The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to Be as They Are.

by Henry Petroski

  Viollet-le-Duc used the design of copper vases to illustrate his ideas about style. Left to right: “the most natural shape,” with handles that are not likely to be bent when the vase is inverted for drying; a modified form, with a more rounded bottom, “to seduce the purchaser with the attraction of novelty”; and a still rounder form, from a “capricious and fanciful” designer seeking greater novelty, with handles that are susceptible to being bent in use. (photo credit 9.2)

  Individual aspects of Viollet-le-Duc’s argument may be debated precisely because different critics and designers will see different shortcomings in the vase and will perceive different solutions in its form. This is why there are seldom only three designers involved in such an evolutionary train, especially when one comes up with something novel and fashionable that “everybody in town must have.” Some might prefer the third vase’s shape, and a fourth coppersmith, for example, might easily correct the fault of the handles’ being bendable by making them heavier in a way consistent with the other lines of the vase. Or he might make a poorer design, thinking he is strengthening one feature but in fact weakening another, which it will take a fifth coppersmith to improve upon. Or a sixth designer, perhaps finding the reinforced handles too heavy aesthetically, would lighten them again. Though such modifications might have appeared to Viollet-le-Duc or others to have been grossly inferior, each in turn might have become the rage of consumers everywhere and in its time might have been the definitive vase to copy. De gustibus non est disputandum, but in the twentieth century a new breed of designer would call upon taste to account for itself.

  Industrial design as an explicit and public marketing tool, rather than an unnamed and unspoken component of business-as-usual in the off-limits corners of many a factory, did not really come into being, at least in America, until the Great Depression. The self-proclaimed originator of the field was Raymond Loewy, who arrived in New York in 1919 as a young man in the uniform of a French army captain. During the 1920s, he worked mostly as a free-lance illustrator for fashion magazines and upscale department stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and Bonwit Teller. Through a friend, who introduced him to lunches at the Algonquin Hotel and summers on the New England coast, he made the acquaintance of many sophisticated New Yorkers.

  In 1927, while working on ads for the original Saks, on 34th Street, Loewy was invited by the company’s president, Horace Saks, to visit the uptown site where a branch store was being readied. Loewy expressed his opinions about how a department store should be, in today’s terms, an integrated system. The employees should be selected for their “physical appearance and courteous inclination,” and they should be well though simply dressed. Elevator operators, with whom the shoppers would willy-nilly become “quite intimate” during crowded rush hours, should be “correct, polite, and neat” and should wear uniforms. The store’s wrapping paper, boxes, bags, and other details should be attractively and consciously designed, and there should be a unified advertising campaign to introduce the new store. This system was a tremendous success, of course, and so was Loewy. But he was not satisfied with the course of his career as a fashion illustrator, even though the Depression left few other opportunities for his talents. Loewy was an observer not only of society but also of its products, and even before the Depression he did not like all that he saw, which was plenty.

  So many functionally similar consumer products had evolved that the principal competitive shortcoming they seemed to face was a failure to distinguish themselves one from another. Since they could not easily do so in their operation, they tried to do so in their fashion. Thus, different brands of toasters were distinguished by superficial features and fashionability. Yet this was not necessarily exploiting the consumer, for no one was expected to buy more than one toaster. Rather, each manufacturer vied for any competitive advantage to attract the consumer who needed or wanted a new toaster. But something was wrong, according to Loewy, who admitted that, “with few exceptions, the products were good.” He was “disappointed and amazed at their poor physical appearance, their clumsiness, and … their design vulgarity.” He found “quality and ugliness combined,” and wondered about “such an unholy alliance”:

  Once in a while, a product would be more cohesive in its design. But then it would be utterly spoiled by a lot of applied “art”: a mess of stripes, moldings, and decalcomania curlicues that would hopelessly cheapen the product. It used to be called gingerbread. (Now we call it schmaltz, or spinach.) What’s more, all this corn was expensive: it did not generate spontaneously; it had to be painted on, etched in, stamped out, slid over, pushed out, or raised up; baked in, sprayed, rolled in, or stenciled up. It meant unnecessary work and, therefore, parasitic cost increase to the consumer. I was shocked.

  Loewy was also “shocked by the fact that most preeminent engineers, executive geniuses, and financial titans seemed to live in an aesthetic vacuum,” and he believed that he could “add something to the field.” But, not surprisingly, the people he approached were “rough, antagonistic, often resentful,” and, by his own admission, Loewy’s French accent was not so helpful outside the fashion world. However, he believed that creation of consumer demand was part of the solution to the Depression, which was compounded by a form of fear that manifested itself in “a lack of imaginative products and advanced manufacturing,” compared with what had been. Loewy was but one of the more conspicuous and self-promoting of “a few industrial design pioneers who were able to make some business leaders aware that this lack of vision and industrial timidity” was not something that was good for business, and “success finally came when we were able to convince some creative men that good appearance was a salable commodity, that it often cut costs, enhanced a product’s prestige, raised corporate profits, benefited the customer, and increased employment.”

