The can opener as we appreciate it today—with a cutting wheel that rolls round the can’s rim—was the brainchild of American inventor William W. Lyman, who patented the device in 1870. Revolutionary in concept and design, it won immediate acclaim, and in its long history underwent only one major improvement. In 1925, the Star Can Opener Company of San Francisco modified Lyman’s device by adding a serrated rotation wheel—named the “feed wheel,” since the can being opened rotated, for the first time, against the wheel. The basic principle continues to be used on modern can openers, and it was the basis of the first electric can opener, introduced in December 1931.
Thermos Bottle: 1892, England
The vacuum thermos bottle, a picnic plus, was developed not to maintain the temperature of hot coffee or iced lemonade but to insulate laboratory gases. It was a nineteenth-century scientific apparatus that found its way into twentieth-century homes.
“Dewar’s flask,” as it was called in the 1890s, was never patented by its inventor, the British physicist Sir James Dewar. He viewed his breakthrough vessel as a gift to the scientific community, and his original container is on display at London’s Royal Institute. As simple as the vacuum-walled thermos bottle is in principle, it was two hundred years in the making.
The insulating properties of a vacuum were understood in 1643 when Italian physicist Evangelista Torricelli invented the mercury barometer, forerunner of all thermometers. Early problems with the thermos involved maintaining the vacuum once it was created, and employing a thermally nonconductive material (like rubber, virtually unknown to most Europeans in the first half of the seventeenth century) to seal all points of contact between the inner and outer vessels.
James Dewar, in 1892, successfully constructed a container with insulated inner and outer glass walls sealing an evacuated space; and to further diminish heat transfer by radiation, he silvered the inner glass. Scientists used Dewar’s flask to store vaccines and serums at stable temperatures, and even to transport rare tropical fish. Dewar’s gift to the British scientific establishment would become his German assistant’s ticket to fortune.
Laboratory vacuum flasks were manufactured for Dewar by a professional glass blower, Reinhold Burger, partner in a Berlin firm specializing in glass scientific apparatus. It was Burger who realized the vacuum bottle’s broad commercial applications, and designing a smaller home version, with a metal exterior to protect the delicate glass walls (absent from Dewar’s model), he secured a German patent in 1903. Seeking a name for his flask, and hoping to drum up publicity at the same time, Burger promoted a contest, offering a cash prize for the most imaginative suggestion. The winning entry was Thermos, Greek for “heat.”
An American businessman, William B. Walker, traveling in Berlin in 1906, was impressed with the thermos and within three months was importing thermoses into the United States. Campers, hunters, and housewives purchased them so quickly that Walker secured German patent rights and set up his own manufacturing operation, the American Thermos Bottle Company of New York. A quart-size thermos sold for $7.50; the pint size for $5.00.
What contributed to the thermos’s rapid acceptance, say industry leaders, was the fact that the flasks were used and praised by notable men in history. President William Taft used a thermos in the White House; Sir Ernest Shackleton carried one to the South Pole; Lieutenant Robert Peary brought one to the North Pole; Sir Edmund Hillary took one up Mount Everest; and thermoses flew with the Wright brothers and Count Zeppelin. Pictured in the hands of prominent men, invariably commented upon in newspapers and in magazine articles on exploration, the thermos, without Madison Avenue’s assistance, received a tremendous amount of favorable press in a relatively short time. And from the American public’s standpoint, if a thermos was dependable enough to take to the farthest reaches of the globe, surely it would keep soup warm on a picnic.
Until July 1970, the word “Thermos” was a patented trademark. It was only after a lengthy court battle between rival manufacturers that the U.S. courts ruled that “thermos has become and is now a generic term in the English language.”
Toaster: 1910, United States
Ever since the Egyptians began baking bread, around 2600 B.C., man has eaten toast, although the reasons for parching bread today are different from those of the past.
The Egyptians toasted bread not to alter its taste or texture but to remove moisture, as a form of preservation. Quite simply, a parched slice of bread, harboring fewer molds and spores, had a longer shelf life in the Egyptian kitchen.
