Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (22 page)

Reynolds believed that lightweight, noncorrosive aluminum had a bright future, and soon his expanded company, Reynolds Metals, offered home owners an impressive list of firsts: aluminum siding and windows, aluminum boats, and a competitive line of aluminum pots, pans, and kitchen utensils. But the product that introduced most Americans to the benefits of aluminum was Reynolds’s 1947 breakthrough: 0.0007-inch-thick aluminum foil, a spin-off of the technological know-how he had acquired in over two decades of developing protective wraps.

Lightweight, nonrusting, nontoxic, paper-thin, the product conducted heat rapidly, sealed in moisture, and for refrigerating foods it was odorproof and lightproof. Homeware historians claim that few if any products this century were more rapidly and favorably welcomed into American homes than aluminum foil. In fact, the kitchen wrap, with its remarkable properties, is credited with winning Americans over to all sorts of other aluminum products.

Today aluminum has an almost unimaginable number of applications: in the space program; in the fields of medicine, construction, and communications; in the soft-drink and canning industries. Given the scientific convention of characterizing ages of technological development by reference to the predominant metal of the time—as with the Iron Age and the Bronze
Age—archaeologists centuries hence may identify the Aluminum Age, which dawned circa 1950, ushered in by the inhabitants of North America with a foil used in the ritual preservation of their foods.

Food Processor: 1947, England

No one could have predicted a decade earlier that the Cuisinart and scores of less expensive imitations would transform 1980s America into a food processor society. When the Cuisinart was unveiled at the Chicago Housewares Show in January 1973, the country’s department store buyers failed to see the machine as anything more than a souped-up blender with a high-class price tag. After all, blender sales then were near their all-time peak, and their price was at a then all-time competitive low.

In England and France, however, the food processor was already an invaluable kitchen appliance for many professional and amateur chefs. Designed by British inventor Kenneth Wood, and marketed in 1947 as the Robot Kenwood Chef, the first powerful machine came with a variety of fitted accessories: juice squeezer, pasta wheel, flour mill, can opener, slicer, shredder, mixer, mincer, and centrifuge. Wood’s versatile food processor, though, was not the prototype for the American Cuisinart. That would come from France.

In 1963, French inventor and chef Pierre Verdun introduced his own processor, the Robot-coup. It consisted of a cylindrical tank with an inner knife revolving close to the bottom and walls. The device was popular with professional chefs, and to tap the home market, Verdun created the more compact, streamlined Magimix in 1971.

That year, a retired electronics engineer from Connecticut, Carl Sontheimer, who was an amateur chef, was scouting a Paris housewares show in search of a spare-time project. Impressed with the compact machine that could grind, chop, mince, slice, puree, pulverize, mix, and blend, Sontheimer secured U.S. distribution rights and shipped a dozen processors to Connecticut.

At home, he analyzed the machine’s strengths and shortcomings, incorporated improvements, and turned each revamped device over to his wife for kitchen testing. Christening his best design Cuisinart, he readied it for the 1973 Chicago Housewares Show.

Undaunted by the Cuisinart’s tepid reception from houseware buyers, Sontheimer undertook a personal cross-country campaign to convince America’s best-known chefs and food writers of the machine’s potential. Sontheimer was not surprised that every person who took the time to test the Cuisinart became a food processor disciple, spreading the word by mouth, newspaper column, or magazine article. As sales steadily increased, competing manufacturers offered food processors with refinements and attachments, recalling the blender’s “Battle of the Buttons” era. By the late 1970s, the Cuisinart alone was selling at the rate of a half-million machines
a year. Blenders still sold in handsome numbers, but the food processor had, ironically, largely relegated the blender to Fred Waring and Stephen Poplawski’s original intention—mixing drinks.

Can Opener: 1858, Waterbury, Connecticut

It seems hard to believe that a half century elapsed between the birth of the metal can and the dawn of the first practical can opener. How, during those fifty years, did people open canned foods?

