by Peter Nowak
Consumers were, as porn historian Jonathan Coopersmith puts it, finally free from the “censoring eye of the local druggist or the ogling leer of the film laboratory technician.”34 More to the point, Polaroid “was an enormous breakthrough for the amateur because anybody could shoot whatever they wanted,” according to Playboy’s current photo director Gary Cole. “If you shot pictures of your girlfriend, you didn’t have to worry about anybody else seeing them.”35 (The cameras also proved invaluable to professionals, like Playboy photographers. With nude shoots sometimes taking days to meet Hugh Hefner’s exacting standards, Polaroids helped photographers set up shots and save time and money. “A lot of the initial lighting and posing changes were made at the Polaroid stages before we shot the actual film,” Cole says. “It would save you a whole half day, shooting Polaroid.”)
Land’s company knew about the use of its cameras for sexual purposes, both by amateurs and professionals, and tacitly acknowledged as much. In 1966 the company released a new model called “the Swinger,” a term coined in the late fifties to describe a sexually liberated person. (By the seventies, the word had evolved to mean a person who was promiscuous and/or liked to swap sexual partners.) Television commercials for the camera showed good-looking, nearly nude couples frolicking on the beach, taking pictures of each other. With the sexual revolution in full swing, Polaroid was clearly looking to cash in on the new wave of liberation.
The same held true for photo booths, which were essentially giant, immobile Polaroid cameras. By the thirties, fully self-sufficient booths were popping up in public places such as amusement parks and stores. By the fifties, proprietors were encountering an unexpected problem. According to one historian, “Complaints started coming in from Woolworth’s and other stores that people, particularly women, were stripping off their clothes for the private photo booth camera. Couples started being a little more adventurous in the privacy of the curtained booth.” As a result, many Woolworth’s stores removed their curtains to discourage “naughty encounters.”36
There just seemed to be something about the booths that brought out the exhibitionist in people, a phenomenon that continues to hold true. Brett Ratner, director of such mainstream movies as Rush Hour and Red Dragon, installed a black-and-white booth in his house and had his celebrity friends take pictures whenever they stopped by. He published the results in a 2003 book, Hillhaven Lodge: The Photo Booth Pictures, with some glaring omissions. “There were a lot of middle fingers, a lot of people with their tongues out,” Ratner says. “There was also a lot of flashing ... I didn’t publish those.”37
Booth manufacturers have always known what buttered their bread, and they quietly encouraged such uses. One American manufacturer, Auto Photo, handed out programs at a mid-fifties industry convention that featured a drawing of a woman exposing herself with the caption, “Make sure he remembers you! Send a foto to your boyfriend.”38 Technology makers were happy to reap the benefits of the public’s evolving sexual liberation, but it wasn’t something they were willing to tout openly. “The fact that this was in the sales material says, okay, these guys know about it, they just aren’t talking about it in public,” says Coopersmith, who has written several papers on the role of pornography in technological development. “Even now, many of the firms producing the technology and who benefited do not like to publicly talk about it. You still can’t tell people what you’re doing that openly.”39
Participatory porn took a huge step forward with the advent of camcorders in the early eighties. While the 16- and 8-millimetre cameras developed during the Second World War were great for amateur pornographers with an interest and knowledge of film, it wasn’t until the camcorder that the mass market finally had a viable, easy-to-use video option. The camcorder made filming idiot-proof—just point and shoot, no need to set lighting levels or focus, and no need to get film developed. While the technology obviously had many non-pornographic uses, science-fiction author Isaac Asimov was right when he stated in 1981 that “the age of home video will fundamentally alter our approach to sex.”40 The camcorder took the do-it-yourself porn started by Polaroids, photo booths and smaller film cameras to the next level. As had happened with stag films, a market for amateur porn movies sprung up in the eighties, with the back pages of every adult magazine full of ads for homemade videos. The trend further evolved with the advent of digitalization, with amateur porn websites springing up in huge numbers.
The continually evolving ability for amateurs to create their own sexual media, coupled with an ever-increasing amount of purchasable porn, has dramatically transformed our views on sex over the past half century. On the supply side, technology manufacturers—who once refused to publicly acknowledge the role sexual content played in the success of their products— are starting to come around, especially smaller companies that are desperate for customers of any sort. Spatial View, a small Toronto-based company that is developing software to view three-dimensional photos on digital devices, is just one example. In early 2009 the company gave the honour of announcing the availability of its new Wazabee 3DeeShell, which slips onto an iPhone and allows the user to view specially coded photos and movies in 3-D, to adult producer Pink Visual. The adult company put out a press release touting itself as one of the first content suppliers for the shell days before Spatial View itself announced the product. “They wanted to show that they were on the cutting edge of technology,” says Brad Casemore, Spatial View’s vice-president of business development. “They came right after us. They read about it and said, ‘We’d like to give it a try.’ It’s not really a target market for us for a variety of reasons, but when a customer comes to you, there’s not much you can do.”41
4
A GAME OF WAR
The sand of the desert is sodden red,— Red
with the wreck of a square that broke;—
The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with the dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed its banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”
—HENRY JOHN NEWBOLT, “VITAÏ LAMPADA”
When I was a kid, playtime consisted of one of two activities. Either I’d be running around outside playing “army” or I’d be indoors acting out battles between G.I. Joe troops and their sworn enemy, the evil terrorist organization Cobra. In the outdoor scenario, my friends and I would form teams and “fight” each other with plastic guns on the forested hillside across the street from my house. When it was too cold to go outside, I’d build Cobra fortresses in my basement out of couch cushions and boxes that the G.I. Joe troops would have to overrun.