For over four thousand years, people throughout the world toasted bread as the Egyptians had: skewered on a prong and suspended over a fire. Even the device that eighteenth-century Britons and Americans called a “toaster” was nothing more than two long-handled forks, crudely connected, that sandwiched the bread over the flames. Given the vagaries of the fireplace, each slice of toast was guaranteed a unique appearance.
A contraption heralded in the nineteenth century as a toasting revolution did not significantly alter the nonuniformity of slices of toast. Named the Toaster Oven, it was the first regularly manufactured toaster in America. Constructed as a cage of tin and wire, it sat over the opening in a coal-powered stove and held four slices of bread tilted toward the center. Rising heat from the fire gradually darkened one side of the bread, which was watched diligently. Then the bread was turned over.
The arrival of electricity, and later of timers, changed all that.
Electric toasters appeared soon after the turn of the century—skeletal, naked-wire structures, without housing or shells. They lacked heat controls, so bread still had to be watched moment to moment. But the great advantage of the electric toaster was that in order to enjoy a slice of toast at any time of day, a person did not have to fire up the entire stove. This feature was prominently touted in the summer of 1910, in a Westinghouse advertisement in the Saturday Evening Post announcing the company’s electric model: “Breakfast without going into the kitchen! Ready for service any hour of the day or night.” The copy promised that by simply plugging a toaster into a wall socket, the owner could prepare toast in “any room in the home.” The luxury caught on; many wealthier families installed a toaster in each bedroom. These status symbols, selling for $8.95, still required that individual slices of bread be watched and flipped manually from side to side.
Pop-up Toaster. This convenience had its beginning in a plant in Stillwater, Minnesota, where, during World War I, a master mechanic, Charles Strite, decided to do something about the burnt toast served in the company cafeteria. To circumvent the need for continual human attention, Strite incorporated springs and a variable timer, and he filed the patent for his pop-up toaster on May 29, 1919.
Receiving financial backing from friends, Strite oversaw production of the first one hundred hand-assembled toasters, which were shipped to the Childs restaurant chain. Every machine was returned, each requiring some sort of mechanical adjustment. The restaurants, however, which were in the volume toast business, loved the pop-up principle and waited patiently for Strite to iron out the bugs in his invention.
The first pop-up toaster for the home, the Toastmaster, arrived on the scene in 1926. It had a timing adjustment for the desired degree of darkness, and when the toast reached the preselected state, it was ejected, rather forcefully. The device stirred so much public interest that March 1927 was designated National Toaster Month, and the advertisement running in the March 5 issue of the Saturday Evening Post promised: “This amazing new invention makes perfect toast every time! Without watching! Without turning! Without burning!”
That was not entirely true.
The machine’s overall operating temperature grew hotter and hotter with each subsequent slice of bread toasted. The first slice, when Toastmaster was coolest, was underdone. The second and third slices were usually as desired. The fourth and later ones grew darker and darker. In fine print, the operating manual recommended running the toaster once without bread, just to warm it u
p; then, later, letting it cool down slightly. But these were quiddities, to be ironed out by technicians. The automatic toaster had arrived.
Whistling Teakettle: 1921, Germany
Teakettles were used by primitive societies, as were whistles. Among Mayan ruins, archaeologists have unearthed two-thousand-year-old clay pots with multiple whistle spouts. When water pours out of one hole, another emits a faint, thin whistling noise. Whether or not the devices were history’s first whistling teakettles is unknown. But history does record that in 1921, while touring a German teakettle factory, Joseph Block, a retired cookware executive from New York, conceived such an idea.
Growing up in New York, Block had watched his father design a pressurized potato cooker that whistled at the end of the cooking cycle. Years later, at the Westphalia, Germany, teakettle plant, that memory spontaneously awakened in Block’s mind and suggested a variation. Intrigued by the idea, the Germany factory produced thirty-six whistling teakettles—which went on sale at Wertheim’s department store in Berlin at nine o’clock one morning and sold out by noon.
