Slinky: Mid-1940s, United States
As Silly Putty was a failed war effort to develop an inexpensive rubber, Slinky, the spring that descends steps with grace, elegance, and stealth, was the failed attempt of an engineer to produce an antivibration device for ship instruments.
In the early 1940s, marine engineer Richard James was experimenting with various kinds of delicate, fast-responding springs. His goal was to develop a spring that would instantaneously counterbalance the wave motion that rocks a ship at sea. A set of such springs, strategically placed around a sensitive nautical instrument, would keep its needle gauges unaffected by pitching and yawing. In attempting to improve on existing antivibration devices, Richard James stumbled upon a fascinating toy.
One day in his home laboratory, James accidentally knocked an experimental spring off a shelf. It did not fall summarily to the floor, but literally crawled, coil by coil, to a lower shelf, onto a stack of books, down to the tabletop, and finally came to rest, upright, on the floor. A quick experiment revealed that the spring was particularly adept at descending stairs. It was Richard James’s wife, Betty, who realized that her husband’s invention should be a toy. After two days of thumbing through a dictionary, she settled on what she felt was the best adjective in the English language to describe the spring’s snake-like motion: slinky.
Betty James still runs the company she founded with her husband in 1946 to market Slinkys. And in an unusual reversal of roles, Slinky the toy has been put to practical uses. Carried by communications soldiers in Vietnam, Slinky was tossed over a high tree branch as a makeshift radio antenna. Slinky was incorporated into a spring device used to pick pecans from trees. And Slinky has gone aloft in the space shuttle to test the effects of zero gravity on the physical laws that govern the mechanics of springs. In space, Slinky behaves like neither a spring nor a toy but as a continuously propagating wave.
Toys That Glow in the Dark: 1603, Italy
There are various toy amulets, as well as religious artifacts, made of a milky white plastic that, when exposed to light, then moved into darkness, glows a greenish white. That magical property was first produced, fittingly, by a seventeenth-century alchemist in a quest to transform base metals into gold.
Vincenzo Cascariolo was a cobbler in Bologna, Italy. Experimenting in the centuries-old tradition of alchemy, he sought the “philosopher’s stone” to transmute relatively worthless metals such as iron and copper into silver or gold. In 1603, Cascariolo combined barium sulfate with powdered coal, heated the mixture, spread it over an iron bar, and let the coating cool.
To his disappointment, the iron did not become gold. But when Cascariolo placed the coated bar on a darkened shelf for storage, he was astonished by its sudden glow. Though the light eventually faded, Cascariolo learned that repeated exposure to sun “reanimated” the bar. The alchemist believed that he had stumbled upon a means of capturing the sun’s golden rays; and his chemicals did briefly store a form of solar energy. He hailed his discovery as the first step in producing a philosopher’s stone.
Throughout Italy, his compound became known as lapis solaris, or “sun stone,” and it was a great novelty. Particularly with the clergy. Crucifixes, miniature icons of saints, and rosary beads were painted, varnished, and compounded with lapis solaris, to imbue them with eerie halos. The belief developed that prayers recited in the presence of a glowing amulet were more readily answered. And the market for objects that glowed in the dark expanded throughout Christian countries. The alchemist had not succeeded in transmuting iron to gold, but he had spawned a gold mine in religious artifacts that would only lose their mysterious aura centuries later, when physicists explained how molecules absorb and radiate light through the process of chemiluminescence.
Roller Skates: 1759, Belgium
The first practical pair of roller skates, called skaites, was built by a Belgian musical instrument maker, Joseph Merlin, in 1759. Each skate had only two wheels, aligned along the center of the shoe, and Merlin constructed the skates in order to make a spectacular entrance at a costume party in the Belgian city of Huy. The crude design, which strapped to the feet, was based on the ice skates of Merlin’s day.
