Next Tupper developed polyethylene bowls, in a variety of sizes and with a revolutionary new seal: slight flexing of the bowl’s snug-fitting lid caused internal air to be expelled, creating a vacuum, while external air pressure reinforced the seal.
Plastic kitchen bowls previously were rigid; Tupper’s were remarkably pliant. And attractive. The October 1947 issue of House Beautiful devoted a feature story to them: “Fine Art for 39 cents.”
As good a businessman as he was a molder, Earl Tupper took advantage of the windfall national publicity afforded Tupperware. He devised a plan to market the containers through in-home sales parties. By 1951, the operation had become a multimillion-dollar business. Tupperware Home Parties Inc. was formed and retail store sales discontinued. Within three years, there were nine thousand dealers staging parties in the homes of women who agreed to act as hostesses in exchange for a gift. The firm’s 1954 sales topped $25 million.
Satisfied with the giant industry he had created, Earl Tupper sold his business to Rexall Drugs in 1958 for an estimated nine million dollars and faded from public view. Eventually, he became a citizen of Costa Rica, where he died in 1983.
Chapter 6
In and Around the House
Central Heating: 1st Century, Rome
There was a time when the hearth and not the cathode-ray tube was the heart of every home. And though it would seem that electronic cathode-ray devices like television, video games, and home computers most distinguish a modern home from one centuries ago, they do not make the quintessential difference.
What does are two features so basic, essential, and commonplace that we take them for granted—until deprived of them by a blackout or a downed boiler. They are of course lighting and central heating. A crisis with these, and all of a home’s convenience gadgets offer little convenience.
Roman engineers at the beginning of the Christian era developed the first central heating system, the hypocaust. The Stoic philosopher and statesman Seneca wrote that several patrician homes had “tubes embedded in the walls for directing and spreading, equally throughout the house, a soft and regular heat.” The tubes were of terra cotta and carried the hot exhaust from a basement wood or coal fire. Archaeological remains of hypocaust systems have been discovered throughout parts of Europe where Roman culture once flourished.
The comfort of radiative heating was available only to the nobility, and with the fall of the Roman Empire the hypocaust disappeared for centuries. During the Dark Ages, people kept warm by the crude methods primitive man used: gathering round a fire, and wrapping themselves in heavy cloaks of hide or cloth.
Louvre, Paris. Before its conversion into an art museum, the royal palace on the Seine boasted one of the first modern hot-air systems for central heating.
In the eleventh century, huge centrally located fireplaces became popular in the vast and drafty rooms of castles. But since their construction allowed about eighty percent of the heat to escape up the chimney, people still had to huddle close to the fire. Some fireplaces had a large wall of clay and brick several feet behind the flames. It absorbed heat, then reradiated it when the hearth fire began to die down. This sensible idea, however, was used only infrequently until the eighteenth century.
A more modern device was employed to heat the Louvre in Paris more than a century before the elegant royal palace on the Seine was converted into an art museum. In 1642, French engineers installed in one room of the Louvre a heating system that sucked room-temperature air through passages around a fire, then discharged the heated air back into the room. The air, continually reused, eventually became stale. A hundred years would pass before inventors began devising ways to draw in fresh outdoor air to be heated.
The first major revolution in home heating to affect large numbers of people arrived with the industrial revolution in eighteenth-century Europe.
Steam energy and steam heat transformed society. Within a hundred years of James Watt’s pioneering experiments with steam engines, steam, conveyed in pipes, heated schools, churches, law courts, assembly halls, horticultural greenhouses, and the homes of the wealthy. The scalding surfaces of exposed steam pipes severely parched the air, giving it a continual odor of charred dust, but this trifling con was amply outweighed by the comforting pro, warmth.
In America at this time, many homes had a heating system similar to the Roman hypocaust. A large coal furnace in the basement sent heated air through a network of pipes with vents in major rooms. Around 1880, the system began to be converted to accommodate steam heat. In effect, the coal furnace was used to heat a water tank, and the pipes that had previously carried hot air now transported steam and hot water to vents that connected to radiators.
