Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (26 page)

Luxury candles during the next century would be the glossy white beeswax candle from England; a hard, yellow vegetable tallow from China; and the green bayberry-scented candle from the northeastern coast of America.

Gaslight: 19th Century, England

Three thousand years ago, the Chinese burned natural gas to evaporate brine and produce salt. And in parts of Europe, early fire-worshiping tribes erected their temples around natural gas jets, igniting them to produce eternal flames.

But lighting homes with gas did not occur until the nineteenth century—about two hundred years after Belgian chemist Jan Baptista van Helmont first manufactured coal gas. A scientist and a mystic, who believed in the existence of a philosopher’s stone for transforming base metals to gold, Helmont bridged alchemy and chemistry. His work on coal gas encouraged the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier to consider lighting Paris streets with gaslamps; Lavoisier even constructed a prototype lamp in the 1780s. But before his plans could be carried out, he was guillotined during the French Revolution.

Not until the world’s first gas company was established in London in 1813 did home gaslamps become a reality. Advances were rapid. German scientist Robert von Bunsen diminished the annoying flickering of a pure gas flame by premixing gas with air. And to greatly intensify gas’s illumination, a student of Bunsen’s developed the gas mantle in 1885. Constructed of thread dipped in thorium and cerium nitrate, the mantle, when initially
lit, had its thread consumed, leaving behind a skeleton of carbonized compounds, which glowed a brilliant greenish white. By 1860, gas illuminated homes, factories, and city streets. Gas was such a clean, efficient, inexpensive source of lighting that it seemed improbable that any other mode of illumination would, or could, replace the gaslamp.

Electric Light: 1878–79, England and America

Although Thomas Edison is rightly regarded as the father of the incandescent lamp, his was not the first. British inventors had been experimenting with electric lights more than a half century before Edison perfected his bulb.

The basis of the incandescent lamp is a filament, in an evacuated glass chamber, that glows white-hot when current is passed through it. Inventor Joseph Swan in England, and Edison in the United States, both hit on the idea of using carbon for the filament. Swan patented his lamp in 1878; Edison registered his patent in 1879. Edison, though, in setting up a system of electric distribution, took the incandescent bulb out of the laboratory and into the home and street. The Pearl Street Power Station in New York City was the first to supply public electricity on consumer demand. By December 1882, 203 Manhattan customers, individuals and businesses, were living and working by the light from 3,144 electric lamps.

These privileged pioneers had to be satisfied with an average bulb life of only 150 hours (compared with 2,000 hours today). But by early 1884, Edison had perfected a 400-hour bulb, and two years later, one that burned for 1,200 hours.

The electric lamp, despite its great convenience, had a slow start. People were curious; they flocked to demonstrations to observe a bulb glowing, but few home owners ordered electric installation. After seven years of operation, the Edison company had gone from 203 customers to 710. But the electric bulb was an invention that could not fade away. Although electric rates began decreasing, it was favorable word of mouth, from home owners and businesses that tried electric illumination, that generated a snowballing of orders. At the turn of the century, ten thousand people had electric lights. Ten years later, the number was three million and climbing.

As for Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan, they sued each other for patent violation, but eventually joined forces and cofounded an electric company.

Neon Light
. A colorless, odorless, tasteless gas, deriving its name from the Greek
neos
, meaning “new,” neon was discovered in 1898 by two English chemists, William Ramsay and Morris Travers. They puzzled at the gas’s natural red-orange glow and attempted to alter its color chemically. But it was a Frenchman, physicist Georges Claude, who perfected the neon tube in 1909 and used it the following year to illuminate the Grand Palace in Paris. Claude demonstrated that employing a gas, rather than a rigid,
fixed filament, enabled neon bulbs to glow regardless of their length or configuration.

Neon’s advertising value was quickly appreciated. A publicist, Jacques Fonseque, persuaded Claude to prepare a line of tubing that proclaimed the name of a client’s business. In 1912, the first neon sign blazed on Paris’s Boulevard Montmartre. It read (in French), “The Palace Hairdresser,” and glowed a red orange. Only later did scientists discover that by altering the gas and placing powders inside the tube, they could produce a full spectrum of colors.

