How the Hot Dog Found Its Bun (20 page)

How cool was cellophane at the time? Composer Cole Porter, who was a rock star in his day, included it in his hit song “You’re the Top.” Porter called out cellophane alongside such top-notch wonders as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Mona Lisa’s smile, Mahatma Gandhi, and Napoleon Brandy. Proving that you shouldn’t scrutinize lyrics too closely, the verse went “You’re the National Gallery, you’re Garbo’s salary, you’re cellophane.” If you don’t think the thin film was worthy of such high praise (Garbo did make a lot back then), consider this: Along with its role in food storage, cellophane also inspired Sellotape (otherwise known as Scotch Tape) when a 3M engineer figured out a way to add adhesive to Brandenberger’s accidental discovery. But even if you disagree with Porter, it’s safe to say cellophane’s various uses sure beat a stain-fighting tablecloth.

CorningWare: Nuclear warheads

S. Donald Stookey was one of the biggest superstars in twentieth-century American science. His name appears on more than sixty patents and, in 1986, he received the National Medal of Technology from President Ronald Reagan for his uncanny ability to turn ideas into practical uses. He was so good that at one point during his career he decided he was tapped out of ideas and told executives at Corning, where he worked, that he planned to resign. Not wanting to lose Stookey, his bosses kept him on board by giving him a year off and an all-expenses-paid vacation around the world.

Yet, for all his talent, Stookey’s most famous discovery—CorningWare—was the product of nothing more than mistakes on a bad day in 1952. Stookey was working with a plate of photosensitive glass that he planned to heat up to 600°C. For some reason (maybe he was distracted) he didn’t keep a close eye on the experiment. When he returned to the furnace the temperature had risen to 900°C.

Stookey assumed he’d melted the glass and broken equipment. “I figured I had ruined the furnace,” he said in a 1986 interview. But he was astounded to see the glass was intact when he opened the oven. It just had a new white color to it.

He quickly got a pair of tongs to pull it out, but he bungled the pickup and the glass tumbled to the floor. Much to Stookey’s amazement, rather than breaking into a thousand pieces, it bounced around. “[I]t sounded like a piece of steel bouncing, so I figured something different must have happened,” he said.

Stookey had created a form of ceramic glass, dubbed Pyroceram, that seemed like something out of a comic book. It could be heated and cooled to mind-numbing temperatures and still keep its shape while neither rusting nor eroding.

While Corning historically had much success with ovenware—the company introduced Pyrex in 1915—Stookey’s invention was initially slated for another use. It was the height of the Cold War and improving the country’s ballistic missile arsenal was more important than coming up with a foolproof casserole dish. As a result, the Pyroceram was used in making noses for nuclear warheads. In 1958, Corning realized that there was enough of the glass to go around and began selling the ultrastrong material under the CorningWare imprimatur. They embossed the white dishes with what became its iconic blue cornflower. (Geek note: Cornflowers were apparently chosen because men in love in olden days supposedly wore them; in the 1950s one hopes that this didn’t mean that a good man purchased CorningWare as a show of amore.)

CorningWare was a wild hit as an indispensable kitchen item. Ads depicting food being cooked under extreme heat in one half of the cookware and, at the same time, being frozen on the other side successfully wooed customers. CorningWare’s success spurred a sales jump from $25 million when Stookey joined the company in 1940 to $1.7 billion near the end of his career in 1985. That kind of income could have surely sent Stookey on a few more around-the-world vacations.

Dishwashers: Klutzy maids

It may seem like one of the most obvious questions and answers. Question: Why would somebody invent a dishwasher? Answer: To clean dishes, stupid! In truth, you would be far from stupid if you thought cleanliness wasn’t the primary inspiration for the first commercially viable dishwasher.

At first glance Josephine Garis Cochrane would be an unlikely inventor. Cochrane was the wife of a wealthy Illinois politician when she decided to construct her earth-changing invention. As for her plates, cutlery, and glasses, there is nothing to suggest she wasn’t just fine with their cleanliness after they were hand washed. That said, Josephine did have a problem—the kind of problem only a rich woman might have.

Her issue was that the servants in the Cochrane’s 1880s household could get a little clumsy during washing. Increasingly, her beautiful china, some of which supposedly dated back to the seventeenth century, was getting chipped or (gasp) breaking in the hands of the help. She tried scrubbing them herself, but it was too much for her dainty disposition. So one day she stormed into the woodshed adjoining her stately home, rolled up her sleeves, and decided that no maid would ever damage her plates again!

At almost the same time, life would get a whole lot tougher for Mrs. Cochrane. Her husband William was sick when she resolved to make her contraption and died soon after. The tragedy gave her a more compelling reason than unchipped tea cups—let’s call it livelihood—to succeed. Still, her husband’s death also provided the financial ability to pursue her goal. She would apparently sink her $25,000 fortune into this task. (It’s worth noting that while nearly every account tells the story this way, an 1892
New York Sun
article claimed that she embarked on her dishwashing journey after her husband’s death and that she didn’t know “[e]xactly how or when [the idea] came.”)

