by Vaclav Smil
FIGURE 6.6. Drawings that accompanied William Painter’s patent application for a bottle sealing device.
Their realization is based on one or more preceding fundamental innovations, but their commercial success owes no less to their ingenious designs. Many items belong to a large category of simple objects made from cheaper metals and better alloys. These include the following enduring classics, depicted in figure 6.7: the Gem paper clip (actually never patented) and other (patented) clip designs whose production required cheap steel wire and machines to bend it; scores (and eventually hundreds) of kinds of barbed wire (beginning with Joseph Glidden’s pioneering 1874 twist) made of galvanized steel (which, unlike round or oval iron wire, was extremely durable because of its high homogeneity and tensile strength); William Hooker’s 1894 spring mouse trap; and King Gillette’s 1904 razor blades made from tempered steel a mere 0.15 mm thick. This metallic group also included staplers (Charles Henry Gould in 1868), sprinkler heads on showers (Harry Parmelee of New Haven in 1874), Swiss Army knives (Victorinox company set up by Karl Elsener in 1891) and zippers (plastic teeth came decades later).
FIGURE 6.7. Artifacts made possible by cheap, good-quality steel: two sizes of Gem paperclips introduced during the 1890s and a large Ideal clip from 1902; Glidden’s 1874 barbed wire and details of several other elaborate twists; Hooker’s “animal trap” of 1894; and King Gillette’s razor designed in 1901. Gems and an Ideal are scans of actual clips, other drawings are reproduced from their respective patent applications.
In addition, many other products of persistent tinkering had little or nothing to do with the epoch-shaping primary innovations that were taking place during those eventful decades. Genesis of these numerous items of everyday use introduced during the Age of Synergy should be seen as a further proof of the period’s enormous wave of inventiveness. A reasonably complete list of these often very simple but enduring novelties would be tediously long. A few prominent examples include flat-bottom (instead of V-shaped) paper bags (1867), spring tape measures (1868), drinking straws (1888), and ice cream cones (1904). The last two items also point to a large category of dietary and culinary innovations whose introduction created entirely new consumption habits.
Now world-famous branded foodstuffs that emerged in the United States during the two pre-WWI generations range from cheese to chocolate. Empire Cheese Company began selling Philadelphia Cream Cheese in 1880. In 1906 Will Keith Kellogg, brother of the notorious electric shock and enema lover John Harvey Kellogg, added sugar to his sibling’s ascetic corn flakes (patented in 1896) and began marketing them as a breakfast cereal (Powell 1956). Campbell’s soup trademark was registered in the same year; Milton Hershey began selling his Milk Chocolate Bar in 1894, and his rival Frank Mars opened for the business in 1911 (Brenner 1999). Any list of widely consumed new generic foodstuffs should be headed by two leading contributors to the late 20th-century increase of obesity: hamburgers, whose U.S. debut is variously dated between 1885 and 1904 (McDonald 1997), and American-style (sausage- and cheese-loaded) pizza (Gennaro Lombardi opened the first New York pizzeria in 1895).
The world of drink was enriched (if you share the taste for thirst-inducing, syrupy, excessively sweetened, and explosively carbonated liquids that leave peculiar aftertastes) or burdened (if your preferences run more into good tea, mineral water, or fruit juices) by Coca-Cola and Pepsi Cola. Coca-Cola was invented in 1886 by Atlanta physician John S. Pemberton. Pemberton sold rights to this “intellectual beverage and temperance drink” to a pharmacist, Asa Briggs Candler, in 1891, and by 1894 the first bottled cola was available in U.S. drugstores (Hoy 1986). Caleb Bradham’s concoction of water, sugar, vanilla, essential oils, and cola nut extract was renamed Pepsi Cola in 1898. Yet another notable beverage brand that has endured is Canada Dry Ginger Ale, formulated in 1904 by a Toronto pharmacist John McLaughlin. That brand is now owned by Dr. Pepper/Seven Up, the first of these two excessively sweetened liquids being the oldest major U.S. soft drink, created in 1885 by Charles Alderton at Morrison’s Old Corner Drug Store in Waco, Texas (Dr. Pepper/Seven Up 2003).