Fluorescent Tube
.
After nearly sixty years of lighting American homes, the incandescent bulb encountered in the 1930s its greatest rival: the strip light or fluorescent lamp. The battle between the two bulbs would in the end turn out to be a near draw, with both fixtures sometimes illuminating the same room in the house. The fluorescent’s harsher, less flattering glare would win out in the bathroom; the incandescent’s frosted softness would prevail in the bedroom; and in the kitchen, the tube and the bulb would often share honors.

The first attempt at producing fluorescence was made by the French physicist Antoine-Henri Becquerel, discoverer of radioactivity in uranium. As early as 1859, he coated the inside of a glass tube with a chemical—a phosphor—which fluoresced under electric current. Many scientists began work along the same lines, and soon dozens of gases and minerals were known to glow in an electric field. It was this research that led Ramsay and Travers to discover neon.

The first effective fluorescent lamp was developed in the United States in 1934, by Dr. Arthur Compton of General Electric. Operated by lower voltages, the tube was more economical than the incandescent bulb; and where the incandescent bulb could waste up to 80 percent of its energy in generating heat, not light, the fluorescent tube was so energy-efficient that it was named a “cold light.”

Many people glimpsed their first fluorescent light at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, where General Electric had white and colored tubes on display. Within fifteen years, the fluorescent light slightly edged out the incandescent bulb as the chief source of electric lighting in the United States. The victory was due not to home owners’ preference for fluorescent’s eerie glow, but to businesses’ desire to cut lighting costs in the workplace.

Flashlight
.
The utilitarian flashlight originated as a turn-of-the-century novelty item known as the “electric flowerpot.” Had the American public enthusiastically purchased electric flowerpots, the flashlight might have been a longer time coming.

When Russian immigrant Akiba Horowitz arrived in New York in the 1890s, he Americanized his name to Conrad Hubert and landed a job with Joshua Lionel Cowen, the man who would one day create Lionel trains.
Cowen had already invented and abandoned an electric doorbell (people complained of the unacceptability of its protracted ring) and an electric fan (which threw a slight breeze); when he hired Conrad Hubert, Cowen had just perfected the electric flowerpot. It consisted of a slender battery in a tube with a light bulb at one end. The tube rose up through the center of a flowerpot and illuminated a plant.

Hubert believed in the commercial potential of the electric flowerpot and convinced his boss to sell him patent rights. When the novelty failed to attract buyers, Hubert found himself with a large overstock. Attempting to salvage a portion of his investment, he separated the lights from the pots, lengthened the design of the cylinder, and received his own U.S. patent for a “portable electric light.”

The convenient light which, with a flick of the wrist, could be flashed in any direction sold so well that Conrad Hubert started the Eveready Flashlight Company. When he died in 1928, Hubert was able to leave a gift of six million dollars to charity.

As for Joshua Lionel Cowen, he expressed no bitterness. For after a long line of failed inventions, he, too, struck it rich. He redesigned the small motor of the almost breezeless fan and placed it in a set of miniature trains.

Vacuum Cleaner: 1901, England

In 1898, an aspiring young inventor, H. Cecil Booth, attended an exhibition at London’s Empire Music Hall, where an American was demonstrating a new “dust-removing” machine. A metal box topped with a bag of compressed air, the device forced air down into a carpet, causing dirt and dust to billow up into the box.

Booth was unimpressed. A lot of dust missed the box and resettled on the carpet. Questioning the inventor about the possibility of sucking up dust instead, Booth was told that many people had tried but none had succeeded.

Booth thought about suction for several days. Then, as he later wrote of his own invention, “I tried the experiment of sucking with my mouth against the back of a plush seat in a restaurant in Victoria Street.” He choked violently on dust but was inspired.

The secret, Booth realized, would be to find the right kind of filtering bag to pass air and trap dust. At home, he lay on the floor and, with various kinds of fabrics over his lips, experimented. Dust seemed to be collected nicely by a tightly woven cloth handkerchief. He patented his suction cleaner in 1901.

That first commercial vacuum cleaner was huge, the size of a modern refrigerator. With a pump, a dust-collecting chamber, and the power unit, it had to be transported on a dolly, pulled along London streets from an office to a theater to a private home. To operate the cleaner, one man steered the dolly while another manned the long, flexible hose. Even when
the first home models were later constructed, two people would still be required to operate them—usually the housewife and a daughter.

