Household Innovations

Sony Corporation

2011-02-16T20:45:00.000+02:00

The company was founded in 1946 by Masaru Ibuku and Akio Morita as Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo (Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering) and first used the name Sony in 1955 as a brand name for marketing its first transistor radio. In 1958, it was renamed the Sony Corporation. By 1970, Sony was established as one of the world’s leading and most innovative manufacturers of consumer electronic products. Sony is particularly known for its miniaturization of a range of electronic goods and for its modern, minimalist approach to design.

Sony entered the consumer electronics market with its launch in 1950 of the G-type tape recorder, the first commercially available Japanese model. A more significant early milestone was the acquisition of a license to produce transistors in 1954, the same year that the world’s first transistor radio was manufactured in the United States. A year later, Sony launched its first transistor radio, the TR-55. Sony’s great contribution to transistor production was to reduce the failure rate in the production process, thus reducing the costs. Sony’s predilection for miniaturization became evident in 1957 when it introduced the world’s first pocket-size transistor radio, the TR-63. The still smaller and lighter TR-610 pocket transistor radio of 1958 featured a hinged wire stand and came in a range of colors.

Maytag Corporation

2010-12-06T13:46:00.000+02:00

Founded in Newton, Iowa, by F. L. Maytag in 1893, the Maytag Company began as a manufacturer of farm tools. The company’s sales pattern reflected the seasonal nature of farming, so Maytag looked for a new product line that would be less susceptible to fluctuations in demand. In 1907, Maytag produced its first washing machine, a manual model. Maytag soon began to develop a line of washing machines, launching its first electric washing machine in 1911 and, in 1915, a washer powered by gasoline for homes without electricity. By the mid-1920s, Maytag had a 20 percent share of the U.S. washing machine market.

After World War II, Maytag diversified into the production of other white goods (stoves, washing machines, and refrigerators). Although Maytag continued to have a healthy share of the washingmachine market, its strategy seems to have been based on gaining a reputation for reliability rather than innovation. Its first automatic washing machines hit the market in 1948, ten years after these machines first appeared. Five years later, it added automatic clothes dryers to its product line. Maytag was also slow to move into the dishwasher market, introducing its first countertop dishwashers in 1966. Maytag did achieve an industry first in 1985, with the introduction of a stacking washer and dryer.

Tea bag sales

2010-12-03T10:22:00.000+02:00

Tea bag sales now dominate the market and offer improved blends and convenience, including “onecup” bags. Despite this, a restyled and electronically more sophisticated Teasmade remains in production today. Swan also produces a model where the kettle and pot are hidden behind a panel that can accommodate a family photograph. The U.S. Chef’s Choice Company also produces the TeaMate, an appliance that looks similar to a coffee percolator. Based on the samovar method, it steams the tealeaves and then introduces boiled water to create a concentrate that is blended with the rest of the water.

Kodak Today

2010-11-29T09:02:00.000+02:00

Today, Eastman Kodak is a world leader in both consumer and specialist photographic products. It has won eight Oscars for its technical contributions to the movie industry and is dominant in the field of medical laser imaging. The company’s involvement in the development of plastics for photographic film, film containers, and camera bodies resulted in sideways expansion into the fields of synthetic fibers, coal-based industrial chemicals, and general plastics. In the 1990s, Eastman Kodak decided to concentrate on its core businesses and divested itself of peripheral interests by selling off the Eastman Chemical Company and its pharmaceutical businesses. In spite of growing competition from Japanese companies since the 1950s, Eastman Kodak has been able to maintain a healthy share of the camera and film markets in the United States and overseas. The one notable exception has been Japan. In 1995, the company petitioned the U.S. government to take action against anticompetitive trade practices in the Japanese photographic film market. Two years later, the U.S. government responded by filing the case with the World Trade Organization, as yet unresolved.

Tea Makers

2010-11-25T10:21:00.000+02:00

Given the British preference for a cup of tea with breakfast, it is hardly surprising that automatic tea makers appeared there. The earliest example was patented by Frank Clarke, a Birmingham gunsmith, in 1902. It operated through springs and levers connected to an alarm clock. When set it would ignite a match by running it across emery paper, thus lighting a spirit lamp that would heat the kettle above it.

The Goblin Company, which was well known for its vacuum cleaners, produced the first electric machine in 1933, the Goblin Teasmade. Designed by Brenner Thornton, it was also linked to an alarm clock but had a special kettle that could be set to boil before the alarm went off. The boiling water decanted into the teapot, which sat on a stand.

The weight of the water slightly tipped the teapot, engaging a switch that lit a bedside lamp attached to the machine. Despite folktales of scalded sleepers who had forgotten to replace the teapot, the Teasmade gradually became relatively popular.

Meanwhile, the tea bag was introduced in America. Designed by Thomas Sullivan in New York, its intended use was for sampling tea. It went into commercial production for caterers and had become a popular domestic item by the 1930s. The New York–based Tetley introduced tea bags into Britain in 1953.

Refrigerators

2010-11-20T10:19:00.000+02:00

A refrigerator is an artificially cooled cabinet for storage of perishable foods. Cooling occurs when the refrigerant, preferably a substance with a low boiling point, is forced to change from a liquid to a gas by the application of pressure or heat. As the liquid evaporates, it draws heat from its surroundings, thus chilling food. The gas is then caused to reliquify either by being passed outside the

cabinet to a condenser, where it is able to expand and give off heat to the surrounding air, or by gravity. This cycle operates continuously. The basic principles of both methods of refrigeration— compression and (heat) absorption—were established in the nineteenth century and applied in commercial contexts such as brewing and shipment of meat. Refrigerators on a smaller scale, suitable for household use, did not appear until the early twentieth century.

Before domestic refrigerators became available, for many households the only way to keep food cool was by storing it in a naturally cool place, such as a cellar or a larder. A more effective method was to pack blocks of ice around food. Ice became more widespread as a commercial commodity in Europe, Canada, and the United States during the nineteenth century. By 1900, department stores were stocking ice boxes, which were well-insulated wooden cabinets with one compartment for ice, another for food, and a tray to collect water when the ice began to melt. 1930s Electrolux electric refrigerator, sold in Britain through the General Electric Company .