What was the result of all this war-themed play? Well, I can safely say I’m a master of weapon sound effects. There isn’t a variation of “pow-pow-pow,” “budda-budda-budda” or “vooooosh” that I can’t mimic. But I wasn’t a particularly violent child, nor were my parents warmongers who encouraged such military-oriented leisure. No, I was just like millions of children—mainly boys—who happen to like playing war.
For as long as there have been weapons, children have fashioned their own makeshift versions from sticks and other found materials to play at being soldiers, pirates or policemen. Toy soldiers have been around almost as long; wooden carvings have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs, while tin versions were first manufactured in Europe during the Middle Ages. The first plastic toy soldiers, or “army men,” were produced in the United States in the thirties and took off in the fifties after polyethylene became available. Toymaker Hasbro further capitalized on boys’ fascination with war-themed toys in 1963 when it introduced G.I. Joe, a thirty-centimetre-tall “action figure” influenced by the Second World War. The line sold millions of units while a newer, 9.5-centimetre iteration of G.I. Joe troops—the ones I loved so much—became the biggest-selling toy line of the eighties.1
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p; While this link between war and toys has always existed, it wasn’t until after the Second World War that military technology began to drive the development of toys and games. Just as military-refined technology created playthings for adults (like cameras that could be used to shoot sexual escapades), a host of entrepreneurial inventors followed the lead of companies like Raytheon, Hormel and DuPont in exploiting their wartime inventions for post-war commercial success. For some of these entrepreneurs, it was all about money. For others, the motivations were deeper. Turning their inventions into toys and games allowed them to show off their creations publicly, a welcome and sought-after escape from the secretive world they normally worked in. Still others sought to entertain and amuse, perhaps as penance for the horrific deeds that some of their other creations were responsible for. Taken together, their efforts have gradually changed our attitudes toward war. Today, the tide has turned completely—the development of toys and games now drives the military. Remote-control robots incorporate the same controllers used in PlayStation and Xbox consoles, while troops familiarize themselves with combat zones by playing specially designed three-dimensional games that use the same technology as the Call of Duty and Tom Clancy titles found on the shelves of Walmart. In many ways, technology has turned war into a game.
Springs and Things
It started with simple inventions like the humble Slinky. In 1943 navy engineer Richard James was trying to figure out a way to stabilize sensitive instruments on board ships using springs. While tinkering in his home in Philadelphia, he accidentally knocked a steel torsion spring off a shelf. Rather than falling and landing in a heap, the spring—a coil with no compression or tension—“stepped” down from the shelf to a stack of books, then to a tabletop, then onto the floor, where it recoiled and stood upright. The engineer was even more astonished when he gently pushed the spring down a flight of stairs, only to see it gracefully “walk” down. His wife Betty was equally impressed by the spring’s eloquent movements and described them as “slinky,” which stuck as a name.
The couple thought they might have a hit toy on their hands so they formed a business, James Spring & Wire Company, and took out a loan, which Richard used to make a machine that wound Slinky units. They shopped the Slinky around to local department stores and found a taker in Gimbels Brothers, which set up a display—complete with an inclined plane to demonstrate the spring’s walking ability—in a downtown Philadelphia store during the 1945 Christmas season. The Jameses were flabbergasted when all four hundred units, which Richard had spent days winding, quickly sold out.2 The Slinky sensation was off and running.
The couple built a production factory in 1948 to cope with demand and eventually developed spinoff products such as the smaller Slinky Jr. and the Slinky Dog, plus non-spring toys like building kits. For the next decade, the Jameses watched the riches pour in. In 1960, however, Richard became unwound, so to speak. After suffering a nervous breakdown, he left Betty and their six children to join a religious cult in Bolivia. Betty was left to manage the company, which she renamed James Industries, as well as the large debts incurred by her husband’s religious donations. She recovered from the shocking turn of events and eventually took the Slinky to new heights, but it wasn’t easy. “He had given so much away that I was almost bankrupt. I sold the factory and decided to move from the Philadelphia area back to Altoona, where I grew up, with the business,” she later recalled.3
Betty helped create the toy’s memorable television ad campaign, which featured the catchy jingle that anyone born before the nineties is unlikely to forget: “It’s Slinky, it’s Slinky, for fun it’s a wonderful toy. It’s Slinky, it’s Slinky, it’s fun for a girl and a boy!” By its sixtieth anniversary in 2005 more than three hundred million Slinky toys had been sold.4 A few years earlier, on November 4, 2001, the General Assembly of Pennsylvania named the Slinky the Official State Toy of Philadelphia. Richard James, however, didn’t get to see his invention honoured—he died in Bolivia in 1974. The Slinky, meanwhile, went full circle with its military connection, when American soldiers in the Vietnam War found it could be used as an antenna for their mobile radios.
