Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things

by Charles Panati

  The year 1817 witnessed a more dramatic attempt to produce a striking match. A French chemist demonstrated to university colleagues his “Ethereal Match.” It consisted of a strip of paper treated with a compound of phosphorus that ignited when exposed to air. The combustible paper was sealed in an evacuated glass tube, the “match.” To light the match, a person smashed the glass and hastened to kindle a fire, since the paper strip burned for only the length of a breath. The French match was not only ethereal but ephemeral—as was its popularity.

  Enter John Walker.

  One day in 1826, Walker, the owner of an apothecary in Stockton-on-Tees, was in a backroom laboratory, attempting to develop a new explosive. Stirring a mixture of chemicals with a wooden stick, he noticed that a tear-shaped drop had dried to the stick’s tip. To quickly remove it, he scraped the drop against the laboratory’s stone floor. The stick ignited and the friction match was born in a blaze.

  According to Walker’s journal, the glob at the end of his stick contained no phosphorus, but was a mixture of antimony sulfide, potassium chlorate, gum, and starch. John Walker made himself several three-inch-long friction matches, which he ignited for the amusement of friends by pulling them between a sheet of coarse paper—as alchemist Hennig Brandt had done two centuries earlier.

  No one knows if John Walker ever intended to capitalize on his invention; he never patented it. But during one of his demonstrations of the three-inch match in London, an observer, Samuel Jones, realized the invention’s commercial potential and set himself up in the match business. Jones named his matches Lucifers. Londoners loved the ignitable sticks, and commerce records show that following the advent of matches, tobacco smoking of all kinds greatly accelerated.

  Early matches ignited with a fireworks of sparks and threw off an odor so offensive that boxes of them carried a printed warning: “If possible, avoid inhaling gas. Persons whose lungs are delicate should by no means use Lucifers.” In those days, it was the match and not the cigarette that was believed to be hazardous to health.

  The French found the odor of British Lucifers so repellent that in 1830, a Paris chemist, Charles Sauria, reformulated a combustion compound based on phosphorus. Dr. Sauria eliminated the match’s smell, lengthened its burning time, but unwittingly ushered in a near epidemic of a deadly disease known as “phossy jaw.” Phosphorus was highly poisonous. Phosphorus matches were being manufactured in large quantities. Hundreds of factory workers developed phossy jaw, a necrosis that poisons the body’s bones, especially those of the jaw. Babies sucking on match heads developed the syndrome, which caused infant skeletal deformities. And scraping the heads off a single pack of matches yielded enough phosphorus to commit suicide or murder; both events were reported.

  As an occupational hazard, phosphorus necrosis plagued factory workers in both England and America until the first nonpoisonous match was introduced in 1911 by the Diamond Match Company. The harmless chemical used was sesquisulfide of phosphorus. And as a humanitarian gesture, which won public commendation from President Taft, Diamond forfeited patent rights, allowing rival companies to introduce nonpoisonous matches. The company later won a prestigious award for the elimination of an occupational disease.

  The Diamond match achieved another breakthrough. French phosphorus matches lighted with the slightest fiction, producing numerous accidental fires. Many fires in England, France, and America were traced to kitchen rodents gnawing on match heads at night. The Diamond formula raised the match’s point of ignition by more than 100 degrees. And experiments proved that rodents did not find the poisonless match head tempting even if they were starving.

  Safety Match. Invented by German chemistry professor Anton von Schrotter in 1855, the safety match differed from other matches of the day in one significant regard: part of the combustible ingredients (still poisonous) were in the head of the match, part in the striking surface on the box.

  Safety from accidental fire was a major concern of early match manufacturers. However, in 1892, when an attorney from Lima, Pennsylvania, Joshua Pusey, invented the convenience he called a matchbook, he flagrantly ignored precaution. Pusey’s books contained fifty matches, and they had the striking surface on the inside cover, where sparks frequently ignited other matches. Three years later, the Diamond Match Company bought Pusey’s patent and moved the striking surface to the outside, producing a design that has remained unchanged for ninety years. Matchbook manufacturing became a quantity business in 1896 when a brewing company ordered more than fifty thousand books to advertise its product. The size of the order forced the creation of machinery to mass-manufacture matches, which previously had been dipped, dried, assembled, and affixed to books by hand.