Electric Heater. In the decade following home use of Edison’s incandescent lamp came the first electric room heater, patented in 1892 by British inventors R. E. Crompton and J. H. Dowsing. They attached several turns of a high-resistance wire around a flat rectangular plate of cast iron. The glowing white-orange wire was set at the center of a metallic reflector that concentrated heat into a beam.
The principle behind the device was simple, but the success of the electric heater rested completely on homes’ being wired for electricity, an occurrence prompted almost entirely by Edison’s invention. Improved models of the prototype electric heater followed rapidly. Two of note were the 1906 heater of Illinois inventor Albert Marsh, whose nickel-and-chrome radiating element could achieve white-hot temperatures without melting; and the 1912 British heater that replaced the heavy cast-iron plate around which the heating wire was wrapped with lightweight fireproof clay, resulting in the first really efficient portable electric heater.
Indoor Lighting: 50,000 Years Ago, Africa and Europe
“The night cometh, when no man can work.” That biblical phrase conveyed earlier peoples’ attitude toward the hours of darkness. And not until late in the eighteenth century would there be any real innovation in home lighting. But there were simply too many hours of darkness for man to sleep or remain idle, so he began to conceive of ways to light his home artificially.
First was the oil lamp.
Cro-Magnon man, some fifty thousand years ago, discovered that a fibrous wick fed by animal fat kept burning. His stone lamps were triangular, with the wick lying in a saucerlike depression that also held the rank-smelling animal fat. The basic principle was set for millennia.
Around 1300 B.C., Egyptians were lighting their homes and temples with oil lamps. Now the base was of sculpted earthenware, often decorated; the wick was made from papyrus; and the flammable material was the less malodorous vegetable oil. The later Greeks and Romans favored lamps of bronze with wicks of oakum or linen.
Until odorless, relatively clean-burning mineral oil (and kerosene) became widely available in the nineteenth century, people burned whatever was cheap and plentiful. Animal fat stunk; fish oil yielded a brighter flame, but not with olfactory impunity. All oils—animal and vegetable—were edible, and in times of severe food shortage, they went into not the family lamp but the cooking pot.
Oil lamps presented another problem: Wicks were not yet self-consuming, and had to be lifted regularly with a forceps, their charred head trimmed off. From Roman times until the seventeenth century, oil lamps often had a forceps and a scissors attached by cord or chain.
To enable him to work throughout the night, Leonardo da Vinci invented what can best be described as history’s first high-intensity lamp. A glass cylinder containing olive oil and a hemp wick was immersed in a large glass globe filled with water, which significantly magnified the flame.
There was, of course, one attractive alternative to the oil lamp: the candle.
Candle: Pre-1st Century, Rome
Candles, being entirely self-consuming, obliterated their own history. Their origins are based, of necessity, on what early people wrote about them.
It appears that the candle was a comparative latecomer to home illumination. The earliest description of candles appears in Roman
writings of the first century A.D.; and Romans regarded their new invention as an inferior substitute for oil lamps—which then were elaborately decorative works of art. Made of tallow, the nearly colorless, tasteless solid extract from animal or vegetable fat, candles were also edible, and there are numerous accounts of starving soldiers unhesitantly consuming their candle rations. Centuries later, British lighthouse keepers, isolated for months at a time, made eating candles almost an accepted professional practice.
Even the most expensive British tallow candles required regular half-hour “snuffing,” the delicate snipping off of the charred end of the wick without extinguishing the flame. Not only did an unsnuffed candle provide a fraction of its potential illumination, but the low-burning flame rapidly melted the remaining tallow. In fact, in a candle left untended, only 5 percent of the tallow was actually burned; the rest ran off as waste. Without proper snuffing, eight tallow candles, weighing a pound, were consumed in less than a half hour. A castle, burning hundreds of tallow candles weekly, maintained a staff of “snuff servants.”