The Slinky sparked the imaginations of military minds and marketers alike, who realized that war technology might just be an untapped gold mine of toy possibilities. Silly Putty came next. When the Japanese occupied the rubber-producing islands of the Pacific during the early forties, the Allies found themselves facing a potential shortage of vehicle tires and boot soles. Credit for the invention of Silly Putty is disputed; Earl Warrick, a scientist working for Dow Corning, claimed to have created it, but Crayola, the company that now owns the trademark, considers James Wright the proper inventor. Wright, a Scottish engineer working in General Electric’s labs in New Haven, Connecticut, came up with a potential solution to the rubber problem when he mixed boric acid and silicon oil in a test tube. The new substance had rubber-like qualities and a very high melting temperature, but it also bounced, stretched further and resisted mold. The putty-like goo, however, wasn’t solid enough to replace rubber, so it sat out the war. GE sent the substance to scientists and engineers around the world after the war, but eventually gave up and declared it had no practical use.5 (The Allied rubber problem, meanwhile, was solved in the late stages of the war when a number of companies, including tire makers Firestone and Goodrich, came up with a synthetic elastomer under a patent-sharing program overseen by the American government.)
Ultimately, GE’s substance didn’t have to travel far to find a use. Ruth Fallgetter, a toy store owner in New Haven, got her hands on one of the samples that were circulating and immediately saw its potential as a plaything. She brought in Peter Hodgson, a local marketing consultant, to help sell it.
Children immediately fell in love with the putty because of its pliability and ability to copy pictures and text when pressed against newspaper and comics pages. Packaged in a clear case with a price tag of two dollars, the putty outsold just about everything in the store. But Fallgetter wasn’t convinced of its long-term viability, so she left it to her partner to take further. Eyeing the Slinky’s success, Hodgson bounced around potential names before trademarking one he thought represented the goo perfectly: Silly Putty. He bought production rights and a batch of the substance from GE, then packaged it in plastic eggs, since Easter was on the way. He introduced Silly Putty to potential distributors at the 1950 International Toy Fair in New York, but once again it flopped—nearly all of the toy marketers at the fair advised Hodgson to give up. The persistent entrepreneur didn’t listen, however, and eventually convinced department chain Neiman Marcus and bookseller Doubleday to sell the substance for $1 per egg in their stores. Hodgson was convinced Silly Putty was a great toy because it sparked children’s imaginations. “It really has a sort of personality,’’ he later said, “and it reflects your personality.... A lot of what makes it work is that the stuff in the egg is only the half of it.’’6
Silly Putty sold modestly until it made an appearance in The New Yorker, which quoted a Doubleday employee as saying it was the “most terrific item it has handled since Forever Amber,” a bestselling 1944 novel.7 More than a quarter million orders rolled in from stores around the country in the three days following the story’s publication.8
Hodgson and his goo weren’t out of the woods yet. The Korean War and the American government’s rationing of silicone, the main ingredient in Silly Putty, almost put him out of business in 1951. He had to scale back production, but when restrictions were lifted a year later, his business went straight to the moon, literally. American sales boomed throughout the fifties and Silly Putty also became a hit in several European countries. But Hodgson scored his biggest publicity coup yet in 1968, when it was reported that astronauts on the Apollo 8 moon mission were using it to secure tools in zero gravity. The entrepreneur’s tenacity had finally paid off and he rode Silly Putty to riches. When he died in 1976 Hodgson left behind an estate worth $140 million. Crayola bought the rights to Silly Putty in
1977 and ten years later was selling more than two million eggs annually.9
Rocket Doll
As the sixties approached, toys started to become more complex, and so did the technology behind them. The all-time bestselling toy, the Barbie doll, was the product of space-age military thinking. It also had lascivious if not outright pornographic origins. The doll was inspired by Lilli, a cartoon character from the German tabloid newspaper Bild Zeitung. Bild, as it is now known, was founded in Hamburg in 1952 for people with poor reading skills. Like many tabloids, it made heavy use of photographs and featured news stories that were often sensationalistic and based on dubious facts. Lilli, a tall, statuesque character with platinum-blond hair created by artist Reinhard Beuthien, fit in well with the newspaper’s lowbrow editorial direction. She was unabashedly sexual, a gold digger, an exhibitionist and a floozy with “the body of a Vargas Girl, the brains of Pia Zadora and the morals of Xaviera Hollander,” in the words of one Barbie biographer.10 In her first cartoon, Lilli sat in a fortune teller’s tent and, after being told she’d meet a wealthy and good-looking suitor, asked, “Can’t you tell me the name and address of this rich and handsome man?” Another exploit found her naked in her female friend’s apartment concealing her vital parts with a newspaper, saying, “We had a fight and he took back all the presents he gave me,” while yet another had a policeman warn her that her two-piece bathing suit was illegal. “Oh,” she replied, “and in your opinion, which part should I take off?”11