A master violinist, Merlin intended to roll into the party while playing his violin. Unfortunately, he had neglected to master the fine art of stopping on skates, and he crashed into a full-length mirror, breaking it and his violin; his entrance was indeed spectacular. Merlin’s accident underscored the technological drawback of all early “wheeled feet”: starting and stopping were not so much decisions of the skater as of the skates. The crude wheels, without ball bearings, resisted turning, then abruptly turned and resisted stopping, then jammed to a halt on their own.
When, in the 1850s, skate technology improved, roller skating began to compete in popularity with ice skating, though marginally at first. German composer Jakob Liebmann Beer, who achieved fame as Giacomo Meyerbeer, wrote a mid-1800s opera, Le Prophète, which contained an ice-skating scene that was performed on the improved roller skates. The opera was a great success in its own right, but many people attended to witness the much-publicized roller-skating scene. And an Italian ballet of the period, Winter Pastimes; or, The Skaters, choreographed and composed by Paul Taglioni, also became famous for its ice-skating episode executed on roller skates.
Interestingly, during these decades, roller skates were seldom depicted on stage as an entertainment themselves, but mimicked ice skating. Part of the reason was that until 1884, when ball-bearing wheels were introduced, roller skating was difficult, dangerous, and not a widely popular pastime.
Piggy Bank: 18th Century, England
Since dogs bury bones for a rainy day, and since they have been man’s best friend for fourteen thousand years, why not a dog-shaped bank for coins? Since horses were indispensable to the development of commerce and finance, why not a horse bank? On the other hand, squirrels are well-known hoarders, and we talk of “squirreling away” valuables; why not a bank in the shape of a squirrel?
Instead, for almost three hundred years, the predominant child’s bank has been a pig with a slot in its back. Pigs are not known for their parsimony. A proverb warns of the futility of attempting to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear. And Scripture admonishes against throwing pearls to swine—as exemplified by dropping hard-earned cash into a piggy bank.
How did a pig come to symbolize the act of saving money? The answer is: by coincidence.
During the Middle Ages, mined metal was scarce, expensive, and thus rarely used in the manufacture of household utensils. More abundant and economical throughout Western Europe was a type of dense, orange clay known as pygg. It was used in making dishes, cups, pots, and jars, and the earthenware items were referred to as pygg.
Frugal people then as now saved cash in kitchen pots and jars. A “pygg jar” was not yet shaped like a pig. But the name persisted as the clay was forgotten. By the eighteenth century in England, pygg jar had become pig jar, or pig bank. Potters, not usually etymologists, simply cast the bank in the shape of its common, everyday name.
Firecrackers: 10th Century, China
Sparklers, flares, and full-fledged fireworks originated in tenth-century China, when a cook, toiling in a kitchen, mixed several ingredients and produced history’s first man-made explosion of sparks. It is often stated that the anonymous cook was attempting to produce a better gunpowder. But in fact, there was no such thing as gunpowder at that time. Moreover, it was the cook’s concoction—of sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter—that served as the Chinese origin of fireworks and gunpowder.
Historians have not determined what dish the cook was attempting to prepare. But the three above-mentioned ingredients, explosive when combined, were commonplace in a Chinese kitchen. Saltpeter, or potassium nitrate, served as preserving and pickling salt; sulfur was used to intensify the heat of a fire; and as fuel, charred firewood and coal provided an abundant source of charcoal.
The Chinese soon discovered that if the exp
losive ingredients were packed into hollowed-out bamboo, the confined explosion rocketed skyward, to spectacular effect. The accompanying light and bang proved perfect for ceremoniously frightening off evil spirits, and for celebrating weddings, victories, eclipses of the moon, and the New Year. The Chinese called their early fireworks “arrows of flying fire.”
Though the Chinese had all the ingredients for gunpowder, they never employed the explosive for military purposes. That violent application fell, ironically, to a thirteenth-century German monk of the Franciscan order, Berthold Schwarz, who produced history’s first firearms.
The Chinese were more interested in using explosives for celebrations—and in attempting to fly. One inventor, Wan-hu, built a plane consisting of two kites, propelled by forty-two rocket-like fireworks, and seated himself in its center in a chair. Unfortunately, when the rockets were simultaneously ignited, the paper kites, the wooden chair, and the flesh of the inventor were reduced to the common ingredient ash.