Snuffing required great dexterity and judgment. Scottish lawyer and writer James Boswell, the biographer of Samuel Johnson, had many occasions to snuff tallow candles, not all successfully. He wrote in 1793: “I determined to sit up all night, which I accordingly did and wrote a great deal. About two o’clock in the morning I inadvertently snuffed out my candle…and could not get it re-lumed.”
Reluming a candle, when the household fire had been extinguished, could be a time-consuming chore, since friction matches had yet to be invented. Cervantes, in Don Quixote, comments on the frustrations of reluming a candle from scraps of a fire’s embers. Snuffing tallow candles so often extinguished them, it is not surprising that the word “snuff” came to mean “extinguish.”
Up until the seventeenth century, part of a theatrical troupe consisted of a “snuff boy.” Skilled in his art, he could walk onto a stage during a scene’s emotional climax to clip the charred tops from smoking candles. While his entrance might go ignored, his accomplishment, if uniformly successful, could receive a round of applause.
The art of snuffing died out with the widespread use of semi-evaporating beeswax candles late in the seventeenth century. Beeswax was three times the price of tallow, and the wax candles burned with a brighter flame. British diarist Samuel Pepys wrote in 1667 that with the use of wax candles at London’s Drury Lane Theater, the stage was “now a thousand times better and more glorious.”
The Roman Catholic Church had already adopted the luxury of beeswax candles, and the very rich employed them for special occasions that called for extravagance. Household records of one of the great homes of Britain show that during the winter of 1765, the inhabitants consumed more than a hundred pounds of wax candles a month.
Luxury candles during the next century would be the glossy white beeswax candle from England; a hard, yellow vegetable tallow from China; and the green bayberry-scented candle from the northeastern coast of America.
Gaslight: 19th Century, England
Three thousand years ago, the Chinese burned natural gas to evaporate brine and produce salt. And in parts of Europe, early fire-worshiping tribes erected their temples around natural gas jets, igniting them to produce eternal flames.
But lighting homes with gas did not occur until the nineteenth century—about two hundred years after Belgian chemist Jan Baptista van Helmont first manufactured coal gas. A scientist and a mystic, who believed in the existence of a philosopher’s stone for transforming base metals to gold, Helmont bridged alchemy and chemistry. His work on coal gas encouraged the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier to consider lighting Paris streets with gaslamps; Lavoisier even constructed a prototype lamp in the 1780s. But before his plans could be carried out, he was guillotined during the French Revolution.
Not until the world’s first gas company was established in London in 1813 did home gaslamps become a reality. Advances were rapid. German scientist Robert von Bunsen diminished the annoying flickering of a pure gas flame by premixing gas with air. And to greatly intensify gas’s illumination, a student of Bunsen’s developed the gas mantle in 1885. Constructed of thread dipped in thorium and cerium nitrate, the mantle, when initially lit, had its thread consumed, leaving behind a skeleton of carbonized compounds, which glowed a brilliant greenish white. By 1860, gas illuminated homes, factories, and city streets. Gas was such a clean, efficient, inexpensive source of lighting that it seemed improbable that any other mode of illumination would, or could, replace the gaslamp.
Electric Light: 1878–79, England and America
Although Thomas Edison is rightly regarded as the father of the incandescent lamp, his was not the first. British inventors had been experimenting with electric lights more than a half century before Edison perfected his bulb.
The basis of the incandescent lamp is a filament, in an evacuated glass chamber, that glows white-hot when current is passed through it. Inventor Joseph Swan in England, and Edison in the United States, both hit on the idea of using carbon for the filament. Swan patented his lamp in 1878; Edison registered his patent in 1879. Edison, though, in setting up a system of electric distribution, took the incandescent bulb out of the laboratory and into the home and street. The Pearl Street Power Station in New York City was the first to supply public electricity on consumer demand. By December 1882, 203 Manhattan customers, individuals and businesses, were living and working by the light from 3,144 electric lamps.