And there were also new pastimes ranging from a variety of board games (Hofer and Jackson 2003) made affordable by cheaper paper and printing to new sports. These included basketball (James Naismith’s 1891 invention) and two of my favorites, cross-country skiing and tennis. Primitive skis, descendants of snowshoes, were around for millennia, but the sport of ski-running (or Nordic skiing) began in 1879 with the Huseby races near Christiania (today’s Oslo), and 13 years later the first Holmenkollen festival attracted more than 10,000 spectators. Similarly, tennis has a venerable pedigree (medieval jeu de paume), but the modern version was played for the first time in December 1873 in north Wales and patented shortly afterward (G.B. Patent 685/1874) by Walter Clopton Wingfield. The only major modification came in 1877 on the occasion of the first All-England Lawn Tennis Championships at Wimbledon, when the original 26-m-long hourglass field became a 24 × 17 m rectangle; later the net height was lowered by 10 cm to 90 cm (Alexander 1974).
Given the multitude of innovations that flooded in during the Age of Synergy, it is not difficult to construct narratives of today’s life whose minor material ingredients and mundane actions originated not just during that inventive period but, more restrictively, even just within a single eventful decade. Here is an example constrained to the 1880s and, in order to make the exercise more challenging, excludes any direct references to the decade’s key primary innovations. A man wakes up late one day in one of America’s large East Coast cities. First he makes a cup of Maxwell House coffee (a brand introduced by Joel Cheek, a Nashville hotelier in 1886). He hesitates between his favorite Aunt Jemima pancakes (his great-grandfather could have bought them for the first time in 1889) and Quaker Oats (the company began selling prefilled packages in 1884). His late breakfast is interrupted by a doorbell: an Avon lady is calling (they have been doing that since 1886), but his wife is out of town.
He finds that his only clean shirt needs a bit of ironing (Henry Seely patented that useful device in 1882), uses an antiperspirant (introduced in 1888), dresses up, and finds that he is out of brown paper bags (kraft process to make strong paper was first commercialized during the 1880s) to bring his customary lunch. He walks out to catch a streetcar (used to carry commuters since 1882), and once he gets downtown he enters a multistory steel-skeleton building (Jenney completed the first structure of this kind in Chicago in 1885) through a revolving door (Theophilus Van Kannel put the first one into a building lobby in Philadelphia in 1888). He stops in a small drugstore where a bored teenager is turning pages of Cosmopolitan (it appeared first in 1886), and buys a roll of film (celluloid replaced paper in 1889). He has to wait while the teenager fiddles with his cash register (introduced by James Ritty and John Birch in 1883).
Then he takes an elevator (Elisha Otis installed the first high-speed lift in New York in 1889) to his floor, but before getting to his office he stops at a vending machine (Percival Everitt introduced it in 1881) and buys a can of Coca Cola (formulated in Atlanta in 1886). The first thing he does in his office is make a long-distance phone call (possible since 1884), jots down a few notes with his ballpoint pen (John Loud patented the first one in 1888), pulls out a small Kodak camera (George Eastman’s 1888 innovation) from a drawer, and inserts the film. As he reads a technical brief he comes across a strange word: he reaches for his abridged Oxford English Dictionary (publication of its first edition began in 1884) and contemplates the complexity of that amazingly hybridized language. We leave him at that point, the case clearly made: so many of our everyday experiences and actions were set, and so many artifacts that help us to cope with them, were introduced during the Age of Synergy that most people are not even remotely aware of the true scope of this quotidian debt.