Record Players

2010-11-16T10:17:00.000+02:00

Until the late nineteenth century, the only form of musical entertainment available in the home was live performance. While wealthy householders could afford to hire professional singers and musicians to provide entertainment at social gatherings, most people had to rely on their own musical abilities. The invention of the phonograph in 1877, followed by the gramophone in 1888, introduced recorded music to the home. Although a third of British homes had a gramophone by 1913, it was only after the advent of vinyl discs in the late 1940s that recorded music became a huge money earner.

RCA (Radio Corporation of America )

2010-11-12T10:15:00.001+02:00

The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) was formed in 1919 to acquire the assets of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America. It was initially owned by corporate investors, including General Electric and Westinghouse, and became an independent company in 1932. Since 1988, RCA 1960s, to develop a videodisc format. Three rival video disc formats were announced in 1975, all play only and nonrecordable, and appeared on the market a few years later. RCA’s Selectavision system, launched in 1978, was competitively priced but unattractive to consumers in comparison with recordable videocassette systems. After five years, when it ceased Selectavision production, RCA had sold half a million players and 10 million discs, but had spent $300 million on research and development and lost approximately the same amount on production.

Perhaps not surprisingly, following the commercial disaster of Selectavision, RCA ceased to be an independent company in 1986 when it was taken over by General Electric. Less predictably, little more than a year later, General Electric sold off not only RCA, but also its own consumer electronics operations, to the French electronics multinational Thomson Grand Public. The enlarged company was renamed Thomson Consumer Electronics. Ironically, Thomson began life as the French subsidiary of the U.S. Thomson-Houston Electric Company, which merged with Edison Electric Light Company to form General Electric in 1892. This completed a series of prestigious acquisitions by Thomson in the 1980s, which include the German companies SABA and Telefunken and the British company Ferguson. Under new ownership, RCA began to flourish again. It reached a major milestone in 1989 when its 50 millionth color television set came off the assembly line at its plant in Bloomington, Indiana, which is the world’s largest television assembly plant.

In 1993, Thomson became a founding member of the Digital HDTV Grand Alliance, an international body formed to agree on global standards. A year later, the RCA Digital Satellite System introduced digital satellite television broadcasting in the United States. The parent company, Thomson Consumer Electronics, was renamed Thomson Multimedia in 1995 to signal its growing interest in digital home-entertainment products. Moreover, in 1998, it made equity holdings available to four companies that were considered to be suitable partners for new digital developments. These companies, with an aggregate 25 percent shareholding, are Microsoft, DirecTV, Alcatel, and NEC.

Razors

2010-11-09T10:13:00.000+02:00

For over 200 years most Western men have, in accordance with the dictates of fashion, Gillette responded with its own version within a year. Wet razors have continued to market themselves on the concept of the close, refreshing shave. This has led to the introduction of dual and triple bladed shaving heads.

The 1980s saw the range of razors increase, with more models being introduced for women, most being battery operated and useable on wet or dry skin. They are consciously designed in pastel colors, as opposed to men’s razors, which usually have black plastic or aluminum cases. Most men’s razors are now cordless socket/battery combinations. The Philishave Cool Skin has electric blades and a cartridge for shaving gel, combining the features of wet and dry shaving.

Ice Crushers

2010-11-06T10:14:00.000+02:00

Crushed ice became popular for cooling drinks and cocktails in the 1920s and 1930s. Simple ice crushers were usually hinged presses of cast aluminum. The upper handle had a head of spiked teeth that crushed the ice into the lower pan. Another version, popular in the 1950s, had a hopper above a set of hand-cranked teeth with a plastic container for the crushed ice to fall into below. Capable of producing coarse and fine granules, they can crush a quart of ice in two minutes. These models were available in reds and yellows with chromed lids. They are still on sale as retro kitchenware. Electrically operated models are also available.

Fax Machines

2010-11-03T10:11:00.000+02:00

A facsimile (fax) machine is a machine that copies the image of a document, sends it to another location, and reproduces it exactly. Early facsimile machines were developed in the nineteenth century, but in its modern form, compact and cheap enough for household use, the fax machine is a product of the late twentieth century.

Nineteenth century facsimile machines, such as those developed by Alexander Bain and Frederick Bakewell in England and Giovanni Caselli in Italy, used mechanical methods of copying and reproduction. The contents of the document were traced by a pen and the movement of the pen was recreated at the other end. This technique was slow and laborious. In 1873,Willoughby Smith showed that pulses of light converted to pulses of electric current and sent by wire could be reconverted by a selenium photoelectric cell. This technique was used to send newspaper photos. A breakthrough occurred in Germany in 1902, when Arthur Korn invented a method for transmitting photographs by electric wire. This process, telephotography, was used to send the first intercity fax, between Munich and Berlin in 1907. The first machine to employ document scanning, as in the modern fax machine, was the Belinograph, invented by the Frenchman such machines expensive to use. In the 1970s, Japanese companies began to develop faster, smaller, cheaper, and more efficient fax machines. Japan was also the country with the highest level of ownership. By 1985, the number of fax machines in use in the United States had grown to 550,000, whereas Japan had 850,000 and Europe only 120,000. From the mid-1980s, the availability of combined telephone and fax machines made the fax machine more appealing for home use. By 1989, there were 4 million fax machines in the United States.

Fax technology has continued to improve. Early fax machines required expensive thermal paper impregnated with carbon. In such machines, the thermal paper, held on a drum, is heated when current flows through the stylus, releasing the carbon to the paper surface to recreate the transmitted document. To improve print quality and enable the use of ordinary office paper, manufacturers developed “plain paper” fax machines that use either ink film or ink-jets. The Japanese company Canon launched the first plain paper fax machine in 1987. Ink film still relies on thermal technology but the ink is transferred from a thermal film to plain paper, whereas ink-jets spray ink through tiny perforations in the printer head directly onto plain paper. Early fax/phones had to be manually set to act as phone or fax, which could be frustrating. This was solved by the development of automatic fax/phones that could detect whether the incoming message originated from a telephone or fax machine and respond accordingly. Today, the top range fax machines are fully compatible with personal computers, so that they can fulfill a variety of scanning and printing functions.

