Focusing on education was not an option. Spencer left school at the age of twelve to work at a spool mill. A naturally curious person, Spencer would not be consigned to a drab life in a factory. Four years later he got a job as one of three men installing electricity in the local paper mill. It didn’t matter he knew nothing about the process; he simply applied a trial-and-error approach to get the plant up-and-running with electricity. In 1912 when the Titanic sunk, he was captivated by the story of the ship’s wire operator’s efforts to get word to rescue ships. Spencer joined the navy and vowed to learn about the newfangled technology. He read textbooks at night during guard duty to get up to speed.
After his hitch in the navy, he went to work at a wireless company where he was renowned for staying up all night trying to figure out how things worked. This approach, which Spencer called “solving my own situation,” eventually landed him at Raytheon, Inc. At the start of World War II, the British were trying to develop radar that could help track Nazi aircraft—particularly at night. The key to their efforts was something called “magnetron tubes,” which were used for the radar’s microwave system. Spencer listened intently when the British explained how they were having problems with the construction of the tubes and came up with a solution that increased production dramatically and earned Raytheon a huge contract.
All this was a prelude to his biggest invention. One day in 1946, Spencer, who by now was running a division with approximately 5,000 employees, went to do an ordinary check on some of his tubes. As he attentively did his rounds, he noticed something heating up in his pocket. It was a peanut candy bar and it was beginning to melt. According to a 1958 Reader’s Digest article, Spencer wasn’t the first scientist at Raytheon to experience the melting phenomenon near the magnetron tubes, but his prepared mind made him the first to seriously investigate why it was happening.
To further test the tubes, Spencer sent an assistant out to a local store to pick up a bag of popcorn kernels. He exposed the bag to a magnetron and the popcorn burst out of the container light and fluffy. For any couch potato who has used the microwave solely for quick-popping before a game on TV, you can now say you’re following in the footsteps of greatness.
Spencer would continue his work on what he dubbed the “radar range,” constructing a prototype for $100,000. Needless to say, at that cost, suburban families weren’t lining up to buy one. Prices began coming down in the 1950s, with a company called Tappan rolling out a home option in 1955 for a still-pricey $1,295. With so few on the market, manufacturers had a hard time getting food makers to use packaging appropriate for microwaves (for example, they couldn’t stop tinfoil packaging, which we know is a microwave no-no). But over time, as more and more married couples found both partners busy in the workforce, the speed and ease of the microwave caused change. In 1967 approximately 10,000 magnetron ovens were sold; by 1975 that number reached 840,000. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, more than 93 percent of all kitchens had a microwave.
Despite nothing more than a grammar school education, Spencer changed the way Americans eat by paying attention to an accidentally melting candy bar. As one M.I.T. scientist told Reader’s Digest, “The educated scientist knows many things won’t work. Percy doesn’t know what can’t be done.”
Paper Towels: Mistaken delivery
Clarence and E. Irvin Scott were extremely shrewd businessmen. After starting humbly in 1879 pushing a street cart around Philadelphia selling scratch pads, wrapping paper, and paper bags to merchants, the brothers boldly entered an industry that truly unnerved the sensibilities of most of their Victorian-era brethren: toilet paper. Not only did they make the concept palatable to the masses by pressing the health benefits of the disposable tissue but they also invented the toilet roll, which made using the soft paper all the easier.
No doubt, inventing the toilet paper roll should put the Scotts in some sort of pantheon, but the family wasn’t done with just that wonderful creation. Business acumen did not skip a generation in the Scott clan as E. Irvin’s son Arthur was every bit as nimble as his father and uncle when it came to making the most of paper products.
With the company humming along in 1907, Arthur was forced to clean up a big mistake. One day his suppliers sent along a large shipment of paper that was wholly inappropriate for bathroom use. As Time magazine explained in 1938, the company had received “a carload of paper too crunchy for toilet use.” Arthur immediately knew this wouldn’t do. After all, the company focused intently on quality. They would later spend heavily on ad campaigns touting this fact, including one stressing the “harsh tissue dangers” of competitors and another featuring a little girl complaining about an alternative brand that “scratches awful, mummy.”