Life Cycles of Innovations
Numerous as they are, those basically unchanged original designs constitute a minority of advances introduced during the two pre-WWI generations. Most
of the innovations have undergone changes ranging from minor adjustments to fundamental transformations. As already stressed in chapter 1, this quest for improvement—motivated by factors that ranged from desire to capture larger markets to challenges of finding the most elegant engineering solutions—was one of the key marks of the era and one of its most important bequests to the 20th century. Its many forms took different approaches by reducing energy and material intensity and by providing longer durability, higher reliability, improved conversion efficiency, and greater versatility. As all of these aspects will be examined in detail in the companion volume, the only important matter I address here is the apparent inevitability and regularity of many key trends.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the historical continuity of technical innovation is that so many subsequent advances appear to have the inexorability of water flowing downhill. Once the basic ideas were formulated by innovative thinking and tested by bold experiments, it was only a matter of time before they were perfected, diffused, and amplified to reach entirely new performance levels. Look at the photograph of a small Curtiss pusher biplane, piloted by Eugene Ely on the morning of January 18, 1911, as it is about to land on a temporary wooden platform that was laid over the deck and gun turret of the Pacific Fleet’s armored cruiser Pennsylvania (figure 6.8; NHC 2003a). The ship is anchored off the San Francisco waterfront, with thousands of spectators ashore. An updraft lifts Ely’s light plane just as it reaches the platform, but he compensates quickly, snags the arresting gear (just a series of ropes crossing the deck and weighted down by sand bags), and pulls to a smooth stop before reaching the safety barrier (NHC 2003b).
How that image evokes all those torpedo bombers coming back to their carriers to rearm and take off again on their missions to sink Japanese ships during WWII! How conceptually identical, despite all of the enormous intervening technical advances, is this scene compared with F-18s returning to America’s nuclear-powered carriers stationed in the Persian Gulf (figure 6.8). These constants remain: a plane, a ship, a landing deck, an arresting gear, a skillful and alert pilot. Once imagined, and once shown to be practicable, the idea, in this instance not just figuratively, takes off and reaches an execution that was entirely unimaginable by its inventors but that is nevertheless unmistakably present in the original creation.
FIGURE 6.8. Development of an idea. Top: Eugene Ely’s Curtiss biplane nears the landing platform on the USS Pennsylvania, anchored in San Francisco Bay, on January 18, 1911. Arresting lines were fastened to sand bags positioned along the deck. Photograph NH 77608 available at http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/h82000/h82737.jpg. Bottom: An F/A-18F Super Hornet nears landing aboard USS Nimitz in the Persian Gulf. U.S. Navy photo (030331-N-9228K-008.jpg) by Michael S. Kelly.
Another convincing comparative approach is to ask a simple question: would it have been possible to stop further developments of those newly launched techniques and freeze them at any arbitrary levels of performance and complexity? And the obvious answer is no. Hughes (1983) conceptualized the process that follows an invention in four stages: transfer of new techniques to other places and societies, formative system growth followed by reaching a new momentum (that arises both from the accumulated mass of new machines and infrastructures and from the velocity of their diffusion), and finally, a qualitative change of mature techniques.
Once Edison mastered reliable electricity generation and once Tesla and Hertz opened the ways toward innovative electricity applications, it was only a matter of time before the entire electricity-driven universe of modern machines and devices, qualitatively so superior to the initial designs, was put in place. Timing of the key advances of this great transformation was undoubtedly contingent on many external factors, but their eventual attainment was a matter of very high probability. Similarly, once Karl Benz, Gottlieb Daimler, and Wilhelm Maybach mounted their high-speed gasoline motors on light carriagelike chassis, six-lane highways clogged by millions of increasingly sleeker steel machines were only a matter of three generations away.
Historical studies repeatedly demonstrate that the evolution of individual techniques or systems frequently follows an orderly progression much as living organisms do: initially slow growth accelerates and then slows down as it approaches a limit and eventually stops. Fittingly, it was during the Age of Synergy when Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904), a French sociologist, first described this S-shaped growth of innovations:
A slow advance in the beginning, followed by a rapid and uniformly accelerated progress, followed again by progress that continues to slacken until it finally stops: these, then, are the three ages of those real social beings which I call inventions or discoveries (Tarde 1903:127).
