One of the few things that this claim makes unambiguous is that the aeroplane, or wing, was “normally flat”—i.e., plane—in the Wrights’ early conception of a flying machine. They and others would eventually discover, of course, that a cambered wing would provide more lift and thus make the double aeroplanes of biplanes unnecessary and, incidentally, the word “aeroplane” (now “airplane” in the United States) rather inappropriate. The Stealth bomber, though hardly an “aeroplane,” is virtually all wing, and some of the contraptions visible at air shows can seem to have but vestigial wings. For all the vagueness of their claims, the Wright brothers, like all inventors, were merely attempting to forestall the inevitable alternative designs and improvements others would make in the flying machine, just as the Wrights had discovered and articulated the shortcomings of the aeroplanes and other components whose elimination made possible the first sustained manned flight. As invaluable and unique as those components might have seemed at the time, in the final analysis they were not what they were cracked up to be. And they certainly were of no unique form.
Though the Wrights are remembered for their singular achievement, there were in fact competing designs for the first successful flying machine. These, however, are no more easily remembered than are the competitors of the Gossamer Condor for the Kremer Prize. They ranged from “craft in the tradition of Leonardo da Vinci’s ornithopter with flapping wings to pedal-powered machines with two-man crews,” but none of them could execute the mile-long figure-eight course. (And it is hard to imagine that many if any of the unsuccessful craft continued to be developed after the prize was won.) Before a notable achievement, technological or otherwise, there is often a goal but no real standard against which to judge competing plans or designs for achieving the goal. Once the goal has been reached, however, the form or formula by which that is accomplished becomes the standard against which subsequent attempts necessarily compete and must be judged. It is little wonder that the form of artifacts then tends to evolve within the rather vague but narrow confines set by patent claims and counterclaims.
Like performance competitions, design competitions make evident the arbitrariness of form, but our awareness of it is often only short-lived. When a group of planners decided that there would be a Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations—the first world’s fair—in London in 1851, they announced an open competition for the design of a temporary structure to house the anticipated sixteen acres of international exhibits under one roof in Hyde Park. A total of 245 diverse entries was received, but the building committee judged none of them to be suitable and came up with an impractical hodgepodge of its own. Only after it was announced to general ridicule did Joseph Paxton, a gardener and designer of greenhouses, submit his own radical design to the committee and leak it to the Illustrated London News. It proved to be the design that was adopted, and the highly successful Crystal Palace became the paragon of exhibition buildings for decades of subsequent world’s fairs.
At the close of the Great Exhibition there was another competition—for ideas to reuse the cast iron and glass from the Crystal Palace—and one of the entries proposed building a thousand-foot-high crystal tower. Thus the same modular parts could be imagined to be formed into the tall and narrow as easily as the short and squat, much as the parts of a child’s Tinker Toy might become a bridge or a crane. In the twentieth century, the entries in design competitions for skyscrapers have proved time and again that no single form follows the function laid out in the call for submissions. The Tribune Tower in Chicago was the result of a design competition, which included entries that ranged from a skyscraper in the whimsical form of a colossal classical column to the serious Gothic tower that was chosen and built. A recent television documentary tracing the history of a restricted competition for the design of a new central library building for Chicago showed just how diverse proposed solutions can be, and also how function can become forgotten among the considerations of aesthetics, symbolism, and politics that can so influence the final choice.
The Sydney Opera House is a classic case history of design competition and of what can go wrong with large projects. A total of 223 entries were received for the performing-arts complex to be built in Sydney Harbour, and the competition was won by the freehand sketches of the Danish architect Jørn Utzon. His design was a striking assemblage of huge shells that evoked sailing boats, but it omitted any consideration of engineering factors, which made the design highly impractical and the structure extremely difficult to build. Even though the Opera House generally was regarded as an architectural and engineering masterpiece upon its completion in 1973, it opened nine years late and more than 1,400 percent over its original budget. The architect’s obsession with (arbitrary) form had necessitated many ad-hoc engineering decisions in the course of the building’s erection, and little thought was given to maintenance. In 1989, with hundreds of repair projects deferred and with increasing leaks developing in the opera-house complex, a ten-year rehabilitation program was announced at a cost of $75 million. The form remains one of Sydney’s most striking and recognizable visual images, but its function leaves some things to be desired. Unfortunately, the form of an opera house can not respond to failure so quickly as can the form of motorcycles, tractors, or even silverware.
There is one class of large and very visible structures in which form follows engineering, rather than dictating it, but still no single form follows from a stated function. Large bridges constitute perhaps the most pure of engineering structures, and their form is often an expression of the very mechanical principles by which they work. Some of the most beautiful bridges in the world have emerged from design competitions, and the procedure has been especially effective in Europe. There, competitions not only encouraged but also gave opportunities to such pioneering engineers as Robert Maillart and Eugène Freyssinet to develop new forms along with new construction techniques for concrete bridges. Their legacy is a landscape in which technology and nature harmonize rather than clash.