For eight centuries firework displays were limited to shades of yellow and reddish amber.
By the beginning of the seventeenth century, European fireworks technicians could create elaborate flares that exploded into historic scenes and figures of famous people, a costly and lavish entertainment that was popular at the French royal palace at Versailles. For eight centuries, though, the colors of firework explosions were limited mainly to yellows and reddish amber. It was not until 1830 that chemists produced metallic zinc powders that yield a greenish-blue flare. Within the next decade, combinations of chemicals were discovered that gave star-like explosions in, first, pure white, then bright red, and later a pale whitish blue. The last and most challenging basic color to be added to the fireworks palette, in 1845, was a brilliant pure blue. By midcentury, all the colors we enjoy today had arrived.
Dolls: 40,000 Years Ago, Africa and Asia
Long before Mattel’s Barbie became the toy industry’s first “full-figure” doll in 1958, buxom female figurines, as fertility symbols, were the standard dolls of antiquity. And they were the predecessors of modern dolls. These figures with ample bosoms and distended, childbearing bellies were sculpted in clay some forty thousand years ago by Homo sapiens sapiens, the first modern humans.
As early man developed mythologies and created a pantheon of gods, male and female, dolls in wax, stone, iron, and bronze were sculpted in the likenesses of deities. In India, for instance, around 2900 B.C., miniatures of Brahma rode a goose; Shiva, a bull; and his wife, Durga, a tiger. At the same time, in Egypt, collections of dolls were boxed and buried with a high-ranking person; these ushabti dolls were imagined to be servants who would cater to the needs of the deceased in the afterlife.
The transition from dolls as idols to dolls as toys began when figurines came to represent ordinary human beings such as Egyptian servants. For while it would have been sacrilegious for a child in antiquity to play with a clay idol, it became acceptable when that figurine represented a mere mortal. These early toy dolls, which arose independently in the Near and Middle East and the Orient, never took the form of infants, as do modern dolls; rather, they were miniatures of adults.
Other features distinguished these original toy dolls. Whereas today’s infant doll is usually of indeterminate sex (the gender suggested by incidentals such as hair length or color of dress), the gender of an ancient doll was never ambiguous. In general, female dolls were voluptuous and buxom, while males were endowed with genitalia. It was thought natural that a human representation of an adult should be accurate in detail.
Both the Greeks and the Romans by 500 B.C. had toy dolls with movable limbs and human hair. Joints at the hips, shoulders, elbows, and knees were fastened with simple pins. Most Greek dolls of the period were female—to be played with by young girls. And although Roman craftsmen fashioned wax and clay dolls for boys, the figures were always of soldiers. Thus, at least 2,500 years ago, a fundamental behavioral distinction between the sexes was laid down. Several Greek gravestones exist with inscriptions in which Greek girls who had died in youth bequeathed their collections of dolls to friends.
The transition from adult dolls to infant dolls is not clearly documented.
Existing evidence suggests that the infant doll evolved in ancient Greece once craftsmen began to fashion “babies” that fitted into the arms of adult “mother” dolls. This practice existed in third century B.C. Greece, and in time, the popularity of the infant outgrew that of the adult doll. Modern psychological studies account for the transition. A female child, given the choice of playing with an adult or infant doll, invariably selects the infant, viewing it as her “own baby” and seeing herself as “mother”, thereby reen-acting the early relationship with her own mother.
By the dawn of the Christian era, Greek and Roman children were playing with movable wooden dolls and painted clay dolls, were dressing dolls in miniature clothes and rearranging furniture in a dollhouse.
Barbie Doll. The Barbie doll was inspired by, and named after, Barbie Handler, daughter of Ruth Handler, a toy manufacturer born in 1917 in Denver, Colorado. With her husband, Elliot, a designer of dollhouses, Ruth Handler founded the Mattel toy company in 1945.