The can—or “tin cannister,” as it was first called—was developed in England in 1810 by British merchant Peter Durand and used to supply rations to the Royal Navy under a government contract. Though it was introduced as a means of food preservation in America as early as 1817, the can was virtually ignored until 1861, when the twenty-three Northern states of the Union fought the eleven Southern states of the Confederacy. The American Civil War, with its resultant need for preserved military rations, popularized the can in the United States the way the War of 1812 had done in Britain. By 1895, canned foods were a familiar sight on American grocery store shelves.

But despite Peter Durand’s great ingenuity in having devised canned foods, he overlooked entirely the need for a special device to get into a can. British soldiers in 1812 tore open canned rations with bayonets, pocket knives, or, all else failing, rifle fire. A can of veal taken on an Arctic expedition in 1824 by British explorer Sir William Parry carried the instructions: “Cut round on the top with a chisel and hammer.” In fact, some warfare historians make the earnest claim that the bayonet, first designed by a blacksmith in the French city of Bayonne, was intended for use not as a weapon but as a can opener.

Even the Englishman William Underwood, who in the early 1800s established in New Orleans America’s first cannery, saw no need to produce a special device for opening his product. His advice, standard for the day, was to employ whatever tools were available around the house.

Not all this oversight, however, was due to widespread stupidity on two continents. In truth, early cans were large, thick-walled, often made of iron, and sometimes heavier than the foods they contained; Sir William Parry’s can of veal weighed, when empty, more than a pound. Only when thinner cans of steel, with a rim round the top, came into general use, in the late 1850s, did a can opener have the possibility of being a simple device.

The first patented can opener (opposed to home tools and weapons) was the 1858 invention of Ezra J. Warner of Waterbury, Connecticut. Still, it was a cumbersome, forbidding device. Part bayonet, part sickle, its large curved blade was driven into a can’s rim, then forceably worked around its periphery. A slip could draw more than an ouch. American families, already adept at their own can-opening procedures, ignored Warner’s invention—which was kept from extinction only through its adoption by the U.S. military
(as a can opener) during the Civil War.

The can opener as we appreciate it today—with a cutting wheel that rolls round the can’s rim—was the brainchild of American inventor William W. Lyman, who patented the device in 1870. Revolutionary in concept and design, it won immediate acclaim, and in its long history underwent only one major improvement. In 1925, the Star Can Opener Company of San Francisco modified Lyman’s device by adding a serrated rotation wheel—named the “feed wheel,” since the can being opened rotated, for the first time,
against
the wheel. The basic principle continues to be used on modern can openers, and it was the basis of the first electric can opener, introduced in December 1931.

Thermos Bottle: 1892, England

The vacuum thermos bottle, a picnic plus, was developed not to maintain the temperature of hot coffee or iced lemonade but to insulate laboratory gases. It was a nineteenth-century scientific apparatus that found its way into twentieth-century homes.

“Dewar’s flask,” as it was called in the 1890s, was never patented by its inventor, the British physicist Sir James Dewar. He viewed his breakthrough vessel as a gift to the scientific community, and his original container is on display at London’s Royal Institute. As simple as the vacuum-walled thermos bottle is in principle, it was two hundred years in the making.

The insulating properties of a vacuum were understood in 1643 when Italian physicist Evangelista Torricelli invented the mercury barometer, forerunner of all thermometers. Early problems with the thermos involved maintaining the vacuum once it was created, and employing a thermally nonconductive material (like rubber, virtually unknown to most Europeans in the first half of the seventeenth century) to seal all points of contact between the inner and outer vessels.

James Dewar, in 1892, successfully constructed a container with insulated inner and outer glass walls sealing an evacuated space; and to further diminish heat transfer by radiation, he silvered the inner glass. Scientists used Dewar’s flask to store vaccines and serums at stable temperatures, and even to transport rare tropical fish. Dewar’s gift to the British scientific establishment would become his German assistant’s ticket to fortune.

Laboratory vacuum flasks were manufactured for Dewar by a professional glass blower, Reinhold Burger, partner in a Berlin firm specializing in glass scientific apparatus. It was Burger who realized the vacuum bottle’s broad commercial applications, and designing a smaller home version, with a metal exterior to protect the delicate glass walls (absent from Dewar’s model), he secured a German patent in 1903. Seeking a name for his flask, and hoping to drum up publicity at the same time, Burger promoted a contest, offering a cash prize for the most imaginative suggestion. The winning entry was Thermos, Greek for “heat.”