As a result, the initial inclination was to simply send it back. But Arthur remembered a story he’d heard about a local teacher who during a major flu epidemic wanted to do away with cloth towels at her school because she found them too unhygienic. Instead of complaining to his supplier, Arthur opted to keep the crunchy paper. He added perforations and wrapped it around one of his magic cardboard rolls (albeit a little longer than the toilet paper type).
At this point, he wasn’t thinking about the kitchen. Instead, he saw his invention’s public applications. He dubbed the new rolls “SaniTowels” and sold them to schools, hotels, railroad stations, and restaurants as a more sanitary way to dry hands after a bathroom pit stop. Interestingly, despite the Scotts’ great acumen, the paper towel didn’t migrate to the kitchen until 1931—four years after Arthur’s untimely death at age fifty-one. Renamed “ScotTowels” (now known as Scott Paper Towels), these rolls of 200 sheets sold at a reasonable twenty-five cents, making it as easy to keep the kitchen clean as the company’s toilet paper made it simple to keep a person’s . . . well, you get the picture.
Saran Wrap: After-hours lab worker
Saran Wrap inventor Ralph Wiley deserves a prize for making the most out of a mundane job. In 1933 Wiley, a bright guy in his early twenties, had a really blah gig. He was responsible for cleaning laboratory glassware at Dow Chemical Company. One evening the monotony of the work was broken up by an odd discovery. No matter how hard he tried, he simply couldn’t get one of the beakers clean.
Now, many low-rung workers might have just hidden or thrown away the beaker. After all, who counts them all? But Wiley was intrigued. He found out that the film was a by-product of a substance used in dry cleaning bearing the tongue-twisting name perchloroethylene. Wiley’s interest was further piqued when he couldn’t find a single chemical that could break it down.
Despite his excitement at turning his washing role into something bigger (he would go on to be a longtime Dow research scientist), Wiley wasn’t really sure what to do with his find. Showing his age, he dubbed his glass-cleaning discovery “eonite” after an indestructible material featured in the Little Orphan Annie comic strip. At the time, the substance was not the type of material you’d wrap food in. Called polyvinylidene chloride by more serious Dow employees, it was smelly, greasy, and sported an ugly green hue.
At first, Wiley, who wasn’t enthusiastic about the substance’s prospect as a film, broke down the plastic material into fibers. Dow found a use for it in this form as part of car seat covers. But this product ended up being a loser because the fibers built up too much static electricity, shocking passengers. Next up, one of his bosses considered adding it to the construction of battery casings because it was resistant to acids. That idea didn’t pan out either. Wiley grew so attached to his eonite that when Dow bigwigs considered dropping research on it because the material wasn’t paying big dividends, Wiley threatened to quit.
His ploy worked and after ten years of tinkering with it, Dow finally found a decent application. A film was created and sold to the military during World War II. The wrap proved to be a handy way to bind equipment being transported by sea, protecting it from the corrosion of sea water.
But the military success didn’t save Wiley’s pride and joy f
or long. After the war, Dow sold the film to two former employees who set up a new business called the Saran Wrap Company. These guys helped refine Saran Wrap into its thin, clear (odor-free) form, and by 1949 they were marketing it for kitchen use. “It sold like hotcakes because women liked to put it over bowls,” Wiley told a journalist in 1994. No fools, Dow execs bought back Saran Wrap a few years later, turning it into a huge profit maker.
While Wiley worked on many projects in his forty-two years at Dow, Saran Wrap held a special place in his heart. “It pops into my mind every time I go by the [grocery] shelf,” he said. “I get a little flash of pride.”
S.O.S Pads: Desperate door-to-door salesman
Being a door-to-door salesman is a tough job. Edwin Cox lived that reality when he worked the San Francisco area in the 1910s. He had what he thought was a good product: Wear-Ever Aluminum cookware. His problem was he struggled to get many housewives to let him into their kitchens to show how these lightweight rustproof pots and pans were vastly superior to other options on the market.
