We shall, however, be concerned with what is variously called “product design” or “industrial design.” Though this activity often appears to have aesthetics as its principal consideration, the best of industrial design does not have so narrow a focus. Rather, the complete industrial designer seeks to make objects easier to assemble, disassemble, maintain, and use, as well as to look at. And the best of industrial designers will have the ability to see into the future of a product so that what might have been a damning shortcoming of an otherwise wonderful-looking and beautifully functioning artifact will be nipped in the bud. Considerations that go variously under the name “human-factors engineering” or, especially in England, “ergonomics” are closely related to those of industrial design, but the human-factors engineer is especially concerned with how anything from the simplest kitchen gadget to the most advanced technological system will behave at the hands of its intended, and perhaps unintended, users.
The childproof bottle for prescription medicine is something that many people, especially older folks with arthritis, would agree could benefit from some industrial redesign, but most would also no doubt concur that the focus should be on the human-engineering aspects of getting the top off before the container gets an aesthetic treatment, although that would also be welcome. The ideal prescription-medicine container would be human-engineered to perfection and yet attractive enough to displace a bowl of fruit on the kitchen table. Such pretty things may not be designed in this book, but the intention is to go at least some way toward developing an understanding of why such things do not exist among the myriad ones that do. Just as there are many ways in which an artifact can fail, so there are many paths that a corrective form can follow.
3
Inventors as Critics
If the shortcomings of things are what drive their evolution, then inventors must be among technology’s severest critics. They are, and it is the inventor’s unique ability not only to realize what is wrong with existing artifacts but also to see how such wrongs may be righted in order to provide increasingly more sophisticated gadgets and devices. These contentions are not just the wishful thinking of a theorist seeking order in the made world; they are grounded in the words of reflective inventors themselves, who come from all walks of life.
Jacob Rabinovich was the son of a Russian shoe manufacturer who moved his family to Siberia at the outbreak of war in 1914. After five years, when Jacob was eleven years old, the family emigrated to America, and they settled in New York City. Young Jacob was a well-rounded student in high school, belonging to both the mathematics team and the drawing team. His freehand work was admired for its accuracy by the head of his school’s art department, but the teacher advised the young man to study engineering, because his drawings lacked spirit. City College of New York was the institution of opportunity and hence of choice for many a young immigrant child in the 1920s; however, Jacob was advised that the engineering profession was a difficult one to break into, especially for a Jew. So he entered City College in 1928 as a general-studies major and suddenly found himself to be a mediocre student amid strong competition.
The coming of the Great Depression meant that it would be difficult to earn a living in any line of work, and so Jacob changed his major to engineering, his first love. By 1933, when he graduated with a degree in electrical engineering, he had Americanized his name to “Jacob Rabinow.” He stayed on at City College for an extra year to earn the equivalent of a master’s degree, but even then jobs were hard to come by, and he spent some years working in radio factories, much of the time doing assembly work. He took a Civil Service examination in 1935, receiving high marks on both the electrical- and mechanical-engineering parts, but he did not land a government job until 1938, as an engineer in the National Bureau of Standards, where his first duties consisted of calibrating instruments used to measure the rate of water flow in streams and rivers.
Rabinow found his first assignment not unpleasant, and the routineness of the work gave him plenty of time to think. The equipment he was using was old and worn, with many shortcomings, and he soon began to see various ways to improve its operation and accuracy. He approached his boss, who had no objection to Rabinow’s designing and building new equipment, as long as it was done after hours, on his own time. He soon came up with some obviously improved calibrating equipment and also began to show his talents in other areas, and so he was given increasing responsibility and independence—and he flourished, eventually owning his own company for a while. All in all, Rabinow holds 225 patents for devices ranging from self-regulators for watches and clocks to the automatic letter-sorting machines used by the Postal Service.
Over the course of his career Rabinow, in the characteristic fashion of engineers and inventors, wrote relatively little for general publication. But in retirement he published his first full-length book, Inventing for Fun and Profit, which in spite of its title provides a highly original and revealing insight into the inventor’s mind. The origins of many of Rabinow’s inventions are described, and those origins lie typically in finding fault with existing things. Thus he relates such stories as how the difficulty in adjusting a watch he received as a present led him to invent a self-adjusting watch, or how his arguing with a fellow music lover over whether or not the sound issuing from conventional phonographs was distorted (because of the way the arm constrained the needle to move in the record groove) led to his development of a new needle arm suspension system. Problems brought to him by friends proved to be an especially fertile source of ideas for new projects. With a prolific inventor like Rabinow, there appears to be little separation between home, social, and professional life, as testified to by the location of his home workshop just off his living room.
Sometimes Rabinow gets quite explicit about the nature of his type: “Inventors are people who not only curse, but who also start to think of what can be done to eliminate the bother.” He repeated this view when asked why he invents. Rabinow responded, “When I see something that I don’t like, I try to invent a way around it. My job is simply to design gadgets that I like.” Of course, gadgets that he likes will not have the faults of those he found wanting. Many inventors echo Rabinow’s identification of shortcomings as the driving force for change. Lawrence Kamm, who dedicated his book, Successful Engineering, to Jacob Rabinow (“my boss, teacher, close friend, and severest critic”), advises the young design engineer to “continually study the designs around you. Why were they designed as they are? What is wrong with them? How would you improve them?”