These privileged pioneers had to be satisfied with an average bulb life of only 150 hours (compared with 2,000 hours today). But by early 1884, Edison had perfected a 400-hour bulb, and two years later, one that burned for 1,200 hours.
The electric lamp, despite its great convenience, had a slow start. People were curious; they flocked to demonstrations to observe a bulb glowing, but few home owners ordered electric installation. After seven years of operation, the Edison company had gone from 203 customers to 710. But the electric bulb was an invention that could not fade away. Although electric rates began decreasing, it was favorable word of mouth, from home owners and businesses that tried electric illumination, that generated a snowballing of orders. At the turn of the century, ten thousand people had electric lights. Ten years later, the number was three million and climbing.
As for Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan, they sued each other for patent violation, but eventually joined forces and cofounded an electric company.
Neon Light. A colorless, odorless, tasteless gas, deriving its name from the Greek neos, meaning “new,” neon was discovered in 1898 by two English chemists, William Ramsay and Morris Travers. They puzzled at the gas’s natural red-orange glow and attempted to alter its color chemically. But it was a Frenchman, physicist Georges Claude, who perfected the neon tube in 1909 and used it the following year to illuminate the Grand Palace in Paris. Claude demonstrated that employing a gas, rather than a rigid, fixed filament, enabled neon bulbs to glow regardless of their length or configuration.
Neon’s advertising value was quickly appreciated. A publicist, Jacques Fonseque, persuaded Claude to prepare a line of tubing that proclaimed the name of a client’s business. In 1912, the first neon sign blazed on Paris’s Boulevard Montmartre. It read (in French), “The Palace Hairdresser,” and glowed a red orange. Only later did scientists discover that by altering the gas and placing powders inside the tube, they could produce a full spectrum of colors.
Fluorescent Tube. After nearly sixty years of lighting American homes, the incandescent bulb encountered in the 1930s its greatest rival: the strip light or fluorescent lamp. The battle between the two bulbs would in the end turn out to be a near draw, with both fixtures sometimes illuminating the same room in the house. The fluorescent’s harsher, less flattering glare would win out in the bathroom; the incandescent’s frosted softness would prevail in the bedroom; and in the kitchen, the tube and the bulb would often share honors.
The first attempt at producing fluorescence was made by the Fren
ch physicist Antoine-Henri Becquerel, discoverer of radioactivity in uranium. As early as 1859, he coated the inside of a glass tube with a chemical—a phosphor—which fluoresced under electric current. Many scientists began work along the same lines, and soon dozens of gases and minerals were known to glow in an electric field. It was this research that led Ramsay and Travers to discover neon.
The first effective fluorescent lamp was developed in the United States in 1934, by Dr. Arthur Compton of General Electric. Operated by lower voltages, the tube was more economical than the incandescent bulb; and where the incandescent bulb could waste up to 80 percent of its energy in generating heat, not light, the fluorescent tube was so energy-efficient that it was named a “cold light.”
Many people glimpsed their first fluorescent light at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, where General Electric had white and colored tubes on display. Within fifteen years, the fluorescent light slightly edged out the incandescent bulb as the chief source of electric lighting in the United States. The victory was due not to home owners’ preference for fluorescent’s eerie glow, but to businesses’ desire to cut lighting costs in the workplace.
Flashlight. The utilitarian flashlight originated as a turn-of-the-century novelty item known as the “electric flowerpot.” Had the American public enthusiastically purchased electric flowerpots, the flashlight might have been a longer time coming.
When Russian immigrant Akiba Horowitz arrived in New York in the 1890s, he Americanized his name to Conrad Hubert and landed a job with Joshua Lionel Cowen, the man who would one day create Lionel trains. Cowen had already invented and abandoned an electric doorbell (people complained of the unacceptability of its protracted ring) and an electric fan (which threw a slight breeze); when he hired Conrad Hubert, Cowen had just perfected the electric flowerpot. It consisted of a slender battery in a tube with a light bulb at one end. The tube rose up through the center of a flowerpot and illuminated a plant.
Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things Page 18
