Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (24 page)

Dixie Cup
. Hugh Moore’s neighbor in the building where he manufactured Health Kups was the Dixie Doll Company. One day in 1919, while attempting to dream up a catchy new name for his organization, Moore glanced at his neighbor’s sign and recalled a story he had heard as a boy.

In New Orleans before the Civil War, a bank note valued at ten dollars was called a
dix
, French for “ten.” Riverboat men referred to the notes as “dixies,” and they would announce that they were heading downriver “to pick up some dixies.” Etymologists believe this legend is the origin of the word “dixie,” as well as the sobriquet for the South, Dixie Land.

For Hugh Moore, Dixie had all the qualities he sought in a name. It had brevity and a symmetrical handsomeness in print, and it tripped easily off the tongue. Whereas Moore’s previous and short-lived company names had been calculated to capitalize on public sentiment, the Dixie Cup Company, the only one to arrive in a spontaneous rush of inspiration, survived.

The name change came just as the ice cream industry was seeking a way to increase Americans’ consumption of their product. Ice cream was sold only in bulk. A person could buy an individual soda, an individual candy bar, but ice cream only came in a package large enough to feed an entire family. Moore’s company perfected the two-and-a-half-ounce cup with a flat, pull-up lid fitting into a locking circumferential groove. It gave the industry, and ice cream lovers everywhere, the first individual-size servings.

The association between Hugh Moore’s cup and the dessert became so strong that by 1925, adults and children ordered individual prepackaged ice cream by the generic name Dixie Cup. Moore had finally hit on the right product with the right name, and had been in the right place at the right time.

Pyrex: 1915, Corning, New York

Etymologists, pursuing the ancient roots of contemporary words, often tell the tale that Pyrex, the heat-tempered glass, was named by its creator, Jesse Littleton, for the Greek word
pyra
, meaning “hearth.” Logical as that sounds, the remarkable glass actually derived its name from a much humbler source: the word “pie,” since the first Pyrex product to be manufactured by Corning Glass Works was a circular nine-inch pie plate.

It is a cake, though, not a pie, that begins the Pyrex story.

On a morning in 1913, Dr. Jesse Littleton arrived at his laboratory at the Corning Glass Works in Corning, New York, carrying a chocolate cake, which he offered to his co-workers. It was delicious, they acknowledged between bites, but cake for breakfast?

As Littleton later recounted, he said: “You fellows laughed at me when I suggested that you could cook in glass, so I’ve brought you first-hand evidence.” The previous evening, Littleton had sawed off the bowl-shaped bottom of a glass battery jar and asked his wife to bake a cake in it. The noncorrosive, heat-tempered glass had been developed in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century and had already found several industrial applications. But no one before Littleton had thought of baking in it.

Corning introduced the first line of Pyrex ovenware in 1916, and as if to convince scientific skeptics of the capabilities of tempered glass, one of
the earliest advertisements ran in
National Geographic
. The public, impressed by the novelty of baking in glass, purchased over 4.5 million Pyrex items in the year 1919 alone—despite the fact that this early glassware was thick, heavy, slightly discolored, and marred by numerous internal hairline cracks and bubble blisters.

But cooking involves more than baking, and Littleton realized that if Pyrex was to become a major contender in the cookware field, it would have to withstand the stove top’s open flame.

For more than a decade, technicians experimented with ways of strengthening the glass—for example, by rapid air-chilling, or by immersion in cold oil baths. After numerous failures, they hit on the technique of slightly altering the composition of the glass itself. Months of patient testing followed, in which Corning scientists boiled and fried more than eighteen thousand pounds of potatoes in glass vessels.

Finally, in 1936, Corning announced a line of flame-resistant Pyrex. Now glass utensils could be used for cooking as well as baking. The perfection of heat-tempered and flame-tempered ware laid the technical groundwork for a greater challenge: child-tempered, unbreakable dinnerware that had the look and feel of fine china. After years of experimentation, and tens of thousands of broken plates, the product debuted in 1970 as Corelle Ware.