  Among the first to be convinced was Sigmund Gestetner, a British manufacturer of office duplicating machines, who met Loewy on a visit to America. In 1929 the Gestetner machine looked like an ungainly piece of factory equipment, with an exposed pulley and drive belt and four protruding tubular legs that provided support and stability but had little else to recommend them. According to one of Loewy’s accounts, he was asked if he could improve the appearance of the machine and he answered, “Certainly.” After agreeing to a fee, he had a hundred pounds of modeling clay delivered to his apartment and went to work. According to another of Loewy’s accounts, Gestetner was not so easily sold on a redesign of his machine, and Loewy got the job only after sketching a stenographer tripping over one of the protruding legs, sending papers flying everywhere. Regardless of the genesis of the commission, Loewy essentially redesigned the machine by eliminating some of its failures: by cleaning up its awkward lines, by making its cabinet of warm wood rather than of cold metal, by covering up its ugly pulley and belt, and preventing accidents by making the legs flush with the body of the duplicator. The model change was introduced later in 1929 and, according to Loewy, “is generally considered the first American example of industrial design before industrial design was understood as a conscious activity.”

  What seems to have overcome any initial reservations that Gestetner may have had about allowing a virtual stranger to redesign the appearance of the duplicating machine was Loewy’s drawing of an objectively indisputable failure—the secretary tripping over a protruding leg. Gestetner was convinced there was a problem to be solved, but there is no indication that the solution affected the quality of copies made by the machine. Other manufacturers seem to have been persuaded in similar ways that they needed an industrial-design consultant. Loewy described the typical prospective client of the 1930s: “He makes nice Widgets, they sell all right, and he doesn’t believe he really needs any help from the outside.” Loewy won him over by pointing out to the manufacturer problems that he had hardly realized he had:

  Your present models seem to lack certain physical characteristics that would make them stand out among the competition. For one thing, they might reproduce better
in your newspaper advertising. The present models are rather weak in appearance and they lack sparkle and highlights. We feel that a competent outside organization with design imagination, working in close co-operation with your engineers, might develop a fresh and unusual answer to your problem.

  It was easier coming up with fresh and unusual answers to some problems than others, of course, and Loewy admitted that this affected the fees his firm charged. Redesigning a big thing, like a tractor, commanded a relatively low fee, because “there are so many obvious things one can do to make it better-looking,” but he would charge a very high fee to redesign something like a sewing needle. The key was identifying the problems with an existing design and proposing changes. Certainly even a well-evolved design like a needle has problems, such as its propensity to prick the finger and its ability to resist being threaded. But the finger can be protected with a thimble, and the eye threaded with a wire device, and thus the needle’s sharp point and small eye have been preserved so that the instrument can perform its primary function of sewing effectively. What Loewy might have created that was new and unusual he did not say, perhaps because no needle manufacturer was willing to pay him a $100,000 fee to solve a problem with which sewers had long learned to live.

  Tailors and seamstresses had also come to expect pins and needles to be packaged a certain way, and they expressed little if any need for a change. But industrial designers like Loewy seem to love to redesign much familiar packaging, often pointing out the problems with the old only in the context of the new. In his memoirs, Loewy illustrates his 1940 redesign of the Lucky Strike cigarette pack, for example, with before and after photos. The old pack was basically dark green, with the familiar brand name in a target on the front and a description of the toasted tobacco blend on the back. According to Loewy, the green ink was expensive and had a slight smell. His redesign removed these problems by making the package basically white and moving the “It’s toasted” slogan to the side. The word “cigarettes” was put in much smaller and discreet type, supposedly because the brand name and shape of the pack alone conveyed what it contained. The red “Lucky Strike” target was placed on both the front and the back of the pack, so that discarded packaging was always lying right side up and advertising its brand to passersby.

  Loewy’s ambitions were not only to design small packages, however; from boyhood he had loved railroads and their locomotives. Having obtained a letter of introduction to the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Loewy was greatly disappointed that his lack of experience designing railroad equipment got him little more than a polite “we’ll call you” at their meeting. In desperation, he pleaded with the president, “Can’t you find one single design problem to give me now, today?” When asked what he had in mind, Loewy responded, “a locomotive.” The young designer’s hubris apparently prompted an impish response from the president, and he gave Loewy the opportunity to redesign the trash cans in Pennsylvania Station.

  Loewy was ecstatic to have any railroad commission, and after studying the use and abuse of the existing trash cans he came up with sketches of new designs. Several prototypes were built and tried out in the station, and soon he was called back to the president’s office. Loewy asked repeatedly, “How’s the trash can?” but got no response. The president seemed to want to talk about everything but trash cans. When finally pressed, he told Loewy, “in this railroad, we never discuss problems that are solved.” He then called in the man in charge of locomotives, who showed off photos of an experimental one that was soon to be built in quantity, and asked Loewy, “See anything wrong with it?” He did, of course, and thought to himself, “It had a disconnected look; component parts did not seem to blend together, and its steel shell was a patchwork of riveted sections. It looked unfinished and clumsy.” But with the designer in the room, Loewy said only, “It looks powerful and rugged,” and that he thought it could be “further improved.” What he did was sketch his ideas and recommend that riveting be replaced by welding, at a savings of millions of dollars in fabricating costs, and so the first streamlined locomotive came to be made. However, the growing propensity of Loewy and other industrial designers to streamline everything from toasters to pencil sharpeners soon suggested that a failure to be fashionable more than a failure to function was often dictating form.

