How the Hot Dog Found Its Bun (21 page)

A friction match, a small stick of wood that could be set alight in a maintainable manner by simply rubbing it against an object, was needed to ease the process of fire-starting. John Walker, a chemist and druggist from the northern English town of Stockton-upon-Tees, likely knew this. He’d been described as a “walking encyclopedia” by contemporaries, and supposedly only went into what was the precursor to the pharmacy business because, although he was trained as a surgeon, he was a bit squeamish about blood.

The most whimsical story about how Walker happened upon the first friction match in the mid-1820s has him using a stick to mix a brew featuring (for a reason lost in time) such fun chemicals as antimony sulfide, potassium chlorate, gum, and starch. These elements annoyingly coalesced together at the end of the piece of wood. Wanting to clean off his stick, he rubbed it against a hard surface and from it sprung a nice controlled flame. A more likely explanation may have been a bit more bumbling. An 1851 northern English journal simply put it this way: “By the accidental friction on the hearth of a match dipped in the mixture, a light was obtained.”

Walker knew what he’d found. In 1827, he began selling a small box of fifty of his matches with a piece of sandpaper. He named his invention “Congreves” after a rocket developed by Sir William Congreve earlier in the century (still, they were often known as “Lucifer matches”).

One thing Walker didn’t do was patent his invention and within a decade of his discovery others were claiming to be its creator. In France, Dr. Charles Sauria was even bestowed with a medal in 1831 for his form of friction match. (Sauria’s kind used white phosphorous, which did cut down on the smell produced by Walker’s Congreves.)

Still, I’m not sure anyone would want to take too much credit for the original friction match. The chemicals employed in their production were highly dangerous. Interaction with white phosphorous could lead to a number of fatal bone disorders. There were horrible stories of small children getting ahold of matches and becoming gravely ill after sucking on them.

It wasn’t until the 1844 invention of safety matches—which got rid of white phosphorous and placed many of the necessary chemicals on the striking surface rather than the match—that society could really enjoy the warm glow of the fire-inducing stick.

Microwaves: Melting candy bar

The venerated scientist Louis Pasteur once said, “In the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind.” If ever there was a man who embodied the spirit of Pasteur’s words it was microwave inventor Percy L. Spencer. He was a man who was always ready because his background gave him little margin for error.

Born in 1894 in the remote rural community of Howland, Maine, Spencer faced hardship from the beginning. His father died when he was just eighteen months old and his mother left him not long after. His aunt and uncle took over rearing duties, but, again, tragedy struck: His uncle passed away when Spencer was just seven years old.

Focusing on education was not an option. Spencer left school at the age of twelve to work at a spool mill. A naturally curious person, Spencer would not be consigned to a drab life in a factory. Four years later he got a job as one of three men installing electricity in the local paper mill. It didn’t matter he knew nothing about the process; he simply applied a trial-and-error approach to get the plant up-and-running with electricity. In 1912 when the
Titanic
sunk, he was captivated by the story of the ship’s wire operator’s efforts to get word to rescue ships. Spencer joined the navy and vowed to learn about the newfangled technology. He read textbooks at night during guard duty to get up to speed.

After his hitch in the navy, he went to work at a wireless company where he was renowned for staying up all night trying to figure out how things worked. This approach, which Spencer called “solving my own situation,” eventually landed him at Raytheon, Inc. At the start of World War II, the British were trying to develop radar that could help track Nazi aircraft—particularly at night. The key to their efforts was something called “magnetron tubes,” which were used for the radar’s microwave system. Spencer listened intently when the British explained how they were having problems with the construction of the tubes and came up with a solution that increased production dramatically and earned Raytheon a huge contract.

All this was a prelude to his biggest invention. One day in 1946, Spencer, who by now was running a division with approximately 5,000 employees, went to do an ordinary check on some of his tubes. As he attentively did his rounds, he noticed something heating up in his pocket. It was a peanut candy bar and it was beginning to melt. According to a 1958
Reader’s Digest
article, Spencer wasn’t the first scientist at Raytheon to experience the melting phenomenon near the magnetron tubes, but his prepared mind made him the first to seriously investigate why it was happening.

To further test the tubes, Spencer sent an assistant out to a local store to pick up a bag of popcorn kernels. He exposed the bag to a magnetron and the popcorn burst out of the container light and fluffy. For any couch potato who has used the microwave solely for quick-popping before a game on TV, you can now say you’re following in the footsteps of greatness.

Spencer would continue his work on what he dubbed the “radar range,” constructing a prototype for $100,000. Needless to say, at that cost, suburban families weren’t lining up to buy one. Prices began coming down in the 1950s, with a company called Tappan rolling out a home option in 1955 for a still-pricey $1,295. With so few on the market, manufacturers had a hard time getting food makers to use packaging appropriate for microwaves (for example, they couldn’t stop tinfoil packaging, which we know is a microwave no-no). But over time, as more and more married couples found both partners busy in the workforce, the speed and ease of the microwave caused change. In 1967 approximately 10,000 magnetron ovens were sold; by 1975 that number reached 840,000. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, more than 93 percent of all kitchens had a microwave.

