Made In America (20 page)

When George Westinghouse's novel and, in retrospect, superior alternating current electrical system began to challenge the direct current system in which Edison had invested much effort and money, Edison produced an eighty-three-page booklet entitled A
Warning! From The Edison Electric Light Co.
filled with alarming (and possibly fictitious)
tales of innocent people who had been killed by coming in contact with Westinghouse's dangerously unreliable AC cables.
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To drive home his point, he paid neighbourhood children twenty-five cents each to bring him stray dogs, then staged elaborate demonstrations for the press at which the animals were dampened to improve their conductivity, strapped to tin sheets and slowly dispatched with increasing doses of alternating current.
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But his boldest – and certainly tackiest – public relations exercise was to engineer the world's first electrical execution using his rival's alternating current in the hope of proving once and for all its inherent dangers. The victim selected for the exercise was one William Kemmler, an inmate at Auburn State Prison in New York, who had got himself into this unfortunate fix by bludgeoning to death his girlfriend. The experiment was not a success. Strapped into an electric chair with his hands immersed in buckets of salt water, Kemmler was subjected to 1,600 volts of alternating current for fifty seconds. He gasped a great deal, lost consciousness and even began to smoulder a little, but conspicuously he failed to die. Not until a second, more forceful charge was applied did he finally expire. It was a messy, ugly death and wholly undermined Edison's intentions. Alternating current was soon the norm.

Of linguistic interest is the small, forgotten argument over what to call the business of depriving a person of his life by means of a severe electrical discharge. Edison, always an enthusiast for novel nomenclature, variously suggested
electromort, dynamort
and
ampermort
before seizing with telling enthusiasm on
to westinghouse,
but none of these
caught on. Many newspapers at first wrote that Kemmler was to be
electrized,
but soon changed that to
electrocuted
and before long
electrocution
was a word familiar to everyone, not least those on death row.

Edison was to be sure a brilliant inventor, with a rare gift for coaxing genius from his employees, but where he truly excelled was as an organizer of systems. The invention of the light-bulb
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was a wondrous thing, but of not much practical use when no one had a socket to plug it into. Edison and his tireless workers had to design and build the entire system from scratch, from power stations to cheap and reliable wiring, to lamp-stands and switches. In this he left Westinghouse and all other competitors standing.

The first experimental power plant was built in two semi-derelict buildings on Pearl Street, lower Manhattan, and on 4 September 1882 Edison threw a switch that illuminated, if but faintly, 800 flickering bulbs all over southern Manhattan. With incredible speed electric lighting became the wonder of the age.
⁴²
Within months Edison had set up no fewer than 334 small electrical plants all over the world. Cannily he put them in places where they would be sure to achieve maximum impact: on the New York Stock Exchange, in the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago, La Scala opera house in Milan, the dining-room of the House of Commons in London. All this made Edison, and America, immensely rich. By 1920 it was estimated that the industries spawned by his inventions and business pursuits – from electric lighting to motion pictures
– were worth an aggregate $21.6 billion. No other person did more to make America an economic power.
⁴³

Edison's other great innovation was the setting up of a laboratory with the express purpose of making technological breakthroughs with commercial potential. Before long many leading corporations, notably AT&T, General Electric and DuPont, were doing the same. Practical science, elsewhere the preserve of academics, had become in America the work of capitalists.

As the nineteenth century progressed and small companies grew into mighty corporations, the new breed of magnates required increasingly grand and imposing headquarters. Fortunately, their need for office space coincided with the development of a radical type of building: the skyscraper. Before the 1880s, buildings of more than eight or nine storeys were impracticable. Such a structure, made of brick, would require so much support as to preclude openings for windows and doors on the lower floors. However, a number of small innovations and one large one suddenly made skyscrapers a practical proposition. The large innovation was curtain walling, a cladding of non-weight-bearing materials hung on a steel skeleton, which made tall buildings much easier to build.

Skyscraper
had existed in English since 1794, but had been applied to any number of other things: a top hat, a high popup in early baseball, the loftiest sail on a merchant ship. It was first applied to a building in 1888 (though
skyscraping building
was used four years earlier), and not in New York, as one might expect, but in Chicago. Throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century Chicago led the world in the engineering of large structures, and for one very good reason: it had burned down in 1871. The first skyscraper was the Home Insurance Building in Chicago, built in 1883-5, and soon followed by the Leiter Building (1889), the
Reliance Building (1894), and the Carson, Pirie, Scott Building (1899). Soon skyscrapers were transforming
cityscapes
(an Americanism of 1850) all across the nation and so altering people's way of looking at cities as to give new meaning to the word
skyline,
which originally was a synonym for horizon but took on its modern sense in 1896.