APS and Digital Photography

2010-11-01T17:01:00.001+02:00

Both of the latest developments in photography draw on electronic technology. It was almost inevitable that digital photography would emerge in the wake of digital computers and digital sound recording. The key component of a digital camera is a powerful sensor capable of translating the light components of an image into a sufficient number of pixels for it to be reproducible as a continuous image. In 1986, Eastman Kodak developed the first megapixel sensor, with a capacity broadly equivalent to the content of a 13 by 18 cm (5 by 7 inch) photograph. Digital cameras soon followed, with Japanese companies predictably leading the way in making the technology affordable. All digital cameras have the common feature of being filmless, but there are several methods of storing images, including computer floppy disks, removable memory cards, and built-in memory. Eastman Kodak’s PhotoCD pioneered digital technology whereby negatives on film can be scanned and stored digitally on compact disc. The PhotoCD system was introduced in 1990. For the private consumer, the main disadvantage of digital photography is that the quality of output from the typical home printer is far below that of conventional photographic printing.

APS, the Advanced Photo System, was developed by a consortium of five companies—Eastman Kodak and four Japanese companies, Fuji, Nikon, Canon, and Minolta. The APS project began in 1992, and APS cameras and film went on the market in 1996. APS cameras take cartridges of 24 mm film, which incorporates magnetic strips for storing information from sensors about date and time, exposure length, and size settings. Date or message imprinting and normal/panoramic size settings were features already incorporated in some 35 mm cameras; the additional advantages of APS are that the film is thinner and hence the cartridges are slimmer, permitting corresponding slimmer and lighter cameras, and the developed negatives are rewound into the cartridge after printing, so there is less danger of damage through mishandling. A reference set of contact prints is provided to facilitate reordering of prints.

Hair Clippers

2010-10-29T11:15:00.000+03:00

The hair clipper was the first electrical haircare appliance designed for use by men rather than women. Leo J. Wahl invented the first practical electric hair clipper in 1919 and set up the Wahl Clipper Corporation in Sterling, Illinois. The hair clipper basically consists of an electrically driven blade with a comb guide, and the design has changed little since its introduction. Today’s hair clippers are supplied with a range of combs for different trimming grades and are also available as cordless models with rechargeable batteries.

See also
Hair dryers; Hair Stylers

S. W. Farber, Inc.

2010-10-26T08:51:00.000+03:00

The S.W. Farber company was established in 1900 when S.W. Farber, a tinsmith, set up a shop in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The initial products were copper and brass bowls and vases. In 1910, the company introduced Farberware, the line of kitchenware for which it is best known, with chrome and silver-plated table accessories. It produced kitchenware, pots, and pans in the 1920s and moved into the appliance field in 1930 when it developed the first Farberware coffee percolator. Farber improved this with the Coffee Robot coffeemaker of 1937 that could keep coffee warm long after it had brewed. The Broiler Robot, which followed in 1938, was advertised as “the first broiler that could cook at the dinner table.”

Farberware stainless steel and aluminum pans were introduced in 1949 after the company had moved away from wartime demands and invested in stainless steel production. It produced the first stainless steel electric frying pan in 1954. Sold to the multinational Hanson Industries in 1987, it is now a part of Salton Inc. and continues to produce coffeemakers, juicers, and waffle makers.

See also
Coffeemakers

Early Kodak Cameras

2010-10-25T10:34:00.000+03:00

The Kodak brand name made its debut in 1888 to launch Eastman’s first camera. The Kodak box camera, priced at $25, was marketed with the slogan “You push the button, we do the rest” and came preloaded with a 100-exposure roll of stripping film. The completed film was returned inside the camera to Eastman Kodak for processing and reloading at a cost of $10. In 1889, the company was reconstituted as the Eastman Company and introduced a celluloid roll film, the first commercial transparent roll film. The first daylight-loading film and camera followed in 1891.

As business flourished in 1891, the company opened new factories in Rochester and in Harrow, near London, where it had established a British office in 1885. It was renamed the Eastman Kodak Company in 1892 and opened a separate camera factory in Rochester in 1893. The Pocket Kodak camera of 1895 brought a new feature, the exposure window, while the 1898 folding pocket Kodak camera established the 2.25-in-by-3.25-in negative as standard. Eastman Kodak began the twentieth century by creating a mass market for snapshot photography with the launch of the No. 1 Brownie box camera. Designed by Frank Brownell and made from wood and cardboard, the No. 1 Brownie cost just $1, with 6-frame roll films priced at 15 cents each. In 1908, the company brought out the world’s first commercial cellulose acetate film, described as safety film to distinguish it from highly flammable cellulose nitrate film. Eastman Kodak continued to expand its U.S. and overseas operations in the years prior to World War I. An Australian subsidiary was added to its British and French ones, and a research laboratory and new headquarters opened in Rochester.

Morphy Richards

2010-10-22T11:10:00.000+03:00

The British company Morphy Richards was founded in 1936 as a manufacturer of electric irons. It soon became a successful manufacturer of a range of small electrical appliances, such as kettles, toasters, and hair dryers. Its success has been based on the functional design, affordability, and reliability of its products. While not notable as a world innovator, the company has been responsible for introducing new technical advances to the British market. Examples of this include steam irons and pop-up toasters. The Morphy Richards streamlined toaster of 1956 was one of the most popular British models, coming in either a chrome or a yellow enameled body. Its PA75 model, also available in chrome or yellow enamel, was equally successful. Morphy Richards expanded into consumer electronics in 1982, launching into the portable radio and audio market. It became part of the Glen Dimplex Group in 1985. In the 1990s, sales benefited from the introduction of matching lines of small appliances in deep colors. Today, Morphy Richards is the leading British manufacturer of small electrical appliances and has market shares of about 33 percent for kettles and 25 percent for toasters. The audio division has grown to include telecommunications products.

See also
Blenders/Juicers; Frying Pans; Glen Dimplex; Hair dryers; Irons; Kettles; Sandwich Toasters;
Toasters; Trouser Presses.

Motors, Electric

2010-10-19T11:08:00.001+03:00

One of the principal trends underlying the development of many domestic appliances throughout the twentieth century has been the application of instant energy, which has improved their performance. For many appliances, this energy source has been electricity. The first essential factor in this development was the slow but steady spread of an efficient and cost-effective electricity supply in Europe, Canada, and the United States beginning in the 1880s. The second key factor was the development of a small and efficient electric motor.

