Made In America

by Bill Bryson

  Perhaps not coincidentally, the boom years of the 1950s saw the development of another great electrical breakthrough: the home air-conditioner. Air-conditioning had been around for a long time. It was developed in 1902 by a twenty-year-old fresh out of Cornell University named Willis Carrier. As we have seen elsewhere, Carrier didn’t call it an air-conditioner but an apparatus for cooling air. Air-conditioner was coined four years later by a North Carolina textile engineer named Stuart Cramer, who invented a device designed not to cool textile mills but to humidify them.39

  By the 1920s air-conditioning was being widely used for specific applications – in hospitals and cinemas, for instance – but the considerable cost and the need for outsize ducts acted as a disincentive for its use in most homes and office buildings. Even in the late 1940s, a home air-conditioning unit – which Carrier called an ‘Atmospheric Cabinet’ – was as big as an upright piano and as noisy and as expensive to run as you would expect a piano-sized appliance to be. The development of small window models in 1951 made the industry take off. In 1952 sales of home units went from virtually nothing to $250 million, and they have never looked back. Today Americans spend $25 billion a year, more than the gross national products of some countries, just on the electricity to run their air-conditioners.

  Three years after the window air-conditioner made its début, another durable household appliance entered the world: the microwave oven. The first was called the Radarange. It was large and bulky – it weighed over 700 lb. – required a lot of complicated cooling apparatus and didn’t cook food very well. Renamed the microwave oven, the first consumer unit was produced in 1955 by Tappan, but the product and word didn’t become familiar to most Americans until the late 1960s when further improvements and advanced miniaturization of components – not to mention the increasing busyness of American women – made it at last a realistic proposition for home use.40

  Such was the proliferation of gadgets and appliances that by the 1960s it was possible to perform almost any daily household task while scarcely rippling a muscle – from opening cans to brushing one’s teeth to juicing an orange to carving a turkey. Instead of becoming more versatile and innovative, household appliances mostly just became more complex. Blenders accumulated a dazzling array of buttons. One had no fewer than sixteen buttons that the user could activate in an almost infinite selection of permutations, though, in the candid words of one executive, it still ‘couldn’t do much more than whip cream’. Labelling the buttons presented a linguistic as well as marketing challenge. A manufacturer, quoted in Susan Strasser’s history of domesticity, Never Done, recalled that ‘eight of us sat up two nights straight, trying to get words with five letters, each one sounding a bit higher than the other’.41

  Perversely, this plethora of labour-saving devices didn’t translate into greater leisure. The average ‘non-working mother’, as they are so inaccurately called, spends as much time doing housework now as fifty years ago – about fifty-two hours a week.42 Although she has the benefits of countless appliances, the increased productivity they have brought her has been effectively offset by the larger size of modern houses, more wide-ranging lifestyles (her great-grandmother didn’t run children everywhere in the family station wagon and her groceries were probably delivered) and more scrupulous standards of household cleanliness.

  Leisure in any meaningful sense is actually quite a modern concept. Sightseeing didn’t enter the language until 1847 and vacation not until 1878, and even then both were diversions for the well-off few. For millions of people a vacation was a once-in-a-lifetime indulgence that they experienced only on their honeymoon, or bridal tour, as it was often called until about 1900. Honeymoon has existed in English since 1546, but originally signified only the first month of marriage. It didn’t become associated with a trip away from home until about the middle of the nineteenth century.

  Weekend is an even more recent concept. The word was coined in 1879 in England, but didn’t become part of the average American’s vocabulary until as recently as the 1930s. Well into the 1900s most people worked a sixty-hour, six-day week and thus terms like Monday-to-Friday and weekend had no particular significance for them. The five-day, forty-hour week is often attributed to Henry Ford, but in fact it was introduced by the steel industry in 1923. Ford followed in 1926. Most of the rest of the nation didn’t catch up until the Great Depression, when a shorter working week became a convenient way of dealing with falling demand.43 Though nine-to-five had become the standard working day for most Americans by the early 1940s, the term nine-to-fiver isn’t recorded before 1959.

  Today, according to some studies, Americans work harder – or at least longer – than at any time since the forty-hour week became standard. According to Juliet B. Schor in The Overworked American, the amount of leisure time has fallen by almost 40 per cent since 197344 as people have been driven to seek overtime, take second jobs or simply show a zealous commitment to the workplace lest they find themselves the victims of restructuring, premature retirement, coerced transition, constructive dismissal, skill mix redeployment or any of the other forty or so euphemisms for being laid off that the managing editor of Executive Recruiter News reported in 1991.45 (Of which Digital Equipment Corporation’s involuntary methodologies was perhaps the most chillingly recondite.)

  Across the economy as a whole, it has been estimated, the average American works 163 hours more per year today than two decades ago. Men are working 98 hours more, and women no less than 305 extra hours.46 The burden is particularly heavy on working mothers who put in, on, average, an eighty-hour week when cleaning, cooking and child care are included. Not surprisingly, nearly all the recent neologisms relating to work and the workplace are negative: workaholic (1968), three o’clock syndrome (i.e., the tendency to grow drowsy in mid-afternoon, 1980), information overload (1985), sick building syndrome (a feeling of general malaise generated by a poorly designed environment, first noted in Industry Week in 1983), time squeeze (1990), and so on.