  Within two decades of the first repackaging of the Gestetner duplicating machine, industrial design was firmly established. Writing of the postwar years, Loewy claimed that “no manufacturer, from General Motors to the Little Lulu Novelty Company, would think of putting a product on the market without benefit of a designer.” Whether an employee of the firm or an independent consultant, the industrial designer seemed to “know what the public wants.” And although Loewy was perhaps the most flamboyant of the new breed, his focusing on problems with existing designs was not unique.

  Henry Dreyfuss was involved with designing theater sets in New York before opening an industrial-design office on Fifth Avenue in 1929. His influence on the appearance of things from John Deere tractors to Bell System telephones gained him a considerable reputation, and many an aspiring designer sought his advice. To one inquiry he responded with an exercise to help assess talent and aptitude, and it centered on identifying problems with existing designs:

  Walk through a department store or carefully examine a mail-order catalog or just look around your own home. Select a dozen items that do not suit your fancy and seriously study them, then make an attempt to redesign them.

  Dreyfuss assumed the individual had some art, architecture, or engineering training, and that there was a degree of self-confidence, along with an ability to accept objective criticism of any redesigns offered to the master. Though appearance was the most obvious and often most easily criticized feature of an existing design, Dreyfuss was a strong advocate of what have come to be called human-factors considerations, and in his book Designing for People he laid down a five-point formula for good industrial design. Admitting that other designers might not state the case exactly as he did, Dreyfuss was still convinced that his five points comprised the essential concerns of the whole profession. The points are: (1) utility and safety, (2) maintenance, (3) cost, (4) sales appeal, (5) appearance. In ascending order, these points appear to become further removed from basic function, but they all can serve as criteria for how various aspects of failure in existing things can be improved by redesign.

  One thing that has resulted from the emergence of industrial design is the proliferation of artifacts that are competing for attention by declaring themselves “new, improved,” or “faster,” or “more economical,” or “safer,” or “easier to clean,” or “the latest,” or whatever comparative (or superlative) suggests or asserts that one product is better than its predecessor or its competition. But there is also an apparent reluctance among consumers to accept designs that are too radically different from what they claim to supersede, for when familiar things are redesigned too dramatically the function they perform can be less than obvious and thus possibly suspect. Loewy summarized the phenomenon by using the acronym MAYA, standing for “most advanced yet acceptable.” Dreyfuss emphasized the importance of a “survival form,” which was manifested in “a familiar pattern in an otherwise wholly new and possibly radical form,” thus making “the unusual acceptable to many people who would otherwise reject it.”

  Industrial designers thus seem to know not to go too far too soon in making changes, no matter how rational these might be. According to John Heskett, in his study of industrial design, practitioners have learned to “strive for a delicate balance between innovation in order to create interest, and reassuringly identifiable elements.” What determines the expected form of anything is a kind of fashion. And fashion more than function is without question what determines so many of the contemporary forms that surround us, whether they be on the highway, the workbench, or the dinner table. But a myopic obsession with fashion, whether in silverware or steel bridges, can lead to the premature extin
ction of even the most fashionable form if it does not anticipate failure in the broadest sense, including the failure to be fashionable tomorrow.

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  The Power of Precedent

  An interesting example of a multitude of forms solving the same functional problem occurred in pottery making in the late seventeenth century. Whether by whimsy or wisdom, there came to be made a curious category of earthenware known as “puzzle jugs.” These devices had odd projecting tubes, hollow handles, and hidden conduits that carried the liquid in deceptive and unexpected ways when the jug was tipped to the mouth. If the drinker did not figure out how to drink from the jug, it acted much like a practical joker’s dribble glass. Such achievements of the potter’s art were not beneath even the famous Wedgwood family, and, according to a nineteenth-century biographer of Josiah Wedgwood, there was plenty of reason to design variations on the basic puzzle or problem, which was to make it difficult to drink the contents of the jug without spilling any:

  It became a prolific source of wagers, and most ale-houses found it to their advantage to keep one or more of different forms for their visitors. The handle usually sprang from near the bottom of the jug, and was carried up its “belly” some distance, when it bowed out in the general form, and was attached to the rim at its top. The handle and rim were made hollow, opening into the inside of the jug near the bottom, and around the rim were attached a number of little spouts, differently placed, according to the whim of the potter. The ale could thus only be drunk by carefully covering up with the fingers all the spouts but one, and through this one the liquor would have to be sucked into the mouth. Beneath the handle a small hole was, however, usually made, through which, if not carefully and closely covered, the ale would spill, and thus cause the discomfiture of the drinker and the loss of his wager.