If Chicago was the birthplace of the skyscraper, New York soon became its spiritual home. The city's first skyscraper, the twenty-two-storey New York World Building, opened in 1890 and soon Manhattan was gleaming with tall towers – the Pulitzer Building of 1892 (309 feet), the Flatiron Building (1903; 285 feet), Times Tower (1904; 362 feet), Singer Building (1908; 600 feet), Metropolitan Life Tower (1909; 700 feet), and finally the Woolworth Building, built in 1913 and soaring to 792 feet.
⁴⁴

With 58 floors and space for 14,000 workers, the Woolworth Building seemed unsurpassable – and for seventeen years it remained the world's tallest building. Not until 1930 was the Woolworth Building displaced by the Chrysler Building, which with 77 storeys and a height of 1,048 feet was nearly half as big again. The Chrysler Building was only planned to be 925 feet tall, but at the same time a rival developer began work on a building at 40 Wall Street that was planned to be two feet higher. In order not to be beaten, the Chrysler Building's architect, William Van Alen, hastily and secretly designed the 123-foot-high art deco spire that remains to this day the building's glory. The spire was assembled inside the building and hoisted triumphantly into place just as 40 Wall Street was being completed.
⁴⁵
The Chrysler Building's undisputed eminence was painfully short-lived. Before it was even completed work had begun on a more ambitious project on Fifth Avenue, on the site of the original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. There the Empire State Building began to rise. When completed the following year it soared 1,250 feet and 102 storeys, a record that would stand
for forty-three years until the erection of the 110-storey, 1,454-foot-high and heart-stoppingly ugly Sears Tower in Chicago in 1974.

Steel-frame construction and curtain walling made tall buildings possible, but they didn't make them necessarily usable. For that, countless secondary innovations were needed, among them the revolving door, without which draughts would be all but uncontrollable, heightening fire risks and making effective heating and cooling an impossibility, and, above all, swift, safe passenger lifts.

The lift was not, as is commonly supposed and even sometimes stated, the invention of Elisha Graves Otis. Hoists and lifts had been around for years when Otis sprang to fame in the late 1850s. Otis never pretended to have invented the lift. His contribution was merely to come up with a simple, reliable device – a spring mechanism with gripper cogs – that made vertical passenger travel safe. A born showman, Otis travelled the world giving demonstrations of the safety of his lifts. Standing in a heavily weighted lift, he would have himself hoisted thirty feet or so above the ground, and would then call to an assistant to cut the rope. The audience would gasp, but instead of crashing to the floor, the lift would merely drop an inch or so and stay there. He sold the devices by the hundreds. (Even so, early lifts were by no means foolproof. In 1911 the
New York Tribune
reported that in the previous two years at least 2,600 people had been injured or killed in lift accidents.)

Skyscrapers may have transformed the appearance of the American city, but they have done surprisingly little for it linguistically. According to several sources, the Flatiron Building in New York was responsible for the expression
twenty-three skiddoo,
the idea being that the curious angular geometry of the building created unusual draughts that lifted the skirts of women passing on Twenty-third Street, to such an extent that men began hanging out there in the hopes of
catching a glimpse of stockinged leg. And the police, in response, took to moving them on with the growled entreaty ‘Hey, you – twenty-three skiddoo!' Unfortunately, there is not a shred of evidence to support the story.
Skiddoo,
meaning ‘scram' or ‘scat', is known to have been the invention of the linguistically prolific cartoonist T. A. ‘Tad' Dorgan in the early years of this century, but how or why
twenty-three
became immutably associated with it is, like so much else, anybody's guess.

Soon after the Milwaukee Railroad began laying track across Washington state in the 1870s, a vice-president of the company was given the task of naming thirty-two new communities that were to be built along the line. Evidently not a man with poetry in his soul, he appears to have selected the names by wandering through his house and choosing whatever objects his eye happened to light on. He named the towns after everything from poets
(Whittier)
and plays
(Othello)
to common household foods
(Ralston
and
Purina).
One town he named
Laconia
’after what I thought was Laconia in Switzerland located high up among the Alps, but in looking over the Swiss map this morning I am unable to find a place of that name there’.
¹
Laconia was, in fact, a region of classical Greece, as well as a town in New Hampshire. Never mind. Wherever it was from, Laconia at least had a kind of ring to it, and was certainly better than being named for groceries.