An American businessman, William B. Walker, traveling in Berlin in 1906, was impressed with the thermos and within three months was importing thermoses into the United States. Campers, hunters, and housewives purchased them so quickly that Walker secured German patent rights and set up his own manufacturing operation, the American Thermos Bottle Company of New York. A quart-size thermos sold for $7.50; the pint size for $5.00.

What contributed to the thermos’s rapid acceptance, say industry leaders, was the fact that the flasks were used and praised by notable men in history. President William Taft used a thermos in the White House; Sir Ernest Shackleton carried one to the South Pole; Lieutenant Robert Peary brought one to the North Pole; Sir Edmund Hillary took one up Mount Everest; and thermoses flew with the Wright brothers and Count Zeppelin. Pictured in the hands of prominent men, invariably commented upon in newspapers and in magazine articles on exploration, the thermos, without Madison Avenue’s assistance, received a tremendous amount of favorable press in a relatively short time. And from the American public’s standpoint, if a thermos was dependable enough to take to the farthest reaches of the globe, surely it would keep soup warm on a picnic.

Until July 1970, the word “Thermos” was a patented trademark. It was only after a lengthy court battle between rival manufacturers that the U.S. courts ruled that “thermos has become and is now a generic term in the English language.”

Toaster: 1910, United States

Ever since the Egyptians began baking bread, around 2600
B.C
., man has eaten toast, although the reasons for parching bread today are different from those of the past.

The Egyptians toasted bread not to alter its taste or texture but to remove moisture, as a form of preservation. Quite simply, a parched slice of bread, harboring fewer molds and spores, had a longer shelf life in the Egyptian kitchen.

For over four thousand years, people throughout the world toasted bread as the Egyptians had: skewered on a prong and suspended over a fire. Even the device that eighteenth-century Britons and Americans called a “toaster” was nothing more than two long-handled forks, crudely connected, that sandwiched the bread over the flames. Given the vagaries of the fireplace, each slice of toast was guaranteed a unique appearance.

A contraption heralded in the nineteenth century as a toasting revolution did not significantly alter the nonuniformity of slices of toast. Named the Toaster Oven, it was the first regularly manufactured toaster in America. Constructed as a cage of tin and wire, it sat over the opening in a coal-powered stove and held four slices of bread tilted toward the center. Rising heat from the fire gradually darkened one side of the bread, which was
watched diligently. Then the bread was turned over.

The arrival of electricity, and later of timers, changed all that.

Electric toasters appeared soon after the turn of the century—skeletal, naked-wire structures, without housing or shells. They lacked heat controls, so bread still had to be watched moment to moment. But the great advantage of the electric toaster was that in order to enjoy a slice of toast at any time of day, a person did not have to fire up the entire stove. This feature was prominently touted in the summer of 1910, in a Westinghouse advertisement in the
Saturday Evening Post
announcing the company’s electric model: “Breakfast without going into the kitchen! Ready for service any hour of the day or night.” The copy promised that by simply plugging a toaster into a wall socket, the owner could prepare toast in “any room in the home.” The luxury caught on; many wealthier families installed a toaster in each bedroom. These status symbols, selling for $8.95, still required that individual slices of bread be watched and flipped manually from side to side.

Pop-up Toaster
. This convenience had its beginning in a plant in Stillwater, Minnesota, where, during World War I, a master mechanic, Charles Strite, decided to do something about the burnt toast served in the company cafeteria. To circumvent the need for continual human attention, Strite incorporated springs and a variable timer, and he filed the patent for his pop-up toaster on May 29, 1919.

Receiving financial backing from friends, Strite oversaw production of the first one hundred hand-assembled toasters, which were shipped to the Childs restaurant chain. Every machine was returned, each requiring some sort of mechanical adjustment. The restaurants, however, which were in the volume toast business, loved the pop-up principle and waited patiently for Strite to iron out the bugs in his invention.