Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things

by Charles Panati

  Clothes Washer and Dryer: 1800s, England and France

  For centuries, people on sea voyages washed their clothes by placing the dirty laundry in a strong cloth bag, tossing it overboard, and letting the ship drag the bag for hours. The principle was sound: forcing water through clothes to remove dirt. Early hand-operated washing machines attempted to incorporate the same principle through the use of a “dolly” —a device resembling an upside-down milkmaid’s stool, which fitted into a tub and pummeled clothes, squeezing water out, then permitting it to seep back in.

  So numerous were the inventions devised to lessen the drudgery of washing clothes that the origin of the washing machine is unclear, though it is generally agreed that in the early 1800s, in Western Europe, the concept of placing laundry in a wooden box and tumbling the box by means of a hand-operated crank was beginning to catch on. Mothers and daughters took turns cranking the box’s handle hour after hour.

  The rotating-drum concept carried over to the clothes dryers of the day.

  A typical dryer, invented in France in 1800 by a M. Pochon, was known as the “ventilator.” Hand-wrung clothes were placed, damp, in a circular metal drum pierced with holes, and as a handle was cranked the drum rotated above an open fire. Depending on the strength of the fire and the height of the flames, clothes would either dry slowly or burn, and they always acquired the aroma of the hearth, and sometimes its soot. None of these hand-cranked dryers ever threatened to obsolete the clothesline.

  The first electric clothes washers, in which a motor rotated the tub, were introduced in England and America around 1915. For a number of years, the motor was not protectively encased beneath the machine. Water often dripped into it, causing short-circuits, fires, and jolting shocks.

  Touted in advertisements as “automatic,” the early electric clothes washers were anything but. Many washers were manually filled with buckets of water and also drained by hand. Clothes were removed saturated with water, and the wash “cycle” continued until the operator decided to pull the machine’s plug. Not until 1939 did washers appear that were truly automatic, with timing controls, variable cycles, and preset water levels. Liberation from one of the most ancient of household chores came late in history.

  Steam-powered sewing machine of questionable advantage.

  Sewing Machine: 1830, France

  The eyed needle appeared astonishingly early in man’s past. Needles of ivory, bone, and walrus tusks have been found in Paleolithic caves inhabited about forty thousand years ago. In a sense, the invention of the eyed needle ranks in importance with that of the wheel and the discovery of fire. One altered man’s eating habits, another his mode of transportation, while the needle forever changed the way he dressed.

  But from that ancient Paleolithic era until the year 1830, men and women sewed by hand. An experienced tailor could make about thirty stitches a minute. By comparison, the first sewing machine, crude and inefficient as it was, made two hundred stitches a minutes.

  That machine, creating a simple, single-thread stitch, was produced in 1830 by a tailor from Lyon, France, Barthélemy Thimmonier. The machine’s speed so impressed the government that within a short time Thimmonier had eighty machines in operation, turning out military uniforms—until an angry mob, composed of professional tailors who viewed the machine as a threat to their livelihood, stormed Thimmonier’s factory, destroying all the machines and nearly killing their inventor. Thimmonier fled to the town of Amplepuis, where he died in poverty, but his concept of a machine that sewed lived on in numerous versions.

  The development of the modern sewing machine—with a double-thread, lock-stitch system—came chiefly from two Bostonians.

  Elias Howe and Isaac Singer. Elias Howe was a struggling Boston machinist with a wife and three children to support. One day in 1839, he overheard his boss tell a customer that a fortune was assured to anyone who could invent a machine that sewed. The idea became Howe’s obsession.

  At first, Howe carefully observed his wife’s hands sewing, then attempted to produce a machine to duplicate her stitching motions. When that failed, he decided to devise a new kind of stitch, one equally sturdy but within the capabilities of machine design.

  He patented his sewing machine in September 1846, and began demonstrating it to potential manufacturers. The machine sewed in a straight line for only a short distance before the cloth had to be repositioned, but it formed two hundred fifty firm stitches a minute. Impressed as American manufacturers were, they balked at the machine’s three-hundred-dollar price tag, and they also feared the threats made by organized groups of tailors and seamstresses.

  Destitute, and disillusioned with American enterprise, Howe and his family sailed for England in 1847. Two years later, with even less money and bleaker prospects for a future, the family sailed back to America, Howe earning their passage as ship’s cook. Arriving in New York City, he was startled to discover that stores were advertising sewing machines like his own, for about a hundred dollars. He legally contested the patents of the various manufacturers—in particular, the patent belonging to another Boston machinist, Isaac Singer.

  Singer’s machine was superior to Howe’s. It had a straight needle that moved up and down (Howe’s needle was curved and moved horizontally); it had an adjustable lever that held the fabric in place, enabling the machine to sew a long straight or curved seam; and it had a foot-operated treadle (Howe’s had a hand-driven wheel). But Singer’s machine formed the special stitch patented by Howe.

  A flamboyant, ambitious businessman, uninterested in acquiring fame as the sewing machine’s inventor, Singer refused to come to an out-of-court agreement with Howe. He was supporting a wife and two children, plus a mistress and six additional children. He informed his lawyers, “I don’t give a damn for the invention. The dimes are what I’m after.”