American dolls then were all of the cherub-faced-infant variety. Mrs. Handler, observing that her daughter preferred to play with the more shapely teenage paper dolls, cutting out their wide variety of fashion clothes, decided to fill a void in toyland, and designed a full-figured adult doll with a wardrobe of modish outfits.
Popular dolls of the 1890s. Bisque China head and muslin body (left); jointed, dressed dolls (middle, top); wooden doll (bottom); basic jointed doll, undressed.
The Barbie doll, bowing in 1958, helped turn Mattel into one of the world’s largest toy manufacturers. And the doll’s phenomenal overnight success spawned a male counterpart in 1961: Ken, named after the Handlers’ son. The dolls became such a part of the contemporary American scene that in 1976, the year of the United States bicentenary, Barbie dolls were sealed into time capsules and buried, to be opened a hundred years thence as social memorabilia for the tricentenary.
China Doll. Traditionally, dolls’ heads were sculpted of wood, terra cotta, alabaster, or wax. In Europe in the 1820s, German Dresden dolls with porcelain heads and French bisque dolls with ceramic heads became the rage. The painted ceramic head had originated in China centuries earlier, and many manufacturers—as well as mothers and their young daughters—had observed and complained that the dolls’ exquisite ceramic faces occasionally were marred by brownish-black speckles. The source of these imperfections remained a confounding mystery until the early 1980s.
The solution unfolded when a sixteen-year-old British girl who made reproduction antique China dolls noticed that if she touched the dolls’ heads when painting them, black speckles appeared after the ceramic was fired. She took her problem to a doctor, who enlisted a team of scientific detectives. That the problem disappeared if the girl wore gloves suggested sweat from her hands as the source of the trouble.
X-ray fluorescence showed that the black speckles consisted not only of the normal body salts found in sweat but also of sulfides. The girl’s diet was scrupulously studied and found to contain small but regular quantities of garlic—in sauces, soups, and meat dishes. Garlic is high in sulfides. When she abstained from garlic, the problem ceased.
The British researchers further investigated the sweat from the girl’s hands. It contained sulfur metabolites of garlic, which in most people are broken down and excreted in urine. These metabolites were reacting with iron in the clay to produce the speckles. Medical studies revealed that the girl had a subtle, harmless metabolic deficiency, which would never have shown up had she done less unusual work. The researchers concluded that the cloudy speckles occasionally found on ceramic faces of antique dolls probably had a similar origin: A small percentage of humans do not sufficiently metabolize sulfides, and certain ceramic-doll makers literally left fingerprints of their deficiency.
Chapter
16
In the Pantry
Potato Chip: 1853, Saratoga Springs, New York
As a world food, potatoes are second in human consumption only to rice. And as thin, salted, crisp chips, they are America’s favorite snack food. Potato chips originated in New England as one man’s variation on the French-fried potato, and their production was the result not of a sudden stroke of culinary invention but of a fit of pique.
In the summer of 1853, American Indian George Crum was employed as a chef at an elegant resort in Saratoga Springs, New York. On Moon Lake Lodge’s restaurant menu were French-fried potatoes, prepared by Crum in the standard, thick-cut French style that was popularized in France in the 1700s and enjoyed by Thomas Jefferson as ambassador to that country. Ever since Jefferson brought the recipe to America and served French fries to guests at Monticello, the dish was popular and serious dinner fare.
At Moon Lake Lodge, one dinner guest found chef Crum’s French fries too thick for his liking and rejected the order. Crum cut and fried a thinner batch, but these, too, met with disapproval. Exasperated, Crum decided to rile the guest by producing French fries too thin and crisp to skewer with a fork.
The plan backfired. The guest was ecstatic over the browned, paper-thin potatoes, and other diners requested Crum’s potato chips, which began to appear on the menu as Saratoga Chips, a house specialty. Soon they were packaged and sold, first locally, then throughout the New England area. Crum eventually opened his own restaurant, featuring chips. At that time, potatoes were tediously peeled and sliced by hand. It was the invention of the mechanical potato peeler in the 1920s that paved the way for potato chips to soar from a small specialty item to a top-selling snack food.
Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things Page 51