  According to Schor, the average American adult enjoys just sixteen and a half hours of leisure a week after disposing of work and household commitments – though it must be said such a claim appears dubious when you consider that other studies show that the average American also devotes over twenty-eight hours a week to watching television, spends three hours in shopping malls and presumably manages to find at least a few hours for sex, eating and socializing.

  What is certain is that Americans work longer hours and more days than their counterparts in almost any other nation in the developed world. Principally as a result of shorter vacations and fewer national holidays, the average manufacturing employee in America puts in the equivalent of eight weeks a year more at the workplace than a manufacturing employee in France or Germany.47

  Thanks to all that hard work, America as a nation produces twice the goods and services per person that it produced in 1948. Everyone in the country could, in principle at least, work a four-hour day or a six-month year and still maintain a standard of living equivalent to that enjoyed by our parents. Almost uniquely among the developed nations, America took none of its productivity gains in additional leisure. It bought consumer items instead.48

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  14

  The Hard Sell: Advertising in America

  I

  In 1885 a young man named George Eastman formed the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company in Rochester, New York.1 It was rather a bold thing to do. Aged just thirty-one, Eastman was a junior clerk in a bank on a comfortable but modest salary of $15 a week. He had no background in business, but he was passionately devoted to photography and had become increasingly gripped with the conviction that anyone who could develop a simple, untechnical camera, as opposed to the cumbersome, outsize, fussily complex contrivances then on the market, stood to make a fortune.

  Eastman worked tirelessly for three years to perfect his invention, supporting himself in the mean time
by making dry plates for commercial photographers, and in June 1888 he produced a camera that was positively dazzling in its simplicity: a plain black box just 6½inches long by 3¼ inches wide, with a button on the side and a key for advancing the film. Eastman called his device the ‘Detective Camera’. Detectives were all the thing – Sherlock Holmes had been born the year before – and the name implied that it was so small and simple that it could be used unnoticed, as a detective might.2

  The camera had no viewfinder and no way of focusing. The photographer or photographist (it took a while for the first word to become the established one) simply held the camera in front of him, pressed a button on the side and hoped for the best. Each roll took a hundred pictures. When the roll was fully exposed, the anxious owner sent the entire camera to Rochester for developing. Eventually he received the camera back, freshly loaded with film, and – assuming all had gone well – 100 small circular pictures, 2½inches in diameter.

  Often all didn’t go well. The film Eastman used at first was made of paper, which tore easily and had to be carefully stripped of its emulsion before the exposures could be developed. It wasn’t until the invention of celluloid roll film by a sixty-five-year-old Episcopalian minister named Hannibal Goodwin in Newark, New Jersey – this truly was the age of the amateur inventor – that amateur photography became a reliable undertaking. The Revd Goodwin didn’t call his invention film but ‘photographic pellicule’, and, as was usual, spent years fighting costly legal battles with Eastman without ever securing the recognition or financial pay-off he deserved – though eventually, years after Goodwin’s death, Eastman was ordered to pay $5 million to the company that inherited the patent.

  In 1888 Eastman changed the name of the camera to ‘Kodak’ – an odd choice since it was meaningless, and in 1888 no one gave meaningless names to products, especially successful products. Since British patent applications at the time demanded a full explanation of trade and brand names, we know how Eastman arrived at his inspired name. As he crisply summarized it in his patent application: ‘First. It is short. Second. It is not capable of mispronunciation. Third. It does not resemble anything in the art and cannot be associated with anything in the art except the Kodak.’3 Four years later the whole enterprise was renamed the Eastman Kodak Company.

  Despite the considerable expense involved – a Kodak camera sold for $25 and each roll of film cost $10, including developing – by 1895, over a hundred thousand Kodaks had been sold and Eastman was a seriously wealthy man. (A lifelong bachelor, he lived with his mother in a 37-room mansion with 12 bathrooms.) Soon people everywhere were talking about snapshots, originally a British shooting term for a hastily executed shot. Its photographic sense was coined by the English astronomer Sir John Herschel, who also gave the world the terms positive and negative in their photographic senses.4

  From the outset Eastman developed three crucial strategies that have been the hallmarks of virtually every successful consumer-goods company since. First, he went for the mass market, reasoning that it was better to make a little money each from a lot of people rather than a lot of money from a few. He also showed a tireless, obsessive dedication to making his products better and cheaper. In the 1890s such an approach was widely perceived as insane. If you had a successful product you milked it for all it was worth. If competitors came along with something better, you bought them out or tried to squash them with lengthy patent fights or other bullying tactics. What you certainly did not do was create new products that made your existing lines obsolete. Eastman did. Throughout the late 1890s Kodak introduced a series of increasingly cheaper, niftier cameras – the Bull’s Eye model of 1896, which cost just $12, and the famous, slimline Folding Pocket Kodak of 1898 – before finally in 1900 producing his eureka model: the little box Brownie, priced at just $1 and with film at 15 cents a reel (though with only six exposures per reel).

