clearance from the War Production Board. The determined inventor wrote directly to President Roosevelt, heading his letter,
“Minima rex non curat
,” “a king does not bother with details” —then adding,
“Sed President curat et minima
,” “but a President cares even about details.” A lover of good coffee, Roosevelt permitted Chemex to go into production.

A wartime clearance to produce the novelty of an all-glass coffeemaker, at a time when almost all metal-coffeepot production had ceased, was more than Dr. Schlumbohm had dreamed. Although he acquired some two hundred patents for technological devices throughout his lifetime, none would achieve the success of his simplest invention of all.

Pressure Cooker: 1679, England

At a London dinner party on the evening of April 12, 1682, the august members of the Royal Society sat down to a meal such as they—or anyone else—had never eaten before. Cooked by the invited guest, thirty-five-year-old French inventor Denis Papin, a pioneer of steam power, the evening’s fare was prepared in Papin’s latest marvel, the “steam digester.”

Papin, an assistant to the renowned Irish physicist Robert Boyle, formulator of the laws governing gases, had developed his steam digester in 1679. It was a metal container with a safety valve and a tightly fitting lid, which increased internal steam pressure, raising a cooking liquid’s boiling point.

Following the historic meal, the Royal Society’s esteemed architect, Christopher Wren, wrote that thanks to the steam digester, “the oldest and hardest Cow-Beef may now be made as tender and savoury as young and
choice meat”; one wonders what was served at the meal. Wren oversaw the publication of a booklet, “A New Digester,” which offered recipes for steam-cooking mutton, beef, lamb, rabbit, mackerel, eel, beans, peas, cherries, gooseberries, plums, pike, and pigeon.

In the booklet, Papin astutely observed that pressure cooking preserved more of a food’s natural flavor and nutritive value. Other contributors demonstrate the “bandwagon effect” of attempting to employ a new invention for a multiplicity of purposes. The authors offer methods for steam-cooking desserts, punches, hot toddies, and puddings.

History’s first pressure cooker bombed—figuratively and literally. Not only did the majority of Londoners not take favorably to the idea of steamed pike and pigeon, but those who purchased a digester and attempted its recipes often ended up with the evening’s meal on the kitchen wall. The temperature vicissitudes of an open fire were no match for Papin’s imperfect safety valve. Several serious accidents were reported. Except for scientific applications (as autoclaves), pressure vessels were forgotten for about a hundred fifty years. It was French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte who was responsible for the pressure cooker’s reemergence.

In 1810, Napoleon, proclaiming that “an army moves on its stomach,” was desperate to find a means of supplying preserved food to his troops. The government offered a handsome prize for a solution to the problem. Employing a modification of Papin’s pressure cooker, French chef Nicholas Appert developed the first practical method for cooking, sterilizing, and bottling foods. For his preservation technique, Appert won the prize of twelve thousand francs, and his methods reawakened interest in pressure cooking.

Manufacturers today claim that although pressure cookers, incorporating high safety standards, sell in respectable numbers, the public’s main resistance to them is the same as it was in Papin’s day: fear of an explosion.

Disposable Paper Cup: 1908, New England

The small waxed paper cup that serves so well as a disposable drinking glass and an individual ice cream container—to mention only two of its applications—originated out of one man’s frustrated attempts to market an unlikely product: a drink of water. The penny drink of water never achieved popularity, but the specially designed throwaway cup that held the water started an industry.

The paper cup story begins in 1908, when an enterprising inventor, Hugh Moore, produced a porcelain vending machine to dispense a cup of pure, chilled drinking water. Similar to the later glass-tank office cooler, Moore’s Penny Water Vendor had three separate compartments: an upper one for ice, a middle one for water, and a lower part to hold discarded cups. Each machine bore a sign stating that no sanitary cup was ever reused. Water was the commodity being sold, the cup an incidental.

In New York, the Anti-Saloon League immediately endorsed Moore’s water vendor. The League ran ads stating that each day thousands of parched men, desiring nothing stronger than a drink of water, were driven into saloons, where they were faced with “terrible temptation.” Water vending machines on public street corners was the path back to sobriety.

Several water vending machines were set up at transfer points of New York City trolley lines, but no one bought Moore’s water. Discouraged, Moore wondered if it was possible to save his newly formed American Water Supply Company of New England.

Opportunity appeared in the guise of a public health officer, Dr. Samuel Crumbine. In those days, people drank water in most public places not from individual glasses but from a tin sipper, which was seldom washed, never sterilized, and used indiscriminately by the diseased and the healthy. Dr. Crumbine had already begun an ardent crusade for a law banning public drinking sippers. The entrepreneuring Moore and the health-conscious Crumbine could help each other. There was a niche—a chasm—for the disposable paper cup.

Financial backing was hard to obtain. Everyone Moore approached scoffed at the thought of a disposable cup turning a profit, and most people disbelieved the health threat from communal tin sippers. Fortunately, Moore met a wealthy hypochondriac, a New York banker with a longtime dread of the sipper, who promptly invested $200,000 in the venture. Virtually overnight, in 1909, the American Water Supply Company of New England was reincarnated as the Public Cup Vendor Company.

The scientific climate for success could not have turned balmier. That same year, Kansas passed the first state law abolishing the sipper, concluding that “disease was communicated to well persons who drank from the same cup as did, for instance, tubercular persons.” And a biology professor at Lafayette College placed scrapings from several public sippers under a microscope and published a report on the alarming varieties of germs present.

State after state began passing laws prohibiting the use of communal sippers and recommending that individual drinking vessels be used in public places. Moore again changed his company’s name, this time to the Individual Drinking Cup Company. Railroads, schools, and offices started to buy disposable paper cups, which now were regarded as a symbol of health. “Health” became the public byword, and for a third time Moore renamed his company, to Health Kups. Today, we might be purchasing ice cream in Health Kups had Moore not eventually tired of that name and sought something with a less antiseptic ring.