by Bill Bryson
For the average American, progress was not, in the words of Henry Steele Commager, ‘a philosophical idea but a commonplace of experience ... Nothing in all history had ever succeeded like America, and every American knew it.‘5 In no other country could the common person enjoy such an intoxicating possibility of accumulating wealth. An obsession with money – and more specifically with the making of money – had long been evident in the national speech. As early as the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin was reminding his readers that ‘time is money’ and foreign visitors were remarking on the distinctly American expression ‘to net a cool thousand’,6 and on the custom of defining a person as being ‘worth so-and-so many dollars’. Long before Henry Clay thought up the term in 1832, America was the land of the ‘self-made man’.7 At about the same time people began referring to the shapers of the American economy as ‘businessmen’. The word had existed in English since at least 1670, but previously it had suggested only someone engaged in public affairs.8 In the sense of a person concerned with the serious matter of creating wealth it is an Americanism dating from 1830. As the century progressed people could be well-fixed (1822), well-to-do (1825), in the dimes (1843), in clover (1847), heeled (1867; well-heeled didn’t come until the twentieth century), a high roller (1881), or a money-bag (1896, and made into the plural money-bags early in this century). As early as the 1850s they could hope to strike it rich and by the 1880s they could dream of living the life of Riley (from a popular song of the period, ‘Is That Mr Reilly?’, in which the hero speculates on what he would do with a fortune).9
Not everyone liked this new thrusting America. In 1844 Philip Hone, a mayor of New York and a noted social critic, wrote ‘Oh, for the good old days’, the first use of the phrase.10 But most people, then as now, wanted nothing more than to get their hands on ‘the almighty dollar’, an expression coined by Washington Irving in 1836 in an article in the Knickerbocker Magazine.11
A great many of them did. As early as the mid-1820s, Americans were talking admiringly of millionaires, a term borrowed from the British who had in turn taken it from the French, and by 1850 were supplementing the word with a more aggressive version of their own devising: multimillionaires.12 An American lucky enough to get in on the ground floor (1872) with an arresting invention or a timely investment might reasonably hope to become a millionaire himself. In 1840 the country had no more than twenty millionaires. By 1915 there were 40,000.13
The new class of tycoons (from the Japanese taikun, ’military commander’, and first applied to business leaders in the 1870s) enjoyed a concentration of money and power that is almost unimaginable now. In 1891 John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil controlled 70 per cent of the world market for oil. J. P. Morgan’s House of Morgan and its associate companies in 1912 were worth more ‘than the assessed value of all the property in the 22 states and territories west of the Mississippi’.14 With great wealth came the luxury of eccentricity. James Hill of the Great Northern Railroad reportedly fired an employee because the man’s name was Spittles. The servants at J. P. Morgan’s London residence nightly prepared dinner, turned down the bed and laid out nightclothes for their master even when he was known beyond doubt to be three thousand miles away in New York. The industrialist John M. Longyear, disturbed by the opening of a railroad line past his Michigan residence, had the entire estate packed up – sixty-room house, hedges, trees, shrubs, fountains, the works – and re-erected in Brookline, Massachusetts.15 James Gordon Bennett, a newspaper baron, liked to announce his arrival in a restaurant by yanking the tablecloths from all the tables he passed. He would then hand the manager a wad of cash with which to compensate his victims for their lost meals and spattered attire. Though long forgotten in his native land, Bennett and his exploits – invariably involving prodigious drinking before and lavish restitution after – were once world famous, and indeed his name lives on in England in the cry ‘Gordon Bennett!’, usually uttered by someone who has just been drenched by a clumsy waiter or otherwise exposed to some exasperating indignity.
The indulgences of the rich become all the more insufferable when contrasted with the miserable condition of those whose labours sustained their wealth. Through the 1860s, workers in factories – or manufactories as they were still often called – routinely worked sixteen-hour days six days a week for less than twenty cents a day. Often they were paid in scrip, which they could spend only at the factory store. Workplaces were often ill-lit, ill-heated and filled with dangerous machinery and perilous substances. A physician in the mill town of Lawrence, Massachusetts, noted just after the turn of the century that 36 per cent of factory workers there didn’t live to see their twenty-fifth birthdays.16
As America prospered, less attractive words entered the language, like slum (a word of uncertain origin, but probably based on a British dialectal variant of slime) and sweatshop (commonly shortened to sweater and first recorded in 1867), and tenderloin for the less salubrious areas of cities. This last named has been traced to a New York policeman who announced upon being assigned to the district around Forty-second Street that the opportunities for graft would enable him to stop eating ground beef and switch to tenderloin. The obvious pun on a prostitute’s salient anatomical feature no doubt helped to reinforce the term.17 Older words, too, sometimes took on new, more sinister meanings. Tenement originally described any tenanted dwelling. In America, where only the poor lived in shared housing, it had by the 1840s taken on the sense of a crowded, fetid building inhabited by the lowest orders.