The following year, the kettle debuted in America, at a Chicago housewares fair. For the duration of the week-long show, Joseph Block kept at least one demonstration kettle whistling continuously. The sound drove store buyers to other exhibits, but not before many of them placed orders. Wanamaker’s in New York took forty-eight kettles and discovered that the whistling one-dollar novelty attracted customers in droves from other counters into the housewares department. And the retired Joseph Block found himself back in business, selling department stores across the nation 35,000 whistling teakettles a month.
Block was the first to admit that his invention made no great contribution to the American kitchen, but it did bring a smile of amusement to the lips of those who stopped to listen to the high-pitched sound, especially children—who may have duplicated the reaction of Mayan children to their pots that whistled.
Coffeepot: 1800, France
Coffee has been a favorite food (the beans were chewed for four hundred years) and beverage ever since its discovery by an Ethiopian goatherder named Kaldi in A.D. 850. But no commercial device such as a coffeepot existed for brewing ground beans until the introduction of the French biggin in 1800. During those intervening centuries, in the many countries that prodigiously consumed coffee, people prepared the drink simply by boiling ground beans in water and pouring the mixture through a filter of their own design. Bags of grounds came with the standard instruction to boil until the coffee “smelled good.”
The biggin, simple as it was, became a welcome kitchen accessory.
Created by nineteenth-century French pharmacist R. Descroisilles, it consisted of two slender metal containers—available in tin, copper, or pewter—separated by a plate containing holes, the filter. Around 1850, French manufacturers introduced the first porcelain-enameled biggins.
The quest for a perfect cup of coffee. The Filter Pot, c. 1870, modeled on the Biggin; Coffee Warmer; Coffee Boiler (lower right), in which grounds were boiled until the brew “smelled good,” then the liquid was strained.
The first American adaptation of the biggin was patented in 1873. The single-chamber cylinder contained a filter that was pressed down through the mixture of grounds and hot water, forcing the grounds to the bottom of the vessel. Unfortunately, filters were not always flush with the container’s walls, and a gritty drink might result. The problem annoyed one woman enough to drive her to invent a better cup of coffee.
Melitta. In 1907, Mrs. Melitta Bentz of Germany began experimenting with different materials to place between the two chambers of a biggin-like coffeepot. A circle of cotton fabric cut out and placed over the pot’s own metal filter worked for a time, but the fabric soon shredded. She hit on a near-perfect kind of heavy-duty, porous paper in 1908 when she cut out a disk from a desk ink blotter, and the Melitta filter system was on its way toward commercial development.
In America at that time, sales of all kinds of coffeepots were slow and manufacturers conceived an idea that would be popular until the late ’20s—the combination of several functions into one appliance. A prime and successful example was the Armstrong company’s Perc-O-Toaster. It toasted bread, baked waffles, and perked coffee. But it was the percolator part that Americans loved best, and it was the percolator that in America won out over all competing types of coffeepot in the first half of this century.
Chemex. Next in the never-ending quest for the perfect cup of coffee came the Chemex, in 1940. The brainchild of a German chemist, Dr. Peter Schlumbohm, it embodied the Bauhaus design philosophy: a table must be a table, a chair a chair, and a coffeepot should do nothing except make great coffee.
Schlumbohm, who immigrated to America in 1939, adapted a trusty piece of scientific laboratory equipment: a heat-tempered Pyrex pot. He added no more than an inverted conical top that held filter paper and a measured amount of finely ground coffee beans.
At first, major appliance makers turned down Schlumbohm’s design. Chemex, they argued, looked too simple to actually work. Finally, he persuaded a buyer for Macy’s Herald Square store in New York City to take a Chemex home overnight and prepare coffee with it the next morning. Before noon, he received a phone call and an order for a hundred pots.