  What set Eastman apart above all was the breathtaking lavishness of his advertising. In 1899 alone, he spent $750,000, an unheard-of-sum, on advertising. Moreover it was good advertising: crisp, catchy, reassuringly trustworthy. ‘You press the button – we do the rest’ ran the company’s first slogan, thus making a virtue of its shortcomings. Never mind that you couldn’t load or unload the film yourself. Kodak would do it for you. In 1905 it followed with another classic slogan: ‘If It Isn’t An Eastman, It Isn’t A Kodak.’5

  Kodak’s success did not escape other businessmen. In Detroit, Henry Ford carried the idea of mass marketing to the automobile industry, creating in the Model T a car that was within the purchasing power of almost everyone. He failed to follow Eastman’s second precept, however, and milked his Model T for years longer than he should have, a mistake Ford’s successors would spend decades rectifying. Others, however, saw the virtue in the idea of steady refinement and improvement. AT&T and Westinghouse, among others, set up research laboratories with the idea of creating a stream of new products, even at the risk of displacing old ones. Above all, everyone everywhere began to advertise.

  Advertising was already a well-established phenomenon by the turn of the twentieth century. American newspapers had begun carrying ads as far back as the early 1700s and magazines had soon followed. (Benjamin Franklin has the distinction of having run the first magazine ad, seeking the whereabouts of a runaway slave, in 1741.)6 By 1850 the country had its first advertising agency, the American Newspaper Advertising Agency, though its function was to buy advertising space rather than come up with creative campaigns. The first advertising agency in the modern sense was N. W. Ayer & Sons of Philadelphia, established in 1869. To advertise originally carried the sense of to broadcast or disseminate news. Thus a nineteenth-century newspaper that called itself The Advertiser meant that it had lots of news, not lots of ads. By the early 1800s the term had been stretched to accommodate the idea of spreading the news of the availability of certain goods or services. A newspaper notice that read, ‘Jos. Parker, Hatter’, was essentially announcing that if anyone was in the market for a hat, Jos. Parker had them. In the sense of persuading members of the public to acquire items they might not otherwise think of buying – items they didn’t know they needed – advertising is a phenomenon of the modern age.

  By the 1890s advertising was appearing everywhere – in newspapers and magazines, on billboards (an Americanism dating from 1850), on the sides of buildings, on passing streetcars, on paper bags, even on books of matches, which were invented in 1892 and being extensively used as an advertising medium within three years.

  Very early on, advertisers discovered the importance of a good slogan. Ivory Soap’s ‘99 44/100 per cent pure’ dates from 1879. Schlitz has been calling itself ‘the beer that made Milwaukee famous’ since 1895, and Heinz’s ‘57 varieties’ followed a year later. Morton Salt’s ‘when it rains, it pours’ dates from 1911, the American Florist Association’s ‘say it with flowers’ was first used in 1912 and the ‘good to the last drop’ of Maxwell House coffee, named for the Maxwell House Hotel in Nashville, where it was first served, has been with us since 1907. (The slogan is said to have originated with Teddy Roosevelt, who pronounced that the coffee was ‘good to the last drop’, prompting one wit to ask, ‘So what’s wrong with the last drop?’)

  Sometimes slogans took a little working on. Coca-Cola described itself as ‘the drink that makes a pause refreshing’ before realizing, in 1929, that ‘the pause that refreshes’ was rather more succinct and memorable. A slogan could make all the difference to a product’s success. After advertising its soap as an efficacious way of dealing with ‘conspicuous nose pores’, Woodbury’s Facial Soap came up with the slogan ‘The skin you love to touch’ and won the hearts of millions.7 The great thing about a slogan was that it didn’t have to be accurate to be effective. Heinz never actually had ‘57 varieties’ of anything. The catch-phrase arose simply because H. J. Heinz, the company’s founder, decided he liked the sound of the number. Undeterred by considerations of verity, he had the slogan slapped on every one of the produc
ts he produced, which in 1896 was already far more than fifty-seven. For a time the company tried to arrange its products into fifty-seven arbitrary clusters, but in 1969 it gave up the ruse altogether and abandoned the slogan.

  Early in the 1900s, advertisers discovered another perennial feature of marketing – the giveaway as it was called almost from the start. Consumers soon became acquainted with the irresistibly tempting notion that if they bought a particular product they could expect a reward – the chance to win prizes, to receive a free book (almost always ostensibly dedicated to the general improvement of one’s well-being but invariably a thinly disguised plug for the manufacturer’s range of products), receive a free sample, or a rebate in the form of a shiny dime. Typical of the genre was a turn-of-the-century tome called The Vital Question Cook Book, which was promoted as an aid to livelier meals, but which proved upon receipt to contain 112 pages of recipes all involving the use of Shredded Wheat. Many of these had a certain air of desperation about them, notably the ‘Shredded Wheat Biscuit Jellied Apple Sandwich’ and the ‘Creamed Spinach on Shredded Wheat Biscuit Toast’. Almost all in fact involved nothing more than spooning some everyday food on to a piece of shredded wheat and giving it an inflated name. None the less, the company distributed no fewer than four million copies of The Vital Question Cook Book to eager consumers.