Despite nothing more than a grammar school education, Spencer changed the way Americans eat by paying attention to an accidentally melting candy bar. As one M.I.T. scientist told
Reader’s Digest
, “The educated scientist knows many things won’t work. Percy doesn’t know what can’t be done.”

Paper Towels: Mistaken delivery

Clarence and E. Irvin Scott were extremely shrewd businessmen. After starting humbly in 1879 pushing a street cart around Philadelphia selling scratch pads, wrapping paper, and paper bags to merchants, the brothers boldly entered an industry that truly unnerved the sensibilities of most of their Victorian-era brethren: toilet paper. Not only did they make the concept palatable to the masses by pressing the health benefits of the disposable tissue but they also invented the toilet roll, which made using the soft paper all the easier.

No doubt, inventing the toilet paper roll should put the Scotts in some sort of pantheon, but the family wasn’t done with just that wonderful creation. Business acumen did not skip a generation in the Scott clan as E. Irvin’s son Arthur was every bit as nimble as his father and uncle when it came to making the most of paper products.

With the company humming along in 1907, Arthur was forced to clean up a big mistake. One day his suppliers sent along a large shipment of paper that was wholly inappropriate for bathroom use. As
Time
magazine explained in 1938, the company had received “a carload of paper too crunchy for toilet use.” Arthur immediately knew this wouldn’t do. After all, the company focused intently on quality. They would later spend heavily on ad campaigns touting this fact, including one stressing the “harsh tissue dangers” of competitors and another featuring a little girl complaining about an alternative brand that “scratches awful, mummy.”

As a result, the initial inclination was to simply send it back. But Arthur remembered a story he’d heard about a local teacher who during a major flu epidemic wanted to do away with cloth towels at her school because she found them too unhygienic. Instead of complaining to his supplier, Arthur opted to keep the crunchy paper. He added perforations and wrapped it around one of his magic cardboard rolls (albeit a little longer than the toilet paper type).

At this point, he wasn’t thinking about the kitchen. Instead, he saw his invention’s public applications. He dubbed the new rolls “SaniTowels” and sold them to schools, hotels, railroad stations, and restaurants as a more sanitary way to dry hands after a bathroom pit stop. Interestingly, despite the Scotts’ great acumen, the paper towel didn’t migrate to the kitchen until 1931—four years after Arthur’s untimely death at age fifty-one. Renamed “ScotTowels” (now known as Scott Paper Towels), these rolls of 200 sheets sold at a reasonable twenty-five cents, making it as easy to keep the kitchen clean as the company’s toilet paper made it simple to keep a person’s . . . well, you get the picture.

Saran Wrap: After-hours lab worker

Saran Wrap inventor Ralph Wiley deserves a prize for making the most out of a mundane job. In 1933 Wiley, a bright guy in his early twenties, had a really blah gig. He was responsible for cleaning laboratory glassware at Dow Chemical Company. One evening the monotony of the work was broken up by an odd discovery. No matter how hard he tried, he simply couldn’t get one of the beakers clean.

Now, many low-rung workers might have just hidden or thrown away the beaker. After all, who counts them all? But Wiley was intrigued. He found out that the film was a by-product of a substance used in dry cleaning bearing the tongue-twisting name
perchloroethylene.
Wiley’s interest was further piqued when he couldn’t find a single chemical that could break it down.

Despite his excitement at turning his washing role into something bigger (he would go on to be a longtime Dow research scientist), Wiley wasn’t really sure what to do with his find. Showing his age, he dubbed his glass-cleaning discovery “eonite”
after an indestructible material featured in the
Little Orphan Annie
comic strip. At the time, the substance was not the type of material you’d wrap food in. Called polyvinylidene chloride by more serious Dow employees, it was smelly, greasy, and sported an ugly green hue.

At first, Wiley, who wasn’t enthusiastic about the substance’s prospect as a film, broke down the plastic material into fibers. Dow found a use for it in this form as part of car seat covers. But this product ended up being a loser because the fibers built up too much static electricity, shocking passengers. Next up, one of his bosses considered adding it to the construction of battery casings because it was resistant to acids. That idea didn’t pan out either. Wiley grew so attached to his eonite that when Dow bigwigs considered dropping research on it because the material wasn’t paying big dividends, Wiley threatened to quit.

His ploy worked and after ten years of tinkering with it, Dow finally found a decent application. A film was created and sold to the military during World War II. The wrap proved to be a handy way to bind equipment being transported by sea, protecting it from the corrosion of sea water.

But the military success didn’t save Wiley’s pride and joy for long. After the war, Dow sold the film to two former employees who set up a new business called the Saran Wrap Company. These guys helped refine Saran Wrap into its thin, clear (odor-free) form, and by 1949 they were marketing it for kitchen use. “It sold like hotcakes because women liked to put it over bowls,” Wiley told a journalist in 1994. No fools, Dow execs bought back Saran Wrap a few years later, turning it into a huge profit maker.