The first electric motor was built by the Englishman Michael Faraday in 1831 and consisted of a copper disk rotating between the poles of a powerful magnet. Faraday did not exploit his discovery industrially. Further work was carried out by Faraday’s fellow countryman James Clerk Maxwell, but the first real commercial model was developed by the Croatian-born, U.S.-based Nicola Tesla in 1889. Working with the Westinghouse Company his 1/6 horsepower motor was used to drive a three-bladed domestic

Eastman Plates and Film

2010-10-15T10:32:00.000+03:00

Eastman became a keen amateur photographer while he was employed as a junior clerk at the Rochester Savings Bank, in New York State. Through reading British photographic magazines, he learned about a new dry gelatin emulsion coating for photographic plates and began to work on his own formula. After experimenting for three years, Eastman patented his dry gelatin photographic plate in 1879 and an emulsion-coating machine for making them. In 1880, he leased premises and began to manufacture dry gelatin plates. A year later, he founded the Eastman Dry Plate Company in partnership with Henry A. Strong. By 1883, the company needed larger premises and moved to a four-story building. It was reconstituted as the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company, a corporation with $200,000 stock held by fourteen shareholders, in 1884.

While dry gelatin plates were much easier to use than their wet collodion predecessors, Eastman was still not satisfied because glass plates were a heavy burden for the field photographer. His goal was to find a lighter and more flexible support than glass. In 1884, he brought out Eastman Negative Paper on rolls and a roll-holder attachment. However, the resulting images were inferior to those from glass plates, as the grain of the paper was visible. The next development was Eastman American Film, described as a transparent “stripping” film. Introduced in 1885, it was a paper strip coated with two layers of gelatin. The base layer of gelatin masked the paper grain and, after processing, the paper backing was stripped away.

Dyson Appliances

2010-02-15T17:57:00.000+02:00

James Dyson, the founder of Dyson Appliances, is a British industrial designer and entrepreneur who studied at the Royal College of Art in London. His early product designs include the Ballbarrow, a wheelbarrow made more maneuverable by substituting a ball for the front wheel. He is best known for the Dual Cyclone line of bagless vacuum cleaners that he designs and manufactures.

Based on his observations that traditional vacuum cleaners become less effective as the pores of their dust bags become clogged with dust, he set about designing a new kind of vacuum cleaner. Dyson’s dual cyclone system uses centrifugal force to separate the heavier dust particles from the air, thereby maintaining a clean airstream and full suction. In 1979, he made an industrial version of the cyclone cleaner for the Ballbarrow factory. It took five years of further development and more than 5,000 discarded prototypes to create the world’s first bagless cyclonic vacuum cleaner, the G-Force, which Dyson patented in 1984. Another nine years were to pass before Dyson began to reap the commercial potential of his invention.

Dyson tried to interest existing vacuum cleaner manufacturers in his patent with little success. He managed to negotiate licenses with a Japanese company and an American one. Production went ahead in Japan, but the American company, Amway, pulled out. Dyson then discovered that Amway was producing a cyclone cleaner, purportedly of its own design. In 1987, he sued Amway for patent infringement, a case that took five years to be settled in Dyson’s favor. During that period, he relied on the income from the Japanese license to meet his legal costs and pay the patent renewal fees. With the court case won, Dyson was able to set up Dyson Appliances at a factory in Wiltshire, in the south of England, to mass-produce his designs.

The Dual Cyclone line, more effective at removing finer dust particles than the G-Force, began with an upright model in 1993, soon followed by a cylinder (canister) version. All Dyson cleaners feature a transparent plastic dust container and cylinder models have a unique “stair hugging” shape. The classic Dyson colors are gray and yellow, but variations have been introduced to differentiate new models—for example, the use of purple casing for a high-efficiency filter. The de Stijl models are a stylistic tribute to the Dutch design movement of that name. Another Dyson first is the Recyclone, the first vacuum cleaner to be made by taking plastic waste from the manufacturing process and recycling it. At the end of the twentieth century, Dyson began working on the development of a robotic vacuum cleaner.

Dyson Appliances quickly achieved great commercial success in Britain, in spite of its products being at the higher end of the price range. In 1996, Dyson sold 400,000 vacuum cleaners, taking cumulative sales income above the £1 billion mark. The company now accounts for half of the British vacuum cleaner market by value. As exports only represent about 15 percent of sales, there is considerable foreign growth potential.

Drills, Electric

2010-02-12T17:56:00.000+02:00

The first electric hand drill is a good example of an appliance becoming truly popular almost sixty years after its invention. At the beginning of the century household tool kits could include either a hand drill or an Archimedean drill for making small holes. The first electric model was invented by the German Wilhelm Fein of Stuttgart in 1895. The American Black & Decker Company introduced its first model in 1915 followed by the first on/off trigger switch for a drill in 1917.

Housed in metal cases, these drills were used by workpeople in factories and workshops. They were not seen as a domestic product until the rise of the do-it-yourself (DIY) phenomenon of the postwar period. Black & Decker produced affordable electric drills for the DIY enthusiast, retailing at around seventeen dollars in the 1940s. This and other models had metal casings, and their styling appeared to be influenced by “ray-guns” seen in magazines like Amazing Stories and science fiction film serials such as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. Some companies were developing ergonomic designs. Atlas Copco commissioned the Swedish designer Rune Zernell for its LBB 33 model of 1955; he used ergonomic models and noise reduction chambers to make it slimmer and easier to use.

Bosch, the giant German engineering company, also began to make drills for the domestic market. Founded in Stuttgart in 1886, Bosch began producing industrial equipment and has diversified into appliances, power tools, and communications technology.

The rise of DIY and the confidence of homeowners to tackle bigger jobs as well as a more competitive market led to increasing product specifications and refinements. Variable speeds and hammer adjustments were introduced in the 1960s and 1970s, along with sanding attachments. The hammer action makes the drill bit vibrate backward and forward, pounding the material at the tip of the drill. This is especially useful for masonry, especially combined with two speed gearboxes that increased the torque (twisting force) of the drill at the lower speed. Increasingly models also featured a reverse action for use with a screwdriver attachment. Plastic replaced metal casings. Battery-operated cordless drills appeared on the DIY market in the 1980s. Convenient for light tasks they are not as powerful as drills that plug in to power outlets. That decade also saw the introduction of electro-pneumatic drills with a powerful hammer action and torque control to limit the twisting force at the chuck, ensuring that screws are not driven in too tight.