This is by way of making the point that no people in modern history have been confronted with a larger patch of emptiness to fill with names than those who settled America, or have gone about it in more strikingly diverse ways. According to George R. Stewart, the greatest of American toponymists (that is, one who studies place names), as of
1970 America had probably 3.5 million named places, plus another million or so named places that no longer existed (among them, Purina and Laconia, Washington). There is almost nothing, it would appear, that hasn’t inspired an American place name at some time or other. In addition to breakfast foods and Shakespearean plays, Americans have had towns named for radio programmes (Truth or Consequences, New Mexico), towns named for cowboy stars (Gene Autrey, Oklahoma), towns named for forgotten heroes (Hamtramck, Michigan, named for a Major John Hamtramck), towns that you may give thanks you don’t come from (Toad Suck, Arkansas, and Idiotville, Oregon, spring to mind), at least one town named for a person too modest to leave his name (Modesto, California) and thousands upon thousands of others with more prosaic or boring etymologies (not forgetting Boring, Maryland).

The first colonists, as we noted earlier, were spared the immediate task of giving names to the land since much of the eastern seaboard was named already. But as they spread out and formed new settlements they had to arrive at some system for labelling unfamiliar landmarks and new communities. The most convenient device was to transfer names from England. Thus the older states abound in names that have counterparts across the sea: Boston, Dedham, Braintree, Greenwich, Ipswich, Sudbury, Cambridge and scores of others. An equally simple expedient was to honour members of the royal family, as with Charlestown, Jamestown, Maryland and Carolina. Many of these names, it is worth noting, were pronounced quite differently in the seventeenth century. Charlestown, Massachusetts, was ‘Charlton’. Jamestown was ‘Jimston’ or even ‘Jimson’ – a pronunciation preserved in
jimson weed,
a poisonous plant found growing there in alarming quantities.
²
Greenwich was pronounced ‘grennitch’, but over time came to be pronounced as spelled. Only since about
1925, according to Krapp, has it reverted to the original.
³

But the colonists employed a third, rather less obvious, method for place-naming. They borrowed from the Indians. As we know, the native languages of the eastern seaboard were forbiddingly complex and nowhere more so than with their names, yet the colonists showed an extraordinary willingness not only to use Indian names but to record them with some fidelity. Even now the eastern states are scattered with Indian names of arresting density: Anasagunticook, Mattawamkeag, Nesowadnehunk, Nollidewanticook, Nukacongamoc, and Pongowayhaymock, Maine; Youghiogheny and Kishecoquillas, Pennsylvania; Quacumquasit and Cochichewick, Massachusetts; Wappaquasset, Connecticut; Nissequogue, New York.

Once there were many more. Until 1916, New Hampshire had a stream called the Quohquinapassakessamanagnog, but then the cheerless bureaucrats at the Board on Geographic Names in Washington arbitrarily changed it to Beaver Creek. In like fashion the much loved Conamabsqunooncant River was transformed into the succinctly unmemorable Duck.
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The people of Webster, Massachusetts (especially those who sell postcards), continue to take pride in the local body of water named on a signboard as ‘Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg,’ which is said to be Nipmuck for ‘You fish on that side, I’ll fish on this side, and no one will fish in the middle.’ Such is the hypnotic formidableness of its many syllables that the sign painter added an extra one; the gaugg roughly midway along shouldn’t be there. In any case, the name is no longer official. Often, as you might expect, Indian names went through many mutations before settling into their modern forms.
Connecticut
was variously recorded as
Quonectacut, Quonaughticut, Qunnihticut, Conecticot
and many others before arriving at a permanent arrangement of letters.
Cuyahoga
was at first often spelled
Cajahoga.
John Smith
recorded
Susquehanna
as
Sasquesahanock
and
Potomac
as
Patowomek.
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Kentucky,
from the Iroquoian
kenta-ke,
appeared in a variety of guises –
Kaintuck, Caintuck, Kentuck
and
Kentucke
– and was generally pronounced with just two syllables until the nineteenth century. More than 132 spellings have been recorded for
Winnipesaukee,
perhaps not surprisingly.
Minnesota
has been everything from
Menesotor
to
Menisothé
to
Minnay Sotor.
⁶
Oregon
has appeared as
Ouaricon, Ouragon, Ourgan
and
Ourigan.
Even
Kansas
has had 140 spellings.
Milwaukee,
first recorded in 1679 as
Melleoki,
roamed freely through the alphabet as
Meleke, Millioki, Milwarik, Milwacky, Muilwahkie
and many others before settling into its permanent form as recently as 1844. Probably the liveliest diversity of spellings belongs to Chicago, which in its early days was rendered as
Schuerkaigo, Psceschaggo, Shikkago, Tsckakko, Ztschaggo, Shecago, Shakakko, Stkachango
and almost any other remotely similar combination you could think of.