Either way, Cochrane thankfully turned out to have a knack for the mechanical. Based on her lineage, this shouldn’t have been surprising as her great-grandfather earned a patent for an early steamboat design and her father was an engineer who devised a hydraulic pump for draining marshes. With the help of a friend who possessed some technical knowhow, Cochrane’s initial blueprints had rows of wire compartments that could hold plates, saucers and cups. These items were then fastened around the outside of a wheel located on a copper boiler, which shot out soapy water onto the soiled dinnerware. It wasn’t as fancy as a GE Profile, but it got the job done. Cochrane patented it in 1889 and the machine was the toast of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, capturing an award for “the best mechanical construction, durability, and adaptation to its line of work.”

Despite being conceptually impressive, the dishwasher was not an immediate hit with the paying public. One problem was that many households in the early twentieth century couldn’t generate enough scalding hot water to run the contraption. (Also hard water, which contains various dissolved minerals, couldn’t properly get the early soap sufficiently sudsy.)

A more interesting stumbling block had to do with Cochrane’s inspiration. The aristocratic inventor clearly saw dishwashing as a cumbersome chore. She and her company just assumed that middle class housewives would love the opportunity to cut it out of their workload. It turned out that such an assumption was as wrongheaded as thinking the original dishwasher was just about cleaning things. A 1915 survey found that a majority of women truly loved washing dishes as a calming routine after a day full of more backbreaking tasks like cleaning laundry.

Undeterred, Cochrane’s company (which would ultimately merge with the folks who made KitchenAid appliances) would change tack. As hot water became more plentiful, they sold the dishwasher on its ability to use water too hot to be handled by hand. Advertising for the machine heralded that not only did this clean dishes better, but it also killed more germs. Still, it wasn’t until the postwar era of convenience that the dishwasher became a worldwide phenomenon and the everyday woman learned to value the autonomy that comes from machine-washed dinnerware.

Linoleum: Bedroom paint can

If you’ve been to your grandmother’s home or watched reruns of classic shows like
Leave it to Beaver
or
Happy Days
, you’re bound to have come across linoleum. The once-ubiquitous floor covering—popular because it was durable and relatively easy to clean—became commonplace in American kitchens in the early and mid-twentieth century.

In the 1840s, chemists were laboring to invent a substance that could do what linoleum would eventually offer. A sturdy rug-like material called “floorcloth” was already popular among the wealthy, but a more comprehensive flooring was proving elusive. Some came up with options, but they always proved too costly or not quite right. In the mid-1850s, Frederick Walton may have been aware of some of these experiments. The son of a successful engineer in Manchester, England, Walton had conducted his own scientific investigations—though in a different area (he’d patented a rubber item that could be used in the process of making cotton).

Walton’s life would dramatically shift directions due to the odd fact that he kept a can of paint in his bedroom. History doesn’t explain why he did this (maybe he was inspired by the fumes or wanted to be ready for that special moment when he’d get the call to be handy). Whatever the case, the can made all the difference. One day he entered his bedroom and noticed a thin film had formed on the top of the paint. His mind began to wander as he peeled the rubbery substance away. Thinking the dried linseed oil–based paint might make a good waterproofing substance, he began doing research. In 1860 he earned his first patent for linoleum.

Not everyone was initially enthused by his discovery. Wrote Walton in his autobiography: “[F]ull of my imaginative impulse and really believing that I was in possession of something of importance, I said to my Father, ‘I intend to go to London and make my fortune.’ He replied somewhat sarcastically, ‘I suppose you think you may become Lord Mayor of London.’ ”

Walton didn’t rise to political prominence, but he did become a successful manufacturer of his new flooring, which was also known as “resilient floor.” Its combination of oxidized linseed oil with cork dust and resin on a flax backing quickly spread throughout England. (Geek note: Linoleum was named for a Latin combination of
linum
(flax) and
oleum
(oil).)

But it took another unforeseen turn to get linoleum into the homes of the Beav, the Fonz, and everyone else on the US side of the Atlantic. America became a fan of the material, in large part, because of a former Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, clerk named Thomas Armstrong. At twenty-four years old, Armstrong was ambitious and wanted more than just working for a bottle manufacturer. In 1860 he decided to take on a partner and invest his life savings into a $300 machine that made cork stoppers. Initially, he kept his post at the bottle company just in case, but after a while the business thrived, becoming the world’s largest cork company by the mid-1890s. All went well for years, until the rise in popularity of the mason jar (with its screw-on lid) began killing Armstrong’s business.

Armstrong was forced to come up with an alternative for his beloved cork. He must have been thrilled when he came across linoleum, which required a lot of his product. He threw his business in that direction and, in 1909, the company began selling its own brand of the flooring. While there were other American linoleum manufacturers at the time, it was the Armstrong company’s aggressive advertising and bright designs that propelled the surface material to popularity in the United States. Initially it was used throughout buildings, but thankfully for those who question the depths of linoleum’s aesthetic value, it eventually became the primary domain of kitchens and bathrooms.

Matches: Unplanned friction

The greatest accidental discovery in the world of food (and beyond) has to be fire. Though there is no written history on this one, it’s likely a caveman—or woman—saw a flash of lightning strike a tree or an animal, creating a flame, and, praise be, humanity realized there was an element that could keep you warm and cook your meat. At some early point, these far-off ancestors figured out how to control this magic substance by creating sparks and utilizing tinder and flint. Sizzling steaks for everyone!

But improving on this early fire creation was something that took thousands of years to do. The Romans used sulfur to help in the laborious process of getting a stone to start a fire and the Chinese also employed a match forerunner. In the seventeenth century, scientists discovered that phosphorous combined with sulfur was an even better combination for easily sparking a flame. The problem: It was nearly impossible to control.