  The brewery’s order also launched the custom of advertising on match-book covers. And because of their compactness, their cheapness, and their scarcity in foreign countries, matchbooks were also drafted into the field of propaganda. In the 1940s, the psychological warfare branch of the U.S. military selected matchbooks to carry morale-lifting messages to nations held captive by the Axis powers early in World War II. Millions of books with messages printed on their covers—in Burmese, Chinese, Greek, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, and English—were dropped by Allied planes behind enemy lines. And prior to the invasion of the Philippines, when native morale was at a wartime low, American aircraft scattered four million matchbooks bearing the promise: “I Shall Return—Douglas MacArthur.”

  Today Americans alone strike more than five hundred billion matches a year, about two hundred billion of those from matchbooks.

  Blender: 1922, Racine, Wisconsin

  Popular legend has it that Fred Waring, the famous 1930s bandleader of the “Pennsylvanians,” invented the blender to liquefy fruits and vegetables for a relative suffering from a swallowing ailment.

  Though this is not entirely correct, the bandleader did finance the development and marketing of a food liquefier named the Waring Blendor—which he insisted be spelled with an o to distinguish his machine from the competition. And it was the promotional efforts of his Waring Mixer Corporation, more than anything else in the 1930s, that acquainted the American public with the unique new blending device.

  But Fred Waring never had a relative with a swallowing problem. And his interest in the blender was not to liquefy meals but to mix daiquiris, his favorite drink. In fact, the Waring Blendor, which sold in the ’30s for $29.95, was pitched mainly to bartenders.

  The actual inventor of the blender (initially known as a “vibrator”) was Stephen J. Poplawski, a Polish-American from Racine, Wisconsin, who from childhood displayed an obsession with designing gadgets to mix beverages. While Waring’s blender was intended to mix daiquiris, Poplawski’s was designed to make malted milk shakes, his favorite drink. Opposite as their tastes were, their paths would eventually intersect.

  In 1922, after seven years of experimentation, Poplawski patented a blender, writing that it was the first mixer to have an “agitating element mounted in the bottom of a cup,” which mixed malteds when “the cup was placed in a recess in the top of the base.”

  Whereas Fred Waring would pitch his blender to bartenders, Stephen Poplawski envisioned his mixer behind the counter of every soda fountain in America. And Racine, Poplawski’s hometown, seemed the perfect place to begin, for it was home base of the Horlick Corporation, the largest manufacturer of the powdered malt used in soda fountain shakes. As Poplawski testified years later, during a 1953 patent litigation and after his company had been purchased by Oster Manufacturing, “In 1922 I just didn’t think of the mixer for the maceration of fruits and vegetables.”

  Enter Fred Waring.

  On an afternoon in the summer of 1936, the bandleader and his Pennsylvanians had just concluded one of their Ford radio broadcasts in Manhattan’s Vanderbilt Theater, when a friend demonstrated one of Poplawski’s blenders for Waring. This device, the friend claimed, could become a standard feature of every bar in the country. He sought Fred Waring’s financial backing,
and the bandleader agreed.

  Mixers, c. 1890, that predate the blender and food processor. (Left to right) Magic Milk Shake Vibrator, Egg Aerater, Egg Beater.

  The mixer was redesigned and renamed, and in September of 1936 it debuted at the National Restaurant Show in Chicago’s Furniture Mart as the Waring Blendor. Highlighted as a quick, easy method for mixing frothy daiquiris and other iced bar drinks, and with beverage samples dispensed, Waring’s device attracted considerably more attention than Stephen Poplawski’s malted milk machine.

  The Waring Blendor really caught the American public’s eye when the Ron Rico Rum Company launched a coast-to-coast campaign, instructing bartenders and home owners on the exotic rum drinks made possible by the blender. Ironically, by the early 1950s, blenders had established themselves so firmly in public and home bars and in restaurants that attempts to market them for kitchen use—for cake mixes, purees, and sauces—met with abysmal failure. To reeducate the homemaker, Fred Waring took to the road, demonstrating his blender’s usefulness in whipping up his own recipes for hollandaise sauce and mayonnaise. Still, the public wanted daiquiris.