The vacuum cleaner greatly improved sanitation and health. Tons of germ-laden dust were removed from theater seats, from home and shop floors. One of Booth’s first assignments was to vacuum the vast blue expanse of carpet in Westminster Abbey for the 1901 coronation of Edward VII. The church’s cleaning staff gaped in disbelief at the quantity of hidden dust extracted by Booth’s machine.

During World War I, Booth received a commission to haul several of his vacuum machines to the Crystal Palace, the famous pavilion of London’s 1851 exhibition. Naval reserve men quartered in the building were falling sick and dying from spotted fever. Doctors, helpless to halt the contagion, suspected that germs were being inhaled on dust particles. For two weeks, fifteen of Booth’s machines sucked up dust from the floors, walls, staircases, and girders of the building; twenty-six truckloads of it were carted away and buried. The vacuum cleaner put an end to the spotted-fever epidemic.

Among early commercial vacuum cleaners in America, at least two—Regina and Hoover—were particularly notable for their quality and success. Each trade name became a household word, and each cleaner originated in its inventor’s desperate effort to survive: one, a failing business; the other, failing health.

Regina
. In 1892, a German immigrant and manufacturer of music boxes, Gustave Brachhausen, opened the Regina Music Box Company in Rahway, New Jersey. The hand-crafted items were exquisite and the company prospered, employing at one point 175 technicians and tallying annual sales of two million dollars. Regina, in fact, developed a monopoly on American-made music boxes and even exported them to Europe.

Only five miles from the Rahway factory, Thomas Edison had invented the phonograph, which was already beginning to replace the music box as a source of entertainment in America’s homes. Regina’s fortunes started to slide. Brachhausen, in a frantic attempt to remain solvent, manufactured player pianos one year, printing presses another, and he even challenged Edison head-on with a line of phonographs. But the device that finally saved the Regina Music Box Company was a vacuum cleaner. The Regina Vacuum Cleaner Company made its last music box in 1919.

Hoover Portable
.
Versions of H. Cecil Booth’s vacuum machine were in use in the United States during the early years of this century, some of them superior in design. They were a luxury enjoyed by the wealthy, and their operation required two servants. The idea for a small, handy portable model came to James Murray Spangler, an aging, unsuccessful inventor with a severe allergy to dust.

In 1907, debts forced Spangler to accept a position as janitor of a department store in Canton, Ohio. The store seemed to have miles of rugs
and carpeting to be cleaned, and the dust stirred up by the mechanical sweeper issued to Spangler set off paroxysms of sneezing and coughing. He could not afford to quit. With necessity motivating invention, Spangler began to experiment with devices for “dustless cleaning.”

His first makeshift vacuum used an old electric fan motor placed atop a soap box, which had its cracks sealed with adhesive tape. The dust bag was a pillow case. Spangler patented that invention in the spring of 1908 and with loans from friends formed the Electric Suction Sweeper Company. His finances remained shaky until he sold a cleaner to Susan Hoover, the wife of a prosperous Ohio executive who manufactured leather goods and automobile accessories.

Mrs. Hoover was impressed with the machine. So, too, was her husband, William, who had been contemplating expanding his business. Before the close of 1908, William Hoover had permanently solved Spangler’s financial problems by purchasing rights to manufacture the suction sweeper. In one corner of Hoover’s leather goods factory, three technicians assembled five vacuum cleaners a day.

To market the product, Hoover placed a two-page advertisement in the December 5, 1908, issue of the
Saturday Evening Post
. The copy offered readers the chance to use an electric suction sweeper for a free ten-day home trial. Hundreds of homemakers responded, and by letter Hoover notified each one that her trial sweeper was being delivered to a local merchant (whom he had yet to contact). Then he wrote to selected store owners, offering them a commission for every machine a home owner purchased. If a woman returned a machine, the merchant was entitled to keep it as a free sample. Store owners readily accepted the shipments of Hoover’s vacuum cleaners, and soon he had a nationwide network of dealers. James Spangler became Hoover’s superintendent of production.