  As the court case dragged on, another American inventor came forward who had devised a sewing machine eleven years before Howe. The prolific Walter Hunt was a genius with a wide assortment of inventions to his credit, among them the safety pin, which he had created in three hours (he sold the patent rights for four hundred dollars to repay a fifteen-dollar debt). Hunt had never patented or publicized his sewing machine, afraid that the invention would put tailors out of business. By the time of the Howe-Singer court battle in 1853, Hunt’s machine was a rusty piece of disassembled junk.

  The judge presiding over the case decided that the dimes Singer was after had to be shared—not with Walter Hunt but certainly with Elias Howe. For every sewing machine manufactured, Howe received a royalty. Before he died in 1867, at age forty-eight, the formerly impoverished machinist was collecting royalties of more than four thousand dollars a week. His one regret was that his wife, long his staunchest supporter, who never doubted the commercial potential of the sewing machine, had died before he made a penny from his invention.

  Wallpaper: 15th Century, France

  Wallpaper originated in the latter part of the fifteenth century as a relatively inexpensive substitute for densely woven, richly embroidered tapestries. Bearing stenciled, hand-painted, or printed designs, it developed shortly after the rise of paper mills in Europe.

  The earliest preserved examples date from the year 1509. Because the Chinese had developed papermaking centuries earlier, it was long assumed that wallpaper was an Oriental invention, but its actual birthplace was France.

  Heavy tapestries had been popular since Roman times, not merely as decorative hangings but also because full-length wall coverings, in vast castles and stately homes, effectively minimized drafts. They were so costly that even the most profligate monarchs trundled entire sets on their seasonal peregrinations from castle to castle. Less expensive substitutes were tried; the most popular was embossed and gilded leather, introduced in the eleventh century by the Arabs. But thick decorative paper, pasted to a wall, was even less costly, and as good an insulator from the cold.

  As modern-day Con-Tact paper is printed to imitate certain surfaces,
so early wallpaper, by the late sixteenth century, represented more expensive wall finishings. A British advertisement of the period conveys an idea of the simulated surfaces available: “We selleth all sorts of Paper Hangings for Rooms…Flock Work, Wainscot, Marble, Damask, etc.” In fact, early wallpaper was admired precisely because it authentically yet inexpensively simulated the appearance of more costly materials.

  Flocking, a process in which powdered wool or metal was scattered over a predesigned and gummed paper, achieved great popularity in the next century. Examples are extant from as early as 1680. Prized at the same time was the distinctly different painted Chinese wallpaper, called “India paper.” It bore images of birds and flowers against brightly colored backgrounds. The paper was valued for its absence of repetitive design: every vertical strip of wallpaper plastered about a room was unique, creating a dizzying effect. In the seventeenth century, French supremacy in wallpaper execution was nearing its apex, with exquisite designs of country landscapes and classical architectural forms, employing columns and friezes. Ironically, what began as inexpensive ersatz tapestry became in a short time a costly art form.

  Ready-Mixed Paint; 1880s, United States

  Although painted interior house walls were popular since about 1500 B.C.—and paint itself had been known for some twenty thousand years—the first commercial, ready-mixed paints did not appear until 1880. Home owners or professional painters had been preparing their own bases and blending their own colors, and paint was usually applied by a professional. Ready-mixed paints would create the entirely new phenomenon of the “do-it-yourself” painter.

  Paint for decorative purposes existed thousands of years before its use as a protective interior and exterior coating was conceived. Early peoples of Europe, Africa, and the Americas used paints of iron oxides to decorate caves, temples, and homes. The Egyptians prepared yellow and orange pigments from soil and imported the dyes indigo and madder to make blue and red. By 1000 B.C., they had developed paints and varnishes based on the gum of the acacia tree (gum arabic). The mixtures contributed to the permanence of their art and also were used as protective coatings and sealants on wooden warships. Yet paint as a preservative for exposed surfaces did not come into common use until the Middle Ages.

  Medieval paints used such raw materials as egg whites, and craftsmen kept their formulas secret and their products expensive. City streets bore evidence of the craftsman’s art, with colorful tradesmen’s signs and shop facades. The two favorite shades for signs in those centuries were red and blue. Still, the average home went unpainted. Even in the seventeenth century, when white lead paint became widely available, ordinary houses—and such essential structures as bridges—remained unpainted for another hundred years.

  It was the large-scale manufacture of linseed oil from the flax plant and of pigment-grade zinc oxide that produced a rapid expansion of the paint industry. In the nineteenth century, for the first time, paint pigment and the liquid that carried it were combined before the paint was marketed. The concept was revolutionary.

  Sherwin-Williams. A major pioneer in the field of ready-mixed paint was Henry Alden Sherwin, who in creating a new industry changed the way we decorate our homes.

  In 1870, when Sherwin informed his partners in a paint component business that he was going ahead with plans for a ready-mixed paint, they responded that the time had come to dissolve the young firm of Sherwin, Dunham and Griswold. Home owners, they argued, mixed their own paint and knew what colors they wanted.