Out in the sunshine of prosperity, however, it was a dazzling age. A brief list of just some American inventions of the period may give an idea of the dynamism that seized the country: the passenger elevator, escalator, telephone, phonograph, air-brake, cash register, electric light, fountain-pen, linotype, box camera, pneumatic tire, adding machine, revolving door, safety pin, and typewriter. All were invented in America, mostly in the frantic last quarter of the nineteenth century, and all were designed to relieve people of some everyday inconvenience. Where other countries tied their fortunes to revolutionary industrial processes – Bessemer steel, Jacquard looms, steam presses – Americans churned out appliances that made life easier. They took to heart Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous apophthegm: ‘Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.’ Or they would have, had Emerson ever said any such thing. In fact, what Emerson said didn’t mention mousetraps and was a good deal more prolix: ‘If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the Woods.‘18 (Nor, by the way, did he say, ‘Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.’ He said, ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds’ – quite another matter.)19 But they took the sentiment to heart anyway.
America had a long tradition of productive tinkering. Jefferson invented a plough, which secured him a prix d’honneur from a French agricultural academy (though in fact it didn’t actually work very well), and filled Monticello, his classical Virginia mansion, with self-invented contrivances designed to thwart small everyday irritants. Franklin, as everyone knows, was a manic inventor. He gave the world bifocals, the lightning rod, extendable grippers for taking items off high shelves, possibly the rocking-chair and certainly the Franklin stove (though for its first forty years it was more generally known as the Pennsylvania fireplace) – and always, always with a practical bent. ‘What signifies philosophy that does not apply to some use?’ he asked. Like Jefferson, he never profited from any of them.
It was at Jefferson’s insistence that the US Patent Office was set up in 1790. At first, the patent board consisted of the Attorney General, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of War, who were given the job of vetting inventions as an extra little something to keep them occupied between more pressing assignments. They don’t appear to have been run off their feet. In the first year just three patents were issued.
(For the record, the first American patent went to a Samuel Hopkins for a new way of making potash.) By 1802, however, patents were pouring in so fast that a proper patent board had to be organized. Suddenly the country teemed with tinkerer-inventors. In other nations, inventions emerged from laboratories. In America they came out of kitchens and tool-sheds. Everyone, it seemed, got in on the act. Even Abraham Lincoln found time to take out a patent (No. 6469: A Device for Buoying Vessels over Shoals).20
Typical of the age was Charles Goodyear, the man who gave the world vulcanised rubber. Goodyear personified most of the qualities of the classic American inventor – total belief in the product, years of sacrifice, blind devotion to an idea – but with one engaging difference. He didn’t have the faintest idea what he was doing. Described by one biographer as a ‘gentle lunatic’, Goodyear in 1834 became fascinated with rubber. It was a wonderfully promising material – pliant, waterproof, rugged and durable – but it had many intractable shortcomings. For one thing, it had a low melting-point. Boots made of rubber were fine in winter, but at the first sign of warm weather they would gooily decompose and quickly begin to stink.
Goodyear decided to make it his life’s work to solve these problems. To say that he became obsessed only begins to hint at the degree of his commitment. Over the next nine years, he sold or pawned everything he owned, raced through his friends’ and family’s money, occasionally resorted to begging, and generally inflicted loving but untold hardship on his long-suffering wife and numerous children. He turned the family kitchen into a laboratory and, with only the most basic understanding of the chemistry involved, frequently filled the house with noxious gases and at least once nearly asphyxiated himself. Nothing he tried worked. To demonstrate the material’s versatility, he took to wearing a suit made entirely of rubber, but this merely underlined its acute malodorousness and its owner’s faltering grip on reality. Amazingly, everyone stood by him. His wife did whatever he asked of her and relatives gladly handed him their fortunes. One brother in-law parted with $46,000 and never whimpered when all it resulted in was tubs of noisome slop. With implacable resolve Goodyear churned out one product after another – rubber mailbags, life-preservers, boots, rainwear – that proved disastrously ineffective. Even with the lavish support of friends and relatives, Goodyear several times ended up in debtors’ prisons. In 1840, when his two-year-old son died, the family couldn’t even afford a coffin.
Finally in 1843, entirely by accident, he had his breakthrough. He spilled some India rubber and sulphur on the top of his stove and in so doing discovered the secret of producing a rubber that was waterproof, pliant, resistant to extremes of heat and cold, made an ideal insulator, didn’t break when dropped or struck, and, above all, was practically odourless. Goodyear hastily secured a patent and formed the Naugatuck India-Rubber Company. At long last he and his family were poised for the fame and fortune that their years of sacrifice so clearly warranted.