David Billington, who has written thoughtfully on aesthetics and bridge engineering, believes that design competitions can provide an opportunity for constructive interaction between the general public and the public agencies commissioning designs, and that such interaction can lead to better civic structures. Indeed, according to Billington, public involvement in the design process can have wide-ranging benefits:
It is relatively easy to take one project and judge it as good or bad; it is quite another thing to take several carefully thought-out designs for the same site, rank them, and then justify that ranking in regard to the concept, details, cost, and appearance. This exercise tests the jury as much as the contestants and forces the jury to explain all aspects of bridge design to the public in a clear and jargon-free report.
Whether with bridges, skyscrapers, or any other structures or machines, it is the initial specification of function that certainly defines the problem to be solved and constrains the solution. But the formulation of a design problem in no way dictates its solution, as the variety of entrants in any competition demonstrates. The requirement of a bridge across a strait or a ravine has historically elicited designs ranging from arch to suspension structures; these may be said to be at opposite ends of the structural spectrum, with the former working in compression and the latter in tension. Which solution was favored by one designer and which by another may have depended as much on a preference for materials (say, wrought versus cast iron, or steel versus concrete) as for construction technique (building from the top down or the bottom up). Political constraints, such as nineteenth-century Britain’s headway requirements for the high-masted water traffic that could not be obstructed by an arch, or twentieth-century New Mexico’s preference for the flatness of a plateau that could not be punctuated by towers rising above a gorge, might have as much to do with a choice of form as the expected traffic volume influences the number of lanes. Though material, constructional, and aesthetic considerations are arguably as
functional as traffic constraints, the nonuniqueness of the ways in which the former can be collectively satisfied or compromised is just one more argument against form’s following function.
Design competitions, whether sternly and publicly judged or jovially and privately played out in the office of a commissioned designer, can be counted upon to produce more forms than the functions that drive them. Freedom in the earliest, conceptual design stages can be great fun for all concerned, but it is the serious choices among forms and details that make the difference between ultimate success and failure.
11
Closure Before Opening
A prize of 12,000 francs for a method of preserving foods was announced in 1795 but stood unclaimed for fourteen years. Finally a Parisian named Nicolas Appert demonstrated his scheme for putting cooked fruit, vegetables, and meat in bottles and then immersing them long enough in boiling water to destroy the bacteria that had frustrated prior attempts at food preservation. He set forth the method in his 1810 treatise, L’Art de Conserver, which was soon translated into several languages, including English.
Even though they were airtight, bottles were breakable, of course, and this was a distinct disadvantage in transporting preserved food through the heat of battle that soldiers encountered or over the rough terrain that explorers covered. In 1810 Peter Durand, a London merchant, eliminated this shortcoming by employing a “tin canister” for preserving food. The firm of Donkin and Hall set up a “preservatory” in London, and the new tin-coated wrought-iron cans promised to be an excellent means of supplying British soldiers and the Royal Navy with homestyle food away from home. Unfortunately, early efforts apparently focused so much on the objective (or function) of preserving food against spoilage that little thought seems to have been given as to how the food would be removed from the tin. It is the rare artifact that does not require also an infrastructure of auxiliary artifacts to be developed.
The complications necessarily associated with preserving food were evidently the most immediate problems to be faced by the inventor, but having the food preserved so that it could be eaten at will (and away from a blacksmith’s shop) was clearly an ultimate function of the tin can. Nevertheless, the preservatory objective so dominated the can’s early development that soldiers reportedly had to attack their canned rations with knives, bayonets, and even rifle fire, as American Civil War soldiers still would a half-century later. If Donkin and Hall wanted to sell their products to a broader clientele, they certainly had to address the problem of how to get what was inside a can out civilly, but as late as 1824 a tin of roast veal carried on one of the explorer William Edward Parry’s Arctic expeditions bore these instructions for opening: “Cut round on the top with a chisel and hammer.”
In spite of this shortcoming of the iron container, English shops were selling canned food to the public by 1830, and the Englishman William Underwood, who established America’s first cannery in the early 1920s, apparently spoke for all his contemporaries when he advised using whatever tools might be available around the house to open tin cans in any makeshift way. Despite the need for it, no specialized tool was to be forthcoming for quite some time. In the meantime, early cans made of heavy-gauge iron were “sometimes heavier than the food they contained.” For example, the can containing the veal taken to the Arctic weighed over one pound empty, and had a wall one-fifth-inch thick. There soon developed alternatives to hammer and chisel for those not carrying their canned goods on faraway expeditions, however, and “the first can-openers may have been elaborate mechanisms with which the shopkeeper opened each can before it was taken away.”