Today the electric drill is an essential part of the home tool kit and continues to be improved. The main manufacturers are Black & Decker, Bosch, Hitachi, and Makita.

A. F. Dormeyer

2010-02-09T17:56:00.000+02:00

A. F. Dormeyer developed the electric Household Beater in 1927. It was designed so that the motor could be easily detached from the bracket that held the beater blades, a forerunner of detachable beaters. It was originally manufactured by the MacLeod Manufacturing company, which later changed its name to the A. F. Dormeyer Manufacturing Company.

The company continued into the 1960s producing beaters, deep fat fryers, and coffee percolators, including the magnificently named Automatic Electric Hurri-Hot Electri-Cup

Batteries

2010-02-06T15:14:00.000+02:00

Many small electrical appliances rely on batteries for their power source. They can be for hand-held games such as the Nintendo Game Boy, portable radios, and systems like the Sony Walkman or for remote controls for videos, televisions, and hi-fi equipment.

The development of batteries began with the experiments of Alessandro Volta (1745–1827) and John Frederic Daniell (1790–1845). Volta discovered that when two different metals are in contact with moisture an electrical current is produced. His first “wet cell” battery used alternating zinc and silver discs separated by cloth moistened with a salt solution. Daniell improved on this by using zinc and copper electrodes, resulting in a more practical battery. The “dry cell” battery was developed in the 1860s. This led to the ubiquitous zinc-carbon battery that was to be in use for most of the twentieth century. The so-called dry cell has a moist paste electrode inside a zinc container. The positive electrode is a carbon rod in the center of the cell.

These batteries developed into two basic types, the small cylindrical battery for flashlights (torches), and so on, and the larger, rectangular power pack. The main manufacturers in the United States and the United Kingdom were both called Ever-Ready.

Batteries were important because they made electricity portable. The small inexpensive battery-operated flashlight soon became a household staple. Other appliances (such as radios) had to wait until the associated technological and social conditions allowed them to become smaller. The radios that followed the “cat’s whisker” sets required heavy “wet-cell” batteries. The development of valves allowed the use of lighter “dry-cell” batteries and the portable radio. These models, such as the Pye Type 25 of 1928 (which featured the first of its famous “sunrise” speaker grilles) were heavy due to a combination of batteries and wooden cases. Although a little lighter, even late 1940s and early 1950s models were cumbersome. The British Ever-Ready battery company also produced its own portables.

The development of transistors and radios such as the Sony TR-55 (1955) and the UK Pam (1956) and increasing personal mobility led manufacturers to produce smaller products. The rise of the portable transistor radio was also aided by the growth of rock and roll and a youth culture fuelled by a generation of teenagers with more money and time.

The development of transistors and the culturally driven desire for music and communications on the move has led to a migration of the products from the domestic and office environment into the public realm, as exemplified by the Sony Walkman and the mobile telephone. To keep this revolution going, manufacturers have relied on increasingly efficient lightweight long life batteries.

This trend was exploited by the Duracell Company, which pioneered the marketing of longer-lasting alkaline batteries in the late 1970s and 1980s. It caught the manufacturers of zinc-carbon batteries by surprise, as they were unprepared for the competition. The UK Ever-Ready Company folded in 1981, only to be bought up by an American company, Ralston Purina. In less than ten years alkaline batteries accounted for over 50 percent of U.S. battery sales. Duracell is a division of the Gillette Company and trades in over fifteen countries, employing 4,500 people in the United States, Belgium, China, and India. Although 80 percent of the world market is still zinc carbon, the alkaline battery dominates the Western consumer goods market. Recent trends have been the introduction of power indicators on the sides of the batteries and longer-lasting rechargeable batteries.

Do-It-Yourself

2010-02-03T17:55:00.000+02:00

The term “do-it-yourself ” or DIY now refers to one of the most popular, if enforced, leisure occupations within the Western world. It is supported by an equally large manufacturing and retail sector. A largely post-1945 phenomenon it covers a huge range of practical household tasks that are now carried out by the resident of the home rather than a specialized professional. This is especially so in countries like the United Kingdom, where private property ownership is high, and primarily appeals to people on low or middle incomes, the wealthy being able to afford interior designers and professional craftspeople.

In the United Kingdom, 70 percent of families lived in rented accommodation before 1939. The repairs were the responsibility of the landlord and there was little incentive to redecorate or improve someone else’s property. Also, labor was cheaper and culturally such manual work was not seen as the preserve of the middle-class office worker. Couples often worked together on their gardens and the “man of the house” may have hung the occasional picture, but to attempt the work of the professional painter, plumber, or electrician would have appeared eccentric.

Even if one had wanted to attempt such things the odds were stacked in favor of the professional. There were few detailed manuals and household guides were rudimentary in this area. To take decorating as an example, the wallpaper still came with a selvedge and had to be trimmed, either by hand or with a machine fitted with circular blades. The adhesive paste had to be mixed in a bucket.

World War II brought hardships and shortages and a “make-do-and-mend” attitude, which was in turn followed by a desire to improve the domestic environment. The two attitudes were not necessarily polarities; those who had to mend or make things often found that they enjoyed the creative or technical challenge and translated former tasks into hobbies.

The slowly rising affluence of the postwar period led to rising expectations and the need to replace bomb damaged houses with new towns and suburbs. Despite this, many young married couples still had to live with one set of their parents for a few years before they could find a place of their own, which was often rented. Buying a house was expensive and could require a 30–40 percent deposit. Local governments built many houses and usually decorated them The London County Council used green, cream, and battleship gray; Stevenage new town in Hertfordshire used white walls and gray paintwork. Some local governments let tenants decorate their own houses, others did not, and local government workmen appeared to redecorate two rooms every four or five years. Many people aspired to better brighter homes, inspired by events such as the 1951 Festival of Britain, but often the materials (wallpapers, for example) were scarce in the early 1950s. The influence of the “American dream home,” deluxe modern interiors featured in magazines and Hollywood films, was also important.