  Determined to entice the housewife, the Waring company introduced designer-colored blenders in 1955. An ice crusher attachment in 1956. A coffee grinder head in 1957. And the following year, a timing control. Sales increased. As did blender competition.

  The Oster company launched an intensive program on “Spin Cookery,” offering entire meals developed around the blender. They opened Spin Cookery Schools in retail stores and mailed housewives series of “Joan Oster Recipes.”

  In the late 1950s, an industry war known as the “Battle of the Buttons” erupted.

  The first blenders had only two speeds, “Low” and “High.” Oster doubled the ante with four buttons, adding “Medium” and “Off.” A competitor introduced “Chop” and “Grate.” Another touted “Dice” and “Liquify.” Another “Whip” and “Puree.” By 1965, Oster boasted eight buttons; the next year, Waring introduced a blender with nine. For a while, it seemed as if blenders were capable of performing any kitchen chore. In 1968, a housewife could purchase a blender with fifteen different buttons—though many industry insiders conceded among themselves that the majority of blender owners probably used only three speeds—low, medium, and high. Nonetheless, the competitive frenzy made a prestige symbol out of blenders (to say nothing of buttons). Whereas in 1948 Americans purchased only 215,000 blenders (at the average price of $38), 127,500,000 mixers were sold in 1970, and at a low price of $25 a machine.

  Aluminum Foil: 1947, Louisville, Kentucky

  It was the need to protect cigarettes and hard candies from moisture that led to the development of aluminum wrap for the kitchen.

  In 1903, when the young Richard S. Reynolds went to work for his uncle the tobacco king R. R. Reynolds, cigarettes and loose tobacco were wrapped against moisture in thin sheets of tin-lead. After mastering this foil technology, in 1919 R.S. established his own business, the U.S. Foil Co., in Louisville, Kentucky, supplying tin-lead wraps to the tobacco industry, as well as to confectioners, who found that foil gave a tighter seal to hard candies than did wax paper. When the price of aluminum (still a relatively new and unproven metal) began to drop in the late ’20s, R. S. Reynolds moved quickly to adapt it as a cigarette and candy wrap.

  Reynolds believed that lightweight, noncorrosive aluminum had a bright future, and soon his expanded company, Reynolds Metals, offered home owners an impressive list of firsts: aluminum siding and windows, aluminum boats, and a competitive line of aluminum pots, pans, and kitchen utensils. But the product that introduced most Americans to the benefits of aluminum was Reynolds’s 1947 breakthrough: 0.0007-inch-thick aluminum foil, a spin-off of the technological know-how he had acquired in over two decades of developing protective wraps.

  Lightweight, nonrusting, nontoxic, paper-thin, the product conducted heat rapidly, sealed in moisture, and for refrigerating foods it was odorproof and lightproof. Homeware historians claim that few if any products this century were more rapidly and favorably welcomed into American homes than aluminum foil. In fact, the kitchen wrap, with its remarkable properties, is credited with winning Americans over to all sorts of other aluminum products.

  Today aluminum has an almost unimaginable number of applications: in the space program; in the fields of medicine, construction, and communications; in the soft-drink and canning industries. Given the scientific convention of characterizing ages of technological development by reference to the predominant metal of the time—as with the Iron Age and the Bronze Age—archaeologists centuries hence may identify the Aluminum Age, which dawned circa 1950, ushered in by the inhabitants of North America with a foil used in the ritual preservation of their foods.

  Food Processor: 1947, England

  No one could have predicted a decade earlier that the Cuisinart and scores of less expensive imitations would transform 1980s America into a food processor society. When the Cuisinart was unveiled at the Chicago Housewares Show in January 1973, the country’s department store buyers failed to see the machine as anything more than a souped-up blender with a high-class price tag. After all, blender sales then were near their all-time peak, and their price was at a then all-time competitive low.