Cox figured if he could give them something extra he would get in the door. His company Wear-Ever would commonly offer an “inducement” to lure people to demonstrations at stores. This would come in the form of a special discount for its goods. Cox had a different, more tangible idea.
Despite all of the aluminum-ware’s pluses—they didn’t scorch food and stirring was not necessary when heating liquids—the cookware could become blackened by coal-fueled stoves common in that day. Cox believed that if he could offer a useful (but inexpensive) cleaning tool to hesitant housewives, he’d see sales skyrocket.
In 1917 he began working on his freebee. Steel-wool Brillo pads were patented four years earlier, but a big complaint in the cleaning process was being able to get these abrasive aids really soapy. Cox began hand-soaking little steel-wool pads in buckets full of soapy water. He would let the pad dry and then repeat. Once the small woolly squares were completely saturated in soap, he’d dry them one more time. He then found, when moistened, his invention oozed soap—perfect when it came time to clean pots and pans.
Cox hit the streets again with his product and new pads. As much as he believed in Wear-Ever, it didn’t take long for him to realize that it was his steel wool that enamored potential customers. He would give one free sample of his new product to those who purchased cookware, but began getting calls to find out where additional pads could be purchased.
As a salesman, Cox recognized his new creation was the hot ticket. The next big question was what to name it. He asked his wife, who, the legend goes, suggested calling them S.O.S. pads. The acronym would stand for “save our saucepans” and would also be a reminder of the international Morse code distress signal. He loved it, but had to deal with one hiccup: He couldn’t trademark S.O.S. because of its use in international communication. As a result, he tweaked the name ever so slightly, simply dropping the last period and naming it the S.O.S pad.
Stainless Steel: From gun contract to utensils
Over time regular steel corrodes. Think of old orange-tinged railroad tracks weathered and rusted by years in the sun and the rain. For centuries this fact of life also meant bad news for the everyday use of knives, forks, and spoons. Before the beginning of the twentieth century, cutlery was generally made of carbon steel, which, when air-dried, developed an unsightly reddish tinge.
Of course, utensils were pretty inconsequential compared to other steel-based items like, say, buildings and ship hulls, that could lead to even bigger headaches when rust set in. These larger concerns led many nineteenth-century scientists to search for a way to prevent the corrosion that so badly damaged the metal.
Harry Brearley was not one of those scientists. A metallurgist who ran a laboratory in his hometown of Sheffield, England, he had other metal-related issues to attend to. In 1912, with World War I on the horizon, Brearley earned a contract with a small arms manufacturer to focus on gun barrels. Rather than the corrosion that impacted cutlery and utensils, the trouble with these metal barrels was erosion. The constant firing of the weapons wore down the metal and required them to be replaced.
Brearley went to work experimenting with different alloys (combinations of steel and other elements) that could solve the erosion problem. On August 13, 1913, the scientist made a metal that was 12.8 percent chromium and 0.24 percent carbon. Unknowingly, this formula would change the food world. From there mythmakers take over a bit. Some say that he thought the new steel was a waste and threw it in the garbage. Later, he noticed that it hadn’t rusted and took it out for further experimentation.
A more likely explanation, according to the British Stainless Steel Association, is Brearley etched the alloy with nitric acid—something he likely did with all the combinations he came up with—to assess its resistance to chemical attack. Nitric acid is a very powerful oxidizing agent. In a sense it replicates what it would be like for a knife or fork to be left out in the elements for a long time. Brearley was taken aback to find his chromium-carbon combo was highly resistant to the acid.
Now many other scientists during this period, including ones from Germany, Poland, and the United States, have argued that they were the first to independently come up with rust-repelling steel. But two facts do not appear in dispute: Brearley’s material was the first to be dubbed “stainless steel” and he was the first to come up with the idea of applying it for use with eating.