Inventors at Work, a collection of interviews with sixteen notable American inventors, provides a sampling of the variety of educational backgrounds, ranging from terminal high-school degrees to doctorates, from which the breed comes. For every notable inventor who had to go to work instead of college, there is one who was able to attend an Ivy League school. What seems more common than any educational pattern is the entrepreneurial drive, whether as an independent individual explicitly trying to turn inventions into vastly successful products or as a member of a large corporate structure pushing for innovation by working within the system.
For every scrappy immigrant inventor like Jacob Rabinow, there is one born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Paul MacCready is the creator of the Gossamer Condor, which in 1977 established the possibility of human-powered flight by completing a mile-long figure-eight course over the San Joaquin Valley. Although he freely admits that the £50,000 prize money put up by the British industrialist Henry Kremer in 1959 was a strong motivating factor for the research-and-development effort, MacCready was also attracted to the challenge because he had built model airplanes from early adolescence and by age seventeen was identified by the editors of Model Airplane News as “by far the most versatile model flyer,” one who was always interested in discovering more efficient ways to handle old principles. He later took up the hobby of flying sailplanes, becoming national soaring champion three times.
After graduating from Yale, MacCready ea
rned a doctorate in aeronautical engineering from the California Institute of Technology. Among his many achievements, he has been named engineer of the century by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. But neither accolades nor prize money can keep an inveterate inventor happy. Like many successful inventors, MacCready is driven to make existing things better, and he soon developed the Gossamer Condor into the Gossamer Albatross, which crossed the English Channel under human pedal power in 1979. However, even the sagest of inventors knows that there are limitations to their talents for making good things better. When asked what challenge he would turn down, MacCready responded, “A much better bicycle. There are several avenues to follow there, and I’ve built some, and none of them satisfied me.” Though it is implicit in this response that existing bicycle designs are imperfect, some design questions are more easily asked than definitively answered. Inventors are seldom at a loss for problems, and so they must choose which ones they will work on.
Nathaniel C. Wyeth was born in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, on the family homestead of the painter N. C. Wyeth. While the child’s brother, Andrew, and his sisters, Henriette and Carolyn, studied art under the tutelage of their famous father, Nathaniel took clocks apart and made gadgets out of scrap metal. Originally named Newell Convers Wyeth, after his father, the young, technically inclined tinkerer soon had his first name changed to Nathaniel, after an uncle who was an engineer, so as to be less encumbered by identification with a prominent artist. He studied engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and then had a long and illustrious career with the Du Pont Corporation, culminating in 1975, when he became the first person to hold the company’s highest technical position of senior engineering fellow.
Probably foremost among Wyeth’s many inventions in such areas as textiles and electronics is the now ubiquitous plastic soda bottle, which he developed in the mid-1970s after extensive experiments with processing polyethylene terephthalate, more familiarly called PET. Such a bottle would have obvious advantages over the then conventional glass bottle, which was of course heavy and breakable. But the development of the PET bottle did not come easily; Wyeth recalls showing the misshapen results of an early experiment to the laboratory director, who wondered about spending so much money to get such a “terrible-looking bottle.” Wyeth, who was pleased that the thing was at least hollow, persisted in his efforts, however, using, as he did in all his inventions, his “failures and the knowledge of things that wouldn’t work as a springboard to new approaches.” He was quite explicit about the way an idea progressed from terrible-looking things to bottles displayed proudly in supermarkets: “If I hadn’t used those mistakes as stepping stones, I would never have invented anything.” Whatever one may think of the plastic bottle, the thing does fulfill the objective of replacing glass bottles. That Wyeth’s achievement now presents environmental problems for other inventors to solve should come as no surprise in an imperfect world of imperfect things.
Regardless of their background and motivation, all inventors appear to share the quality of being driven by the real or perceived failure of existing things or processes to work as well as they might. Fault-finding with the made world around them and disappointment with the inefficiency with which things are done appear to be common traits among inventors and engineers generally. They revel in problems—those they themselves identify in the everyday things they use, or those they work on for corporations, clients, and friends. Inventors are not satisfied with things as they are; inventors are constantly dreaming of how things might be better.
This is not to say that inventors are pessimists. On the contrary, they are supreme optimists, for they pursue innovation with the belief that they can improve the world, or at least the things of the world. Inventors do not believe in leaving well enough alone, for well enough is not good enough for them. But, also being supreme pragmatists, they realize that they must recognize limits to improvement and the trade-offs that must accompany it. Credible inventors know the limitations of the world too, including its thermodynamic laws of conservation of energy and growth of entropy. They do not seek perpetual-motion machines or fountains of youth but, rather, strive to do the best with what they have and for the best they know they can have, and they always recognize that they can never have everything.