  In England and France, however, the food processor was already an invaluable kitchen appliance for many professional and amateur chefs. Designed by British inventor Kenneth Wood, and marketed in 1947 as the Robot Kenwood Chef, the first powerful machine came with a variety of fitted accessories: juice squeezer, pasta wheel, flour mill, can opener, slicer, shredder, mixer, mincer, and centrifuge. Wood’s versatile food processor, though, was not the prototype for the American Cuisinart. That would come from France.

  In 1963, French inventor and chef Pierre Verdun introduced his own processor, the Robot-coup. It consisted of a cylindrical tank with an inner knife revolving close to the bottom and walls. The device was popular with professional chefs, and to tap the home market, Verdun created the more compact, streamlined Magimix in 1971.

  That year, a retired electronics engineer from Connecticut, Carl Sontheimer, who was an amateur chef, was scouting a Paris housewares show in search of a spare-time project. Impressed with the compact machine that could grind, chop, mince, slice, puree, pulverize, mix, and blend, Sontheimer secured U.S. distribution rights and shipped a dozen processors to Connecticut.

  At home, he analyzed the machine’s strengths and shortcomings, incorporated improvements, and turned each revamped device over to his wife for kitchen testing. Christening his best design Cuisinart, he readied it for the 1973 Chicago Housewares Show.

  Undaunted by the Cuisinart’s tepid reception from houseware buyers, Sontheimer undertook a personal cross-country campaign to convince America’s best-known chefs and food writers of the machine’s potential. Sontheimer was not surprised that every person who took the time to test the Cuisinart became a food processor disciple, spreading the word by mouth, newspaper column, or magazine article. As sales steadily increased, competing manufacturers offered food processors with refinements and attachments, recalling the blender’s “Battle of the Buttons” era. By the late 1970s, the Cuisinart alone was selling at the rate of a half-million machines a year. Blenders still sold in handsome numbers, but the food processor had, ironically, largely relegated the blender to Fred Waring and Stephen Poplawski’s original intention—mixing drinks.

  Can Opener: 1858, Waterbury, Connecticut

  It seems hard to believe that a half century elapsed between the birth of the metal can and the dawn of the first practical can opener. How, during those fifty years, did people open canned foods?

  The can—or “tin cannister,” as it was first called—was developed in England in 1810 by British merchant Peter Durand and used to supply rations to the Royal Navy under a government contract. Though it was introduced as a means of food preservation in America as early as 1817, the can was virtually ignored until 1861, when the twenty-three Northern states
of the Union fought the eleven Southern states of the Confederacy. The American Civil War, with its resultant need for preserved military rations, popularized the can in the United States the way the War of 1812 had done in Britain. By 1895, canned foods were a familiar sight on American grocery store shelves.

  But despite Peter Durand’s great ingenuity in having devised canned foods, he overlooked entirely the need for a special device to get into a can. British soldiers in 1812 tore open canned rations with bayonets, pocket knives, or, all else failing, rifle fire. A can of veal taken on an Arctic expedition in 1824 by British explorer Sir William Parry carried the instructions: “Cut round on the top with a chisel and hammer.” In fact, some warfare historians make the earnest claim that the bayonet, first designed by a blacksmith in the French city of Bayonne, was intended for use not as a weapon but as a can opener.

  Even the Englishman William Underwood, who in the early 1800s established in New Orleans America’s first cannery, saw no need to produce a special device for opening his product. His advice, standard for the day, was to employ whatever tools were available around the house.

  Not all this oversight, however, was due to widespread stupidity on two continents. In truth, early cans were large, thick-walled, often made of iron, and sometimes heavier than the foods they contained; Sir William Parry’s can of veal weighed, when empty, more than a pound. Only when thinner cans of steel, with a rim round the top, came into general use, in the late 1850s, did a can opener have the possibility of being a simple device.

  The first patented can opener (opposed to home tools and weapons) was the 1858 invention of Ezra J. Warner of Waterbury, Connecticut. Still, it was a cumbersome, forbidding device. Part bayonet, part sickle, its large curved blade was driven into a can’s rim, then forceably worked around its periphery. A slip could draw more than an ouch. American families, already adept at their own can-opening procedures, ignored Warner’s invention—which was kept from extinction only through its adoption by the U.S. military (as a can opener) during the Civil War.