Neither of these happened overnight. In a decision that probably later led to a lot of high-level firings, the bosses at his laboratory balked at the idea of using the new alloy for cutlery. Brearley was undeterred. He was in the right location to find a good utensil maker. His native Sheffield had been the center of cutlery making in England since at least the seventeenth century. Brearley approached a local cutler named R. F. Mosley with what he called “rustless steel.” After some testing, Mosley loved the product. The new knives, forks, spoons, saucepans, and countless other kitchenware were shiny, easy to wash, and most important, rust-resistant. Still, he insisted on the more marketable name, stainless steel.
Styrofoam: Wartime insulator
For environmentalists, expanded polystyrene (aka Styrofoam) may be this book’s most annoying accidental discovery.
During World War II, a twenty-five-year-old scientist at Dow Chemical Company named Ray McIntire wasn’t thinking about a way to develop coffee cups or hamburger containers. He was aiming at coming up with a synthetic alternative to latex rubber that could serve as a sturdy flexible insulator. As part of his efforts, the inexperienced McIntire made a mistake when combining a petroleum by-product called styrene with a volatile liquid known as isobutylene. He was supposed to go easy on the isobutylene, but measured the ratio incorrectly, adding too much of the unstable matter.
After putting the combo under extreme pressure, the result was not the flexible rubber substitute he’d been hoping for. Instead, it was a rigid, exceptionally lightweight foam that had bulked up thirty times greater than what McIntire expected. Moreover, it was tremendously sturdy, extremely buoyant, and an excellent insulator. It hadn’t been what McIntire had been looking for, but the young scientist figured out practical applications for the finding.
Patented in 1944, Styrofoam was adopted by the US Coast Guard, which used it in life rafts and other flotation devices. Following the war, the most popular civilian application for Styrofoam was as an insulator in home building. But as other plastic companies started producing their own versions, Styrofoam migrated into the world of food. As a great insulator, it was perfect for both ice chests and coffee cups. It also didn’t easily get scalding hot so it made sense for picnic plates and fast-food packaging. It helped that it was extremely inexpensive to produce as well. (Geek note: Most squeaky takeout containers or white trays are not Styrofoam; the term—like “Kleenex” for tissue paper—is often used incorrectly to represent material created by other companies that is similar to, but not the same as, McIntire’s invention.)
But for
all its low-price convenience, the light-as-a-feather product can be an environmental nightmare. Its hard-wearing structure is great when you’re packing leftovers, but it also makes Styrofoam-esque disposable items nearly impossible to break down at landfills. This realization came in full focus in the 1980s, when Green groups fought McDonald’s over the clamshell polystyrene boxes used for their hamburgers. In 1990 the fast-food giant got the message and did away with the packaging.
Still, the plastic foam unintentionally innovated by McIntire remains omnipresent. For example, one Boston school principal said in 2010 that his cafeteria uses 72,000 lunch trays made from the material a year. As for McIntire’s legacy, Dow has tried hard to keep it clear of the pollution issue, emphasizing that real Styrofoam (as opposed to other companies’ hardened foam) is used primarily in building and never finds its way to local garbage dumps.
Tea Bags: Sample packaging
Though tea is considered a national drink in Great Britain, it was an American who revolutionized how it’s used, doing so—inadvertently—in the name of capitalism. In 1908 (some say it was 1904) Thomas Sullivan was a wholesaler in New York searching for ways to cut down on his bottom line. One outlay he was finding particularly tiresome was the cost of tins used to mail tea samples to customers. To streamline expenses, he decided to try wrapping samples into sleek silk sachets.
The new packaging puzzled some recipients. Instead of opening up the small envelopes, pouring its contents into water, and sampling the tea as Sullivan had intended, a number of store owners decided to dip the bag directly into their boiling pots. For most people at this point, tea leaves were painstakingly measured and then placed in a strainer, providing flavor as hot water was poured through it into a mug. But those who tried Sullivan’s tea bags loved them and wrote the wholesaler asking for more pouches (but offering suggestions on how to improve its design). A stunned Sullivan wasn’t one to disappoint customers and went to work on new designs—in particular replacing the silk with less expensive gauze. Not only did this help the tea infuse the water better but it was also a financially sound maneuver.
How the Hot Dog Found Its Bun Page 14