  Sherwin believed that factory-crafted paint, benefiting from standardized measurements and ingredients, would be consistently superior to the hit-or-miss home-mixed kind. He located a new partner, Edward Williams, who shared that conviction, and after ten years of painstaking development—grinding pigments fine enough to remain suspended in oil—the Sherwin-Williams Company of Cleveland, Ohio, introduced the world’s first ready-mixed paint in 1880.

  Professional and amateur painters gladly abandoned the chore of combining their own white lead base, linseed oil, turpentine, and coloring pigments. And Sherwin encouraged Americans to become do-it-yourself painters inside and outside their homes. To bolster this new market, the company, through its local distributors, guided home owners through the labors of surface preparation, preliminary coatings, color aesthetics, and the appropriate choice of brushes and clean-up materials. The public discovered that commercial paint did more than protect a surface; it rejuvenated a home.

  What home and furniture restorers would discover decades later was that the first ready-mixed paint created a painting frenzy. It became voguish to cover over carved wooden mantels, window and door moldings, paneled walls and beamed ceilings of walnut, mahogany, oak, ebony, and other inherently rich woods. Antique armoires, hutches, and settles were painted. Today these surfaces are being stripped by owners who, engaged in a labor of love, question: “Why did anyone ever paint this piece?”

  Linoleum: 1860, England

  We tend to take decorative and protective floor coverings in the home for granted; few people, except by choice or poverty, walk on bare boards. But if we examine paintings, drawings, and the written record back to as recently as the middle of the eighteenth century, it becomes apparent that except in the wealthiest of homes, families walked only on bare floors.

  Carpets and rugs had of course existed for centuries. Mats made of dry stalks and tendrils covered the dirt and stone floors of Sumerian homes five thousand years ago. The Egyptians wove carpets of linen, ornamented by brightly colored sewn-on patches of wool. The Chinese perfected a knotted silk-pile carpet backed by cotton. And before the eighth century B.C., elaborately patterned Oriental carpets decorated the royal palaces of central and western Asia.

  What did not exist until the 1860s was a cheap, hard-wearing, mass-produced, easy-to-clean floor covering. Specifically, one made from flax (linum in Latin) and oil (oleum). Today linoleum has been relegated largely to bathroom and kitchen floors, but that was not always its place in the home.

  Inventors had been searching for an inexpensive floor covering. In 1847, Scottish chemist Michael Narin mixed oily paint with cork fibers and produced a slick linoleum-like product, but his process was lengthy and costly. Around the same time, British chemist Elijah Galloway cooked cork powder and shreds of rubber, which yielded a hard but somewhat sticky rubber flooring he named “kamptulicon.” In the 1860s, kamptulicon was laid in selected rooms of the British House of Parliament, but its cost and consistency could not compete with another British inventor’s creation. By oxidizing linseed oil with resin and cork dust on a flax backing, Frederick Walton produced history’s first successful synthetic floor covering, known then as a “resilient floor.”

  A Briton had invented linoleum. But it took an American to introduce it into every room in the home.

  In 1860, Frederick Walton obtained a British patent for his linoleum-making process. The same year, an industrious twenty-four-year-old American, Thomas Armstrong, decided to supplement his meager wages as a shipping clerk in a Pittsburgh glass plant by investing his savings of three hundred dollars in a machine that cut cork stoppers for bottles.

  Shaving corks for various-size bottles generated huge mounds of cork dust, which the frugal Armstrong hated to waste. When he heard that a new floor covering, which was rapidly gaining in popularity in England, was manufactured from cork dust and often backed with sheets of cork, Armstrong revamped his business. By 1908, he was selling Armstrong linoleum. But unlike its forerunner, available in a few somber, solid colors, Armstrong linoleum offered home owners a spectrum of hues and patterns that rivaled those found in woven carpets. And unlike linoleum’s British inventor, who saw only the utilitarian side of his creation, Armstrong promoted his bright, cheery patterns as a way to “beautify the home.”

  The “linoleum carpet,” as the wall-to-wall coverings were called, became the new desideratum for the modern American home. An early advertisement summed up both the manufacturer’s and the public’s se
ntiment: “In many of the finest homes, you will find linoleum in every room. Not gaudy oil cloth, but rich, polished linoleum carpets.”

  Detergent: 1890s, Germany

  All detergents are soaps, but not all soaps are detergents. That distinction is not trifling but paramount at a practical level to anyone who has, in a pinch, laundered clothes or washed his or her hair with a bar of hand soap.

  Soap forms a precipitate in water that leaves a ring around the bathtub, a whitish residue on glassware, a sticky curd in the washing machine’s rinse water, and a dull, lusterless plaque on hair. Furthermore, clothes washed in ordinary soap often develop yellow stains when ironed.

  These undesirable properties occur because soap, which has been in use for 3,500 years, reacts with minerals and acids naturally present in water to form insoluble molecules that refuse to be rinsed away. Synthetic detergents were specifically engineered in the 1890s to overcome this problem. They were first produced in quantity by the Germans during World War I. This was done for a practical, wartime reason: so that the precious fats that go into making ordinary soap could be used as lubricants for military vehicles and weapons.