This kind of progression also applies to life histories of all organisms, and the resulting patterns of development are very close to one of the growth, or logistic, curves. But this is not necessarily the case with life cycles of techniques and their performance parameters: technical advances do not have lives of their own, and their evolution is not governed by some internal calls that produce growth stages of relatively fixed proportions (Ayres 1969). This becomes particularly clear when attempts are made to fit one of the standard growth curves to a historic data set. Some innovations that originated during the Age of Synergy followed a fairly regular progression that conformed rather closely to an ideal curve, while others departed from it quite significantly.
Efficacy of incandescent lights between 1880 and 1930 is a good example of a fairly symmetrical S-curve, with the midpoint at around 1905, while the best fit for the highest conversion efficiency of steam turbines during the same period is obviously a straight line (figure 6.9). Many growth patterns of innovations introduced during the Age of Synergy, exemplified in figure 6.9 by the maximum U.S. steam turbogenerator ratings and by the highest U.S. transmission voltages, form asymmetrical curves with the central inflection points shifted to the right as the early exponential growth rates were reduced by disruptions attributable to the interwar economic crisis. Indeed, both of these patterns could be better interpreted as two successive S-waves, with the first one reaching its plateau during the 1930s.
FIGURE 6.9. Efficacy of incandescent lights followed a fairly regular growth curve between 1880 and 1930 (top left), while the efficiency of best steam turbines progressed in linear fashion (top right). Histories of the highest U.S. transmission voltages (bottom left) and the largest thermal turbogenerators (bottom right) show two successive growth curves. Based on data and figures in Smil (1994) and Termuehlen (2001).
Commercial penetration rates of new techniques display orderly progressions that are dictated by the necessities of developing requisite manufacturing and distribution facilities and in many cases also putting in place the necessary infrastructures (roads, transmission lines). Not surprisingly, costly infrastructural needs or relatively high capital costs will tend to slow down the rate of adoption; for example, it was only after WWII when virtually all of America’s rural households became electrified. In contrast, some industrial adoptions proceeded quite rapidly: electric motors captured half of the prime mover capacity in the U.S. manufacturing just three decades after Tesla’s first devices were made by Westinghouse (see figure 2.21).
Once individual techniques, or their functional assemblages, reach the limits of their growth, they do not, like individual organisms, face inevitable decline and demise. Another biological analogy then becomes appropriate as they behave as mature, climax ecosystems that can maintain their performance for extended periods of time until their eventual displacement by a suite of superior techniques (a process that is analogical to a diffusion of new species in an ecosystem altered by climate). Some of these substitutions are gradual, even inexplicably tardy. Replacement of incandescent lights by fluorescents in households is a notable case of this slow pace: the former converters, despite their inferior efficiency, still dominate the market. Other substitutions, such as adoption of color TV or CDs, proceeded fairly rapidly.
Te
chnical substitutions may be accelerated or hindered by economic and political factors, but, as with the growth of individual techniques, their progress is often very orderly as a new innovation enters the market, comes to dominate it, and then, shortly after its share peaks, begins to yield to a new technique. This wavelike progression has been also the case with the transitions to new sources of primary energies and new prime movers, the two processes that have been, together with ubiquitous mechanization and mass production, among the most notable markers of a new technical era.
Markers of a New Era
Qualitative appraisals of fundamental socioeconomic changes are done by systematically presenting all relevant trends, carefully choosing the descriptive adjectives, and thoughtfully selecting noteworthy examples to capture the wholes by resorting to the specifics. Quantifying epochal changes in macro-economic terms is much more elusive, as aggregate measures and reductions to growth rates hide too much and subsume too many complexities in single figures. Moreover, many pre-WWI innovations had almost immediate, and far-reaching, economic and social impacts, while others needed many decades before they came to dominate their respective markets.