Marvin Camras, a native Chicagoan who was educated at the Illinois Institute of Technology and spent most of his career at its affiliated research institute, holds over five hundred patents for devices in electrical communications. When once asked if he noticed whether inventors had any common traits, he responded:
They tend to be dissatisfied with what they see around them. Maybe they’re dissatisfied with something they’re actually working on or with an everyday thing, about which they say, “Gee, this is a very poor way of doing this.” At least in my case, when I see something that is clumsy or inelegant, I always wonder why it was made that way. You might say that these first ideas lead to invention.… A lot of things seem clumsy to me. I like to have things simplified.
Camras may be an individualistic type, as he believes inventors are generally, but his views about invention are common among his peers. Jerome Lemelson graduated with a master’s degree in industrial engineering from New York University in 1951. He has designed industrial robots and automated factories and has even patented such things as cutout toys for the backs of cereal boxes. And yet, though he has more than four hundred patents to his name, Lemelson has made no attempt to become an entrepreneur, has refused to follow the familiar practice of building a company around one or more of his patents. Rather, he prefers to benefit from their royalties. His idea of how to invent also involves the criticism of existing artifacts:
I think the way to go about it is to ask yourself these questions: Is this particular function being properly performed? Is it being performed in the best way possible? Are there any problems with it? How can I improve upon it? The patent system contains patents, most of which are simply improvements over what existed before. And that’s really the name of the game: improving on what’s existing today.
This idea is repeated in a “primer on inventions and patents” entitled Money from Ideas and published in 1950 by Popular Mechanics Press. With few pretensions to being out of the mainstream of the common dream of many an inventor, the book has its tone set in the first sentence of the first chapter: “A man once made a million dollars with a pair of scissors and a few sheets of paper.” (He was a traveling salesman whose disgust with common drinking glasses in public places led him to invent the paper cup.) Whereas self-confident inventors who are also self-starters would certainly not need the assistance of such a primer, the popular image of the inventor as creative genius, national hero, and wealthy benefactor of a leisurely if not glamorous pursuit, provides ample attraction to those who may have more desire than talent to become inventors themselves. Such inventors manqués, being without their own ideas, must get them from others. In advising would-be inventors that they must accumulate an inventory of ideas, the adviser focused his attention on everyday items around the house:
Tools! That should be worth exploring. Every household needs them. Every mechanic and workman in the country uses hand tools of some sort. Probably every workman has some pet peeve about one of his tools, something he feels should be altered or fixed. Beefing is a great American sport, and almost any mechanic should be glad to pour out a list of such troubles to an interested ear. The inventor who does not listen to others for stimulating ideas is usually a failure.
In spite of the tone and purpose of this advice, the underlying truth is universal: invention begins not so much in need as in want. The mechanic’s needs are met with existing tools, and he uses his hammer, screwdriver, and wrench every working day. But his tasks vary from day to day, and his unchanging tools work better some days than others. He might have to screw some pieces of wood together to make a storage box for his workshop, or he might have to reattach a brightly finished metal panel to a machine he has repaired for
a customer. (Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that this mechanic has only one conventional screwdriver, and that the wood and metal screws involved are of the conventional kind, with single slots that go across an entire diameter of the screw head.) In the one case, the screwdriver might slip out of the screw head and indent the wooden box. Though that would be unfortunate, the mechanic could no doubt live with it. In the other case, however, a slip of the screwdriver might leave a nasty scratch where the customer will not accept one. Strictly speaking, the mechanic should be able to avoid scratching the metal panel by paying close attention to how he drives the screws, carefully centering the screwdriver head firmly in the screw slot and twisting the screwdriver perfectly straight with absolutely no sideways leaning or slipping. To be extra-careful, the mechanic might even hold the fingers of one hand around the screw head so as to contain the screwdriver’s head.
Such precautions would work, of course; the mechanic may once have scratched a polished panel with a screwdriver long ago, when he was less attentive, but he might never have made the same mistake again. Though we could say that the mechanic needs to be careful, he does not necessarily need a new or different screwdriver. But he would certainly take one, and inventors are always looking for opportunities to give him one. Recently, for example, screwdrivers with tungsten-carbide particles bonded to their tips have been added to the toolbox. The hard particles bite into the softer screw slots and so reduce the problem of having the screwdriver blade slip out.
Jacob Rabinow has spoken specifically about screws and screwdrivers in the context of questions he used in interviewing prospective employees. His goal was to separate theoretical scientists and engineers from practical inventors. He would observe, of the most familiar screw heads: “The slot is traditional. It’s simple to make but it has several problems.” In addition to the problem of the screwdriver’s slipping out of the slot and damaging the work, Rabinow would mention that it is easy for people to improvise screwdrivers out of coins, nail files, and the like to remove screws that should not be removed. (This seems to have been an especially annoying habit of users of public restrooms, and so many of the screw heads in such contemplative quarters have come to be of an unusual but now familiar design that allows them to be easily installed but virtually impossible to be removed by the uninitiated.)
The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to Be as They Are. Page 5