By 1957, the industry was big enough to stage a Do-It-Yourself show at London’s Olympia Exhibition Center. It ran for three weeks and attracted over a quarter of a million people. Magazines such as Practical Householder, Handyman, and Do-It-Yourself appeared in the late 1950s, and companies began to respond to this changing mood. They offered step-by-step guides to projects such as converting attics, boxing in stair rails, and removing old fireplaces. They recommended the right tools and helped popularize new materials such as Formica and Melamine. Black & Decker, for example, began to produce power tools aimed at the home market.

These materials were able to transform previously dull rooms, especially kitchens, where a laminate could be glued to old furniture and worktops. Not everyone approved; Richard Hoggart, writing in his influential The Uses of Literacy, glumly commentated on the changes in the working-class home of 1957. “Chain-store modernismus, all bad veneer and sprayed on varnish stain, is replacing the old mahogany; multicolored plastic and chrome biscuit barrels and bird cages have come in.”

Despite the fears of some cultural critics, the market continued to grow. The rising affordability of television provided a mass audience for televised DIY programs such as the BBC show hosted by Barry Bucknell. In 1962, the BBC bought a derelict house in West London, which Bucknell “did up” over a period of months, removing old fireplaces and covering paneled doors and stairs. The project inspired many terraced house dwellers to transform their homes into brighter more modern spaces. Over 2,000 people came to view the house before it was sold. The Daily Mail Ideal Home Show began to introduce DIY displays.

By the 1960s the pioneering days of DIY were over and it had become an accepted part of modern life. The range of paints, tools, and equipment continued to expand as the stigma of doing it yourself fell away. Paint companies such as Crown and Dulux produced “fashion” colors aimed at the homeowner rather than the professional. Dulux is the paints division of ICI and was a pioneer in promoting DIY paint. It remains one of the major brands within the United Kingdom. Its success illustrates how the company aimed itself at the new DIY consumers. In 1961 it introduced an Old English sheepdog into its advertising, both on television and in magazines. Much of the advertising was directed at women and the dog achieved remarkable brand recognition, so much so that Old English sheepdogs are often referred to as “Dulux Dogs.”

The lead content of paints was reduced and then removed. Nondrip paints were introduced in the 1970s, followed by one-coat gloss paints in the 1980s. The large DIY stores began to introduce their own lines of paints in the 1980s.Wallpapers became washable and ready pasted. DIY was seen as an important pastime and many households were proud that they had “done it themselves.”

Culturally, DIY has tended to follow marriage or a long-term commitment. One suburban male interviewed in 1998 probably speaks for many:

I never used to do any DIY before I was married. When I lived at home, I just used to play football every weekend and that was it. And quite honestly when we got married it was just a question of you went out and, if you could find somewhere to live and you could afford it, then you bought it, and if there was anything to be done then you did it yourself. You couldn’t afford to pay anyone to do it for you. I’ve just learned as I’ve gone along.

DIY was given a further boost by the economic uncertainties of the early 1970s, following global recession and the increase in oil prices in 1973. Many people could not afford to buy a new house and invested in improving what they had. Even so home ownership did rise in this decade, and a British survey carried out in 1979 showed that 51 percent of the male respondents claimed that DIY was one of their main leisure pursuits.

DIY continues to be a major pastime, covering home painting and decorating, electrical work, gardening, car maintenance, and small-scale building work. America has had a different experience of DIY due to its size and diversity. For many established eastern farmers and the homesteaders attracted to the prairies in the 1910s and 1920s, doing it yourself was a way of life. Many urban Americans continued to rent their apartments. The rise of suburbia in the United States led to similar trends as those in the United Kingsom, although professional decorators and repair companies have survived longer in the U.S. labor market. Nevertheless U.S. companies such as Black & Decker and a host of smaller companies produce tools, fittings, and accessories. Large supermarkets have DIY sections. In the United Kingdom, the Sainsbury group introduced Homebase stores in the early 1980s and the Woolworth’s group their B&Q stores. The U.S. market has Black & Decker’s own stores and also large suburban outlets such as Builders Square, Home Depot, Ace Hardware, and Sears.

The domestic area continues to be a center for much of modern life as computers and the Internet offer home-based services. There is a growing trend toward working at home in some sectors. As a result, the desire for attractive affordable surroundings remains high.

Dishwashers

2010-01-30T17:53:00.000+02:00

In 1900, the domestic dishwasher did not exist in either mechanical or electric form. Nineteenth-century patents for dishwashers were conceived in terms of commercial or institutional use. The most influential of these has been L. A. Alexander’s U.S. patent of 1865. Alexander’s dishwasher consisted of a tub with a rotor at the bottom attached by a crankshaft to a handle in the lid. A rack with tangential slots for dishes was placed above the rotor. As the user turned the handle, the rotor threw water outward against the dishes. While Alexander’s dishwasher was conceived for commercial catering use, a similar but smaller-scale dishwasher was patented by American housewife Josephine Cockran in 1886.

The first commercial hand-cranked dishwasher intended for home use was shown by the Walker Company of Syracuse, NewYork, at the New York State Fair in 1910. Walker produced an electric version in 1918, with a small electric motor at the base to drive the agitator. Hand-cranked models continued to be sold in the 1920s. A British example was the Polliwashup machine, effusively advertised as the “greatest household labour-saver of all Time.” General Electric purchased the Walker Company in 1930 and began to remodel the dishwasher. It brought out the first square-tub model in 1932. The first electric dishwasher sold in Britain, in 1937, was a U.S. product, a Thor model made by the Hurley Machine Company.

In the late 1930s and again ten years later, a combined washing machine and dishwasher appeared on the market in the United States. The two functions were served by having a long agitator for clothes washing that was interchangeable with a short agitator plus dish rack. This model was a top loader but from the late 1940s, as with automatic washing machines, manufacturers began to favor the front-loading design. The price of dishwashers in Britain fell when Hoover began to manufacture them there. The introduction of plastic sink-top models by companies such as Electrolux was another way of making dishwashers more affordable and at the same time addressing the problem of space constraints in the typical British kitchen.