Microwave Oven: 1952, United States

Microwave cooking can accurately be described as the first absolutely new method of preparing food since
Homo erectus’s
discovery of fire a million and a half years ago. The claim is justified by the fact that in microwave cooking there is no application of fire, or of a fiery element, direct or indirect, to the food. Pure electromagnetic energy agitates the water molecules in food, producing sufficient heat for cooking.

The electronic tube that produces microwave energy—a magnetron—was in use a decade before the birth of the microwave oven. It was the ingenious 1940 invention of Sir John Randall and Dr. H. A. Boot, perfected at England’s Birmingham University. The thoughts of the two scientists were focused not on how to roast a turkey but on how to cook the Nazis’ goose. For the magnetron was essential to Britain’s radar defenses during World War II.

Thoughts of cooking with the internal heat of microwaves did not occur until after the war years—and then entirely as a result of an accident.

One day in 1946, Dr. Percy Spencer, an engineer with Raytheon Company, was testing a magnetron tube when he reached into his pocket for a candy bar. He discovered that the chocolate had melted to a soft, gooey mess. Well aware that microwaves generate heat, he wondered if the candy had been critically close to radiation leaking from the tube. He’d sensed no heat. Too intrigued to be irritated over a pair of soiled trousers, he sent
out for a bag of popcorn kernels, placed them near the tube, and within minutes, kernels were popping over the laboratory floor.

The following morning, Spencer brought a dozen raw eggs to the laboratory. He cut a hole in a pot, placed an egg inside, and aligned the hole with the magnetron. A curious colleague, leaning a bit too close, ended up with egg on his face. Spencer immediately realized that the egg had cooked from the inside out, pressure having caused the shell to burst. If an egg could be cooked so quickly and unconventionally with microwaves, thought Spencer, why not other foods?

Raytheon set out to develop a commercial microwave oven, and within a few years announced the Radar Range—which in size more closely resembled a refrigerator, though its actual cooking space was quite modest. The Radar Range suffered from a problem characteristic of all electronic devices before the advent of microminiaturization: most of its bulk housed vacuum tubes, cooling fans, and a Medusan tangle of wires. Although some Radar Ranges sold to restaurants, from the consumer standpoint the product was unmemorable.

Not until 1952 could a home owner purchase a domestic microwave oven. Produced by the Tappan Company, the oven had two cooking speeds, an on-off switch, and a twenty-one-minute timer; it retailed for $1,295. Despite the steep price tag, the Tappan oven, and later the Hotpoint model, generated unprecedented enthusiasm at houseware shows throughout the ’50s. American homemakers had not yet become microwave cooking converts in large numbers, but sales of the ovens, year by year, had already begun the steady upward trend that has yet to abate.

Plastic: 1900, United States

In plastic’s early days, the product seemed at times like a science fiction movie prop. Plastic strainers washed in hot water twisted and curled. Plastic refrigerator storage bowls exposed to cold cracked open. Plastic trays for flatware melted and oozed in a sunny kitchen.

People complained that plastic was ersatz, and bad ersatz at that. In a way, they were right.

Plastic was actually developed as an inexpensive substitute for ivory. The plastics industry in America was born in 1868, when a serious shortage of ivory prompted a New England manufacturer of ivory billiard balls to offer a ten-thousand-dollar prize for a suitable substitute.

A young printer from Albany, New York, John Wesley Hyatt, met that challenge and won the prize with a product he christened Celluloid and registered as a trademark in 1872.

Hyatt did not actually develop Celluloid himself but acquired the British patent for it in 1868 from a Birmingham professor of natural science, Alexander Parkes. Around 1850, Parkes was experimenting with a laboratory chemical, nitrocellulose. Mixing it with camphor, he discovered that the compound formed a hard but flexible transparent material, which he called Parkesine. He teamed up with a manufacturer to produce it, but there was no market in the early 1850s for the thin, transparent plastic film—which in a short time would revolutionize still photography and give birth to the field of cinematography. Dr. Parkes was only too glad to sell patent rights for the useless novelty to John Hyatt.