The early can was a success at preserving food, but its tolerable failures were obviously its weight, which directly affected its cost, and the difficulty of getting at the food. Having the shopkeeper open a can at the point of sale meant that its contents had soon to be consumed, thus removing any advantage of having the food preserved at the ready in one’s own pantry. Such an objection to an otherwise wonderful product was what drove some inventors to concentrate on ways to make cans thinner, lighter, and easily assembled and disassembled, while others tackled the problem of developing specialized tools for opening cans. The replacement of iron with the stronger steel in the late 1850s did make cans thinner, but the greater flexibility of the lighter material in turn necessitated the introduction of a rim for stiffening, and for attaching a top and a bottom, which in earlier times had been folded over onto the sturdy side of the can. (Today, many steel cans are corrugated under their paper labels to stiffen their thin sides further against being dented during handling.)
Ezra Warner’s 1858 patent for a can opener removed flaws of earlier devices, which often caused the liquid to fly out when the can was first punctured with a percussive blow of a pointed object. With Warner’s invention, the can top was pierced not by percussion but by pressing in the point d, which was prevented from penetrating too far into the can by the guard c. With the top breached, the guard was swung out of the way so that the cutter blade a could be worked around the can top. (photo credit 11.1)
In 1858 Ezra Warner, of Waterbury, Connecticut, obtained a landmark patent for a can opener. Described by one student of the origins of everyday things as “part bayonet, part sickle,” the large curved blade had to be worked forcibly around the can’s periphery. Like inventors before and after him, Warner defended the form of his brainchild by comparing it with more primitive forms and implicitly pointing out their shortcomings and outright failures:
The advantages of my improvement over all other instruments for this purpose consist in the smoothness and rapidity of the cut, as well as the ease with which it is worked, as a child may use it without difficulty, or risk, and in making the curved cutter susceptible of being removed, so that if one should be injured it may be replaced by another, thus saving all the other portions of the instrument, and consequently much expense, and in that the piercer will perforate the tin without causing the liquid to fly out, as it does in all those which make the perforation by percussion of any kind.
Although such devices were in some use during the Civil War, soldiers and homemakers alike had long become accustomed to making do with more familiar implements to open cans, and so specialized openers were not necessarily employed. Only in 1885 did the British Army and Navy Co-operative Society, whose catalogue was an omnium-gatherum of Victorian gadgets and merchandise, seem to offer its first can opener. The 1907 catalogue of the cooperative offered several “knives” for opening tins, including one known as the Bull’s Head. Thought by some to be the first popular domestic can opener, it had a red handle cast in the form of a bull’s head at its working end, while the other end had a bull’s tail looping nicely back upon itself to form a graceful handle. A screw through the bull’s neck held an L-shaped blade that formed the animal’s lower jaw and provided the cutting edge of the opener, which, like virtually all of its kind, worked on the principles of the wedge and the lever. The other end of the blade projected out from the bull’s withers, and was no doubt convenient for piercing the top of the can as a first step in opening it without bending or breaking the necessarily longer cutting end of the blade.
Anyone who has used an old-fashioned can opener, whether or not its form suggested a powerful animal, knows all the disadvantages of the tool. Its action is jerky rather than continuous, and the jagged edge left behind has been the cause of many a cut finger. The first opener with a wheel for cutting in a more continuous and smooth fashion was apparently patented in America in 1870 by William Lyman of West Meriden, Connecticut. One end of his opener was used to pierce the center of a can’s top and serve as a pivot about which the opener’s handle pulled a cutting wheel. The device had to be adjusted for each size of can, and its efficient operation relied upon getting a bull’s-eye with the piercer.
The Bull’s Head can opener consisted of a cast-iron frame whose head gave the object its name and whose handle continued the fanciful theme. The L-shaped blade, pivoted about a scre
w, had one short and sharply tapered end for piercing the can’s top without penetrating so deep that removal was difficult. The longer end of the blade worked in a familiar manner. As can tops became thinner and easier to pierce, a single blade could serve both functions. (photo credit 11.2)
In 1925 a patent was issued for an improvement on what has become a more familiar style of wheeled opener, one that pinched and rode around the rim of the can. This improvement employed a serrated wheel to reduce slipping. The 1928–29 Sears, Roebuck catalogue offered an “up to date can opener” called the Simplex, which had a serrated gripping wheel and a cutting wheel that worked around the side of the can to remove the “entire top,” including the rim. Now, of course, there is a great variety of can openers, including electrically operated ones, but each of them has its own shortcomings, drawbacks, inconveniences, or little annoyances. Those that work with a squeeze of the handle and a twist of the wrist can be tiring to use on large cans, and frustrating when their driving wheel slips and fails to grip the can. Electric can openers, on the other hand, can be bulky counter-cluttering devices that are difficult to clean. Almost two centuries after the introduction of tin cans, there is still room for improvement in what might be termed the infrastructural equipment to break into them to remove their contents, and thus there are likely to continue to be inventors patenting new openers. In the meantime, of course, pull-opening tops are being incorporated into more and more cans, giving new meaning to the phrase “breaking and entering,” and so the question of developing a better can opener may become moot.
The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to Be as They Are. Page 21