It was not to be. Goodyear’s process was so easily duplicated that other manufacturers simply stole it. Even the name by which the process became known, vulcanization, was coined by an English pirate. Goodyear had endless problems protecting his patents. The French gave him a patent but then withdrew it on a technicality, and when he travelled to France to protest the matter, he found himself tossed yet again into a debtors’ prison. He made more money from his autobiography – a book with the slightly less than compelling title Gum-Elastic – than he ever did from his invention. When he died in 1860, he left his family saddled with debts.21 The company that proudly bears his name, the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, had nothing to do with him or his descendants. It was named Goodyear by two brothers in Akron, Ohio, Frank and Charles Seiberling, who simply admired him.22
Many of the most prolific and important inventors of the age are now almost wholly forgotten. One such was Walter Hunt, who took out patents by the score on fountain-pens, a process for manufacturing paper collars, a machine to make nails and rivets, and the prototype of the breech-loading Winchester rifle. Perhaps his most lasting invention was the safety pin, which he devised in 1849 after a couple of hours of fiddling with a piece of wire. Never much of a businessman, he immediately sold the rights to the device for $400. Slightly earlier, but in much the same mould, was Eli Whitney. While still a youth, he had devised novel processes for manufacturing nails, pins and men’s walking-sticks, and later in life would be instrumental in developing the idea of interchangeable mass-produced parts, an approach that came to be known as the uniformity, or Whitney, system. But what he is chiefly remembered for is the cotton gin, and rightly so. It was one of the great inventions of the age. If you have ever wondered how an intoxicating drink became associated with a device for combing cotton the answer is it didn’t. Gin is merely a shortening of engine.
Whitney hit upon the invention while visiting a cotton plantation in Georgia. As a New Englander unacquainted with the region, Whitney took a keen interest in how the plantation worked, and was immediately struck by how slow and labour-intensive was the process of deseeding cotton by hand. He knocked together a contraption that consisted essentially of two contra-rotating drums with teeth that effectively parted the cotton from the seeds. It was ingeniously simple, but it transformed the plantation economy of the South. Indeed, perhaps no other simple invention in history other than the wheel has had a more sensational and immediate payback in terms of increased efficiency. A single gin could do the work of a thousand slaves. In ten years, exports of cotton from the South increased from 189,500 pounds to 41 million pounds. Slavery across large parts of the South was suddenly not just morally indefensible but economically unnecessary. But what is notable here is that Whitney wasn’t thinking of a revolutionary device that would alter history or secure his fortune – at least not at first – but of a simple machine that would make a friend’s life simpler and more efficient.
When it did occur to Whitney that the gin was revolutionary and that there ought to be money in it, he hastily secured a patent. As so often with nineteenth-century inventors, he found himself cheated at every step and spent much of his life fighting costly court battles that gained him little but lawyers’ bills. At least he had the satisfaction of being famed for his achievement, which is more than many got.
Consider the fate of poor Elias Howe, a young Boston native who in 1846 produced the first workable sewing-machine. The trouble was that no one wanted it. Depressed by his failure, Howe suffered a nervous breakdown and fled to England, where he hoped his ingenious invention might be given a more congenial reception. It was not. After two years of tramping the streets, he was so destitute that he had to work his passage home on a merchant ship. Arriving penniless in Boston he discovered that in his absence one Isaac Singer had stolen his patent, set up a sewing-machine factory and was making money hand over fist. Howe took Singer to court, where it became apparent that Singer had not a leg to stand on but was making so much money from Howe’s invention that he could afford to hire the sharpest lawyers. After a protracted fight, Singer was compelled to pay Howe a decent royalty on every machine built. (Having secured his fortune, Howe promptly enlisted in the Union Army as a common foot-soldier; it was an age of eccentrics as well as inventors.) None the less, it is Singer’s name, not Howe’s, that is indelibly associated in the popular mind with the sewing-machine.23
Equally unlucky was J. Murray Spangler, who invented the vacuum cleaner – or electric suction sweeper as he called it – at the turn of the century in New Berlin, Ohio. Unable to make a success of it, he turned for advice to W. H. Hoover, a local leather-goods maker who knew nothing about electrical appliances but did recognize a business opportunity when it fell in his lap. Before long there were Hoover factories all over the world, Hoover was credited with a great invention he had nothing to do with, the British were turning his name into a verb, and J. Murray Spangler was forgotten.
But perhaps the greatest historical snub was that meted out to Professor Joseph Henry of Princeton, who in 183
1 invented the telegraph. The word itself had been coined thirty-seven years earlier by a Frenchman named Claude Chappe, for a kind of semaphore system employed during the French Revolution, and by 1802 was being employed to describe long-distance messages of all types. Henry not only had the idea of transmitting messages as coded electrical impulses via wires, but worked out all the essentials that would be necessary to make such a system feasible, but for some reason he never bothered to perfect, or more crucially patent, the process.
That fell to a talented, well-connected, but generally unattractive fellow from Charlestown, Massachusetts, named Samuel Finley Breese Morse. Morse – Finley to family and friends – would have been a man of distinction even if he had never perfected the telegraph. The scion of a leading New England clan (his grandfather had been president of Princeton), he was an accomplished artist, a member of Britain’s Royal Academy, a professor of fine arts at New York University, a dedicated dabbler in the creative sciences, and a would-be politician of distinctly reactionary bent (he ran twice for mayor of New York on a virulently anti-Catholic ticket and believed, among other things, that slavery was not just a good thing but divinely inspired). His consuming passion, however, was the idea of transmitting messages along wires, to the extent that he abandoned his career and spent five desperately impoverished years perfecting the telegraph and lobbying Congress for funding. Finally, in 1842, Congress – proving that it is seldom more than half smart – appropriated $30,000 for Morse’s experiments and $30,000 to be spent on the equally exciting new science of mesmerism.