Celluloid shirtfronts, cuffs, collars, and comb. Developed as a substitute for ivory, Celluloid ushered in the era of synthetic-fabric clothing such as acrylic sweaters, polyester pants, and nylon stockings
.

With his prize money, Hyatt began manufacturing ersatz-ivory billiard balls in Newark, New Jersey. But he almost immediately realized that Celluloid was too versatile a compound for only one application.

By 1890, Celluloid was a household word in America. Men shot Celluloid billiard balls while wearing high, “wipe-clean” Celluloid collars, cuffs, and shirtfronts. Women proudly displayed their Celluloid combs, hand mirrors, and jewelry. The elderly began to wear the first Celluloid dental plates, and children were playing with the world’s first Celluloid toys. Ivory had never enjoyed such popularity.

Celluloid was the world’s first plastic and its heyday was hastened by two monumental developments. American inventor George Eastman introduced Celluloid photographic film in his Kodak cameras in 1889, and then Thomas Edison conceived of Celluloid strips as just the thing to make motion pictures.

In any room-temperature application, the world’s first plastic performed admirably; the science fiction nightmares occurred only after manufacturers
introduced plastic into the extreme hot and cold temperatures of the kitchen.

A new plastics breakthrough, though, was just over the horizon: Bakelite, a seemingly indestructible material that could be produced in a rainbow of designer colors—and would lead to the development of nylon stockings and Tupperware.

Bakelite
. Celluloid was developed as an ivory substitute; Bakelite was conceived as a durable replacement for rubber, for when rubber was used on the handle of a frying pan, or as the head of an electrical plug for a toaster or an iron, it dried out and cracked. Bakelite’s creator, Leo Hendrik Baekeland, would become famous as the “father of plastics,” responsible for the modern plastics industry.

Born in Belgium in 1863 and trained in the latest organic chemistry techniques at the University of Ghent, Baekeland transformed everything he touched into an imaginative, practical marvel. One of his early triumphs after settling in Yonkers, New York, was a photographic paper that allowed the taking of pictures in indoor artificial light instead of the strong sunlight previously required. He sold the paper to George Eastman of Kodak in 1899 for three-quarters of a million dollars, confirming his faith in the opportunities available in America.

Equipping himself with an elaborate home laboratory, Baekeland began the search for a rubber substitute. A notebook entry in June 1907, commenting on a certain mixture of phenols, formaldehyde, and bases, reveals that he had hit upon something special: “solidified matter yellowish and hard…looks promising…it will be worth while to determine how far this mass is able to make moulded materials…. [It may] make a substitute for celluloid and for hard rubber.”

A later entry records: “I consider these days very successful work…. Have applied for a patent for a substance which I shall call Bakelite.”

Bakelite was the first in a long line of so-called thermoset plastics—synthetic materials that, having been shaped under heat and pressure, become rock hard and resistant to heat, acids, and electric currents. And the fact that it could be tinted in a variety of hues increased its popularity. In shades of black and deep brown, Bakelite became the handles of kitchen pots and pans, the heads of electrical plugs, and the dials of radios. And in the ’20s, Bakelite fit right in with the flowing lines and glossy finishes of art deco design. The toast of society as well as industry, Leo Hendrik Baekeland appeared on the cover of
Time
magazine in September 1924. Plastic, once the ugly duckling of the housewares industry, had become its darling.

With the chemistry gleaned from the development of Celluloid and Bakelite, a whole new lines of household products entered the marketplace. The everyday, commonplace products—all synthetic polymers—are notable because their raw materials are utterly original in history. Whereas man for 100,000 years had employed his innate ingenuity to shape nature’s
rocks, woods, and minerals into useful tools and utensils, with the start of the twentieth century he used his acquired learning to fashion long chains of molecules, called polymers, that were unknown to his predecessors, unavailable in nature, and probably unique in the five-billion-year life of the planet—if not in the fifteen-billion-year history of the universe.