The performance of dishwashers benefited from improvements in soap and detergent technology in the 1950s. By the mid-1960s, special dishwashing powders and rinse aids were available. Considering the very limited commercial success of dishwashers even in the United States, it is surprising that Kelvinator demonstrated a high-tech concept of dishwashing in Seattle in 1962. This was the water-free and detergent-free ultrasonic dishwasher. The concept never got beyond the prototype stage, so its reliability is untested.

Dishwashers were still a luxury item in the United States until the late 1960s when annual sales reached 2 million units. In Britain, only 2 percent of homes had dishwashers by 1973. This slow pattern of growth has baffled those historians of domestic technology who have argued that dishwashing, as a frequent and tedious chore, is an obvious candidate for automation. Recently, manufacturers have applied the same technical innovations to dishwashers as to washing machines and for the same reasons. The ability of the fuzzy logic chip to optimize water and detergent use allows manufacturers to promote dishwashers as environmentally friendly, setting aside the issue of electricity consumption.

Detergents

2010-01-27T17:52:00.000+02:00

In the broadest sense, a detergent is a cleansing agent of any kind. The term has become commonly used in a narrower sense to describe particular chemical cleansing agents developed in the twentieth century. These detergents replaced soap and washing soda as the preferred agent for washing clothes.

Soap is made by mixing animal or vegetable fats with sodium hydroxide (caustic soda) or potassium hydroxide (caustic potash). This causes the fatty acids to form sodium salts. In its normal bar (tablet) form, soap is not ideal for washing large loads of clothes. For centuries, the usual practice was to presoak clothes in water to which lye, an alkali derived from wood or plant ash, or urine had been added. This had a mild bleaching effect and loosened dirt, which could then be removed by rubbing with soap. In 1791, a French chemist, Nicholas Leblanc, developed a process for making washing soda (sodium carbonate), which performed the same function as lye or urine. In Britain, most people used soap very sparingly until 1853, when the government repealed a soap tax imposed in 1712. The first powdered soap, Babbitt’s Best Soap, went on sale in New York in 1843. The first British soap powder was Hudson’s Soap Extract, introduced in 1863. By 1900, soap was also available in flake form. In 1918, the British company Lever Brothers (now Unilever) introduced Rinso, the world’s first granulated laundry soap.

The German company Henkel took the first step toward modern detergent technology with its Persil washing powder, introduced in 1907. The name was derived from two of its constituents, perborate and silicate. Perborate releases oxygen from the water molecules so that it becomes available to act on stains. Persil was an improved soap powder, rather than a modern detergent, but its self-activation process was the key to the successful laundry detergents that followed. The U.S. company Procter & Gamble developed an equivalent product, Oxydol. After electric washing machines became available in 1907, the disadvantages of soap-based laundry products became more evident. When soap is used in water containing magnesium and calcium (hard water), insoluble salts are created, which form scum on the surface. The first nonsoap detergents were developed in Germany in the late nineteenth century, with coal tar as the base and sulfuric acid as the reagent. Nekal, introduced in Germany in 1907, was the first detergent to be marketed commercially.

However, although early detergents eradicated the scum problem, they were not as effective at washing clothes as the improved soap powders. In 1933, Procter & Gamble marketed its first detergent, Dreft, as a cleanser for washing dishes in hard water. It launched the first synthetic laundry detergent, Tide, in 1946 as the “washing miracle.” Tide became the leading American laundry detergent in the 1950s. The British equivalent of Tide was Surf, introduced by Unilever in 1949. These new detergents contained optical brighteners, which enhanced the appearance of white clothes. Previously, a similar effect had been achieved by adding a blue powder to rinsing water. From the 1950s, powder detergents were based on alkyl benzene, a light, clear oil derived from coal tar or petroleum. In 1968, the first biological detergents appeared. These contain enzymes, which are natural catalysts with specific properties. The digestive enzymes used in detergents break down biological stains: lipase acts on fats, protease on proteins, and amylase on starches. Another advantage of enzymes is that they are effective at low temperatures. The increasing popularity of front-loading automatic washing machines created a need for low-lather detergents. Silicone is one of the ingredients that can be added to reduce foaming. In the mid-1980s, liquid detergents were developed.

While advances in detergent technology improved their washing performance, it became apparent that a number of the key ingredients had damaging environmental consequences. Phosphates and surfactants, the surface-active agents that improve wetting (the penetration of water into fabrics), evade the biological processes used to purify sewage. Phosphates, which may also be found

Design Council

2010-01-24T17:52:00.000+02:00

Founded in 1944 as the British Council of Industrial Design, the government-funded Design Council is responsible for encouraging and promoting high standards of industrial design. It was not the first British organization to undertake this mission. In 1914, the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, which promoted handcrafted products, turned its attention to industrial design and set up an offshoot, the Design and Industries Association. The Arts and Crafts influence was reflected in its motto, “Fitness for purpose.” The government first took an interest in industrial design in 1931, when the Board of Trade first proposed to set up the Council for Art and Industry, whose main purpose from its launch in 1934 was to mount exhibitions showing examples of good design. Ironically, it was during World War II, a period of material shortages and production constraints, that the government began to take a more active role in shaping the design environment. In 1942, the Ministry of Information recruited a number of leading British designers, including Herbert Read, Milner Gray, and Misha Black, to head a new Design Research Unit. The goal was to create an advisory and consultancy network to educate manufacturers to embrace the notion of “total design.”

The formation of the British Council of Industrial Design and its Scottish Committee was announced in December 1944 by the president of the Board of Trade. The stated objective of the council was “to promote by all practicable means the improvement of design in the products of British industry.” Its motto, “Good design, good business,” reflected the government’s belief that design was a way of boosting product sales. The council’s staff grew from 10 in 1945 to over 1,000 in 1946. With the backing of the Board of Trade, the council mounted its first exhibition, “Britain Can Make It,” at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1946. Featuring 5,000 exhibits produced by 1,300 companies, the exhibition was visited by 1.4 million people. The products were carefully selected to convey the council’s notions of good taste in design to both consumers and manufacturers.