Corning Glass, developers of Pyrex, agreed to produce Chemex, but by then World War II was in full force and the company notified Schlumbohm that they could not legally manufacture a new product without priority clearance from the War Production Board. The determined inventor wrote directly to President Roosevelt, heading his letter, “Minima rex non curat,” “a king does not bother with details” —then adding, “Sed President curat et minima,” “but a President cares even about details.” A lover of good coffee, Roosevelt permitted Chemex to go into production.
A wartime clearance to produce the novelty of an all-glass coffeemaker, at a time when almost all metal-coffeepot production had ceased, was more than Dr. Schlumbohm had dreamed. Although he acquired some two hundred patents for technological devices throughout his lifetime, none would achieve the success of his simplest invention of all.
Pressure Cooker: 1679, England
At a London dinner party on the evening of April 12, 1682, the august members of the Royal Society sat down to a meal such as they—or anyone else—had never eaten before. Cooked by the invited guest, thirty-five-year-old French inventor Denis Papin, a pioneer of steam power, the evening’s fare was prepared in Papin’s latest marvel, the “steam digester.”
Papin, an assistant to the renowned Irish physicist Robert Boyle, formulator of the laws governing gases, had developed his steam digester in 1679. It was a metal container with a safety valve and a tightly fitting lid, which increased internal steam pressure, raising a cooking liquid’s boiling point.
Following the historic meal, the Royal Society’s esteemed architect, Christopher Wren, wrote that thanks to the steam digester, “the oldest and hardest Cow-Beef may now be made as tender and savoury as young and choice meat”; one wonders what was served at the meal. Wren oversaw the publication of a booklet, “A New Digester,” which offered recipes for steam-cooking mutton, beef, lamb, rabbit, mackerel, eel, beans, peas, cherries, gooseberries, plums, pike, and pigeon.
In the booklet, Papin astutely observed that pressure cooking preserved more of a food’s natural flavor and nutritive value. Other contributors demonstrate the “bandwagon effect” of attempting to employ a new invention for a multiplicity of purposes. The authors offer methods for steam-cooking desserts, punches, hot toddies, and puddings.
History’s first pressure cooker bombed—figuratively and literally. Not only did the majority of Londoners not take favorably to the idea of steamed pike and pigeon, but those who purchased a digester and attempted its recipes often ended up with the evening’s meal on the kitchen wall. The temperature vicissitudes of an open fire were no match for Papin’s imperfect safety valve. Several serious accidents were reported. Except for scientific applications (as autoc
laves), pressure vessels were forgotten for about a hundred fifty years. It was French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte who was responsible for the pressure cooker’s reemergence.
In 1810, Napoleon, proclaiming that “an army moves on its stomach,” was desperate to find a means of supplying preserved food to his troops. The government offered a handsome prize for a solution to the problem. Employing a modification of Papin’s pressure cooker, French chef Nicholas Appert developed the first practical method for cooking, sterilizing, and bottling foods. For his preservation technique, Appert won the prize of twelve thousand francs, and his methods reawakened interest in pressure cooking.
Manufacturers today claim that although pressure cookers, incorporating high safety standards, sell in respectable numbers, the public’s main resistance to them is the same as it was in Papin’s day: fear of an explosion.
Disposable Paper Cup: 1908, New England
The small waxed paper cup that serves so well as a disposable drinking glass and an individual ice cream container—to mention only two of its applications—originated out of one man’s frustrated attempts to market an unlikely product: a drink of water. The penny drink of water never achieved popularity, but the specially designed throwaway cup that held the water started an industry.
The paper cup story begins in 1908, when an enterprising inventor, Hugh Moore, produced a porcelain vending machine to dispense a cup of pure, chilled drinking water. Similar to the later glass-tank office cooler, Moore’s Penny Water Vendor had three separate compartments: an upper one for ice, a middle one for water, and a lower part to hold discarded cups. Each machine bore a sign stating that no sanitary cup was ever reused. Water was the commodity being sold, the cup an incidental.
Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things Page 16