Gordon Russell, an influential British furniture designer whose career spanned the Arts and Crafts Movement and Modernism, took over as director in 1947. The council began to promote its ideas through publications (such as Design magazine, which was introduced in 1949), film strips, and displays. In 1951, the council undertook a national survey of British design, which generated the Design Index, a stock list of approved products, and a pictorial reference library. The most high-profile venture of the council in its early years was its contribution to the 1951 Festival of Britain. The festival was the brain-child of the Royal Society of Arts as a means of celebrating the centenary of the Great Exhibition. The role of the Council of Industrial Design was to choose 10,000 products of British manufacture for exhibition. Eight and a half million visitors attended the festival, which had its main site on the South Bank of the Thames in London.

In spite of the success of the Festival of Britain, the council felt that it was not getting its message across to the public. The pattern of sales of consumer products suggested that the majority of the public were attracted by the “cheap and cheerful” rather than the quiet good taste that the council espoused. The council felt that it needed a permanent showcase for good design. The result was the Design Centre for British Industries, a “shopping guide to well-designed British goods,” which opened in London in 1956. The Scottish Design Centre opened in Glasgow in 1957, which was also the year that the council introduced an annual design award. The Design Centre Awards, later renamed the Design Council Awards and then the British Design Awards, were originally restricted to consumer goods. They were later extended to capital goods, such as engineering products and car components, in 1974, to medical products in 1975, and computer software in 1986. In order to bring good design to the attention of a wider audience, the council introduced a black and white triangular label as a symbol to identify goods that met its design criteria. The label scheme was discontinued in 1988.

The council’s name was shortened to the Design Council in 1972. The 1970s was a period of consolidation and regional expansion. New offices were opened in Cardiff in 1974 and Belfast in 1978. In the 1980s, the council began to adapt to a changing political and business environment. In 1983, it introduced the Funded Consultancy Scheme, whereby eligible companies could claim free design consultancy services. New facilities were opened at the London Design Centre, including an Innovation Centre in 1985, a Materials Information Centre in 1988, and aYoung Designers Centre in 1989.

Further rethinks in the 1990s brought several changes of premises and a slimming down of the council’s functions. In 1990, the Design Council Scotland moved to a different location in Glasgow. A year later, the Design Council Northern Ireland also relocated to new offices in Belfast, while a new regional English office was opened in Leeds. The last of these relocations saw the council move its London headquarters from Haymarket to Covent Garden in 1998. In 1993, the government’s industry minister announced a comprehensive review of the Design Council in consultation with manufacturers, designers, and educators. The outcome of the review was that the council ceased to provide direct design consultancy services, transferring its consultancy database to the Chartered Society of Designers.

The end of the second millennium provided the opportunity for the council to relaunch itself. The Millennium Products initiative, managed by the Design Council, was launched in September 1997 by the prime minister. After three rounds of applications, a total of just over 1,000 Millennium Products were selected by the end of 1999. These design achievements were celebrated in the Spiral of Innovation artwork commissioned by the Design Council and installed in the Millennium Dome at Greenwich in London.

Defrosters

2010-01-20T17:51:00.000+02:00

Self-defrosting freezers and refrigerators appeared in the 1960s. Prior to that the excess buildup of ice had to be removed. Most people simply switched off the appliance and left a pan of hot water in the freezer compartment. Once melting was under way, the ice could be scraped off by hand.

The electrical appliance manufacturers spotted the opening for an appliance to assist this process. During the 1950s U.S. companies produced a line of electric defrosters that could be plugged in and then placed in the freezer. Most were small electric heaters encased in aluminum bodies with wooden handles, such as those manufactured by Howell & Company and the Shane Manufacturing Company. Some models had metal and plastic casings. The Osrow Products Company of New York produced an infrared version in the early 1960s.

Consumers

2010-01-18T17:37:00.000+02:00

The growth of industrialization in the nineteenth century was stimulated by, and linked to, a rising population that created bigger markets. The establishment of modern capitalism grew in association with many of these developments. The innovations within technology and science were not driven only by “pure” experimentation but also by the desire to commercially develop the results. This culture of mass consumption was already advanced in Europe, Canada, and the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century and was initially enjoyed by the middle classes. The post-1945 increase in prosperity allowed more and more working people to purchase consumer durables.

Designers and manufacturers of the earlier twentieth-century domestic appliances were certainly aware of their potential markets insofar as they wanted their products to sell. Nevertheless, what market research that was carried out was largely unscientific and anecdotal. Initially they relied on the nineteenth-century premise that there were “natural” preexisting markets for a product. The role of promotion and advertising was to make sure that the potential customers were attracted to your particular product. Branding, the process of giving a product an identity, was beginning to develop and was accelerated during the Depression years of the 1930s. Economists and politicians looked to increased consumption as a way out of economic slumps. The late 1920s and 1930s saw the introduction of the marketing methods and psychological selling techniques familiar today. There was a change from “getting commodities to consumers” to “getting consumers to commodities.”

This was achieved by advertising techniques that, in the case of domestic appliances, were aimed specifically at women. Advertisements prompted purchase through a combination of guilt and desire. In the United Kingdom and the United States advertisements began to illustrate the housewife, not the servant, using the appliances and exploited rising standards of cleanliness and fears about “household germs.” The increasing use of labor-saving appliances may have saved time in some areas, but social and cultural pressures led to increasing standards and more time spent on other areas of housework. The desire to consume was stimulated by aspirational advertisements and planned obsolescence of products.

As Americans were encouraged to become patriotic consumers many of them felt that they needed to make informed choices about the increasing range of products. In 1926 Frederick Schlink, an engineer from White Plains, New York, organized a consumer club that distributed lists of products that were seen as good value and also those “one might well avoid, whether on account of inferior quality, unreasonable price, or of false and misleading advertising.” Schlink used these lists to produce a book, Your Money’s Worth, which led to the founding of Consumers’ Research and the Consumers’ Research Bulletin in 1928.

The Consumers Union was a splinter group from Consumers’ Research and was established in 1936, following acrimonious labor relations. Its founding group of professors, labor leaders, journalists, and engineers had a mission to “maintain decent living standards for ultimate consumers,” a rhetoric born of the Depression and the strike-breaking tactics of Schlink. It remains independent of both government and industry and depends on membership subscriptions. It first published its magazine Consumer Reports in the same year, establishing a tradition of testing and rating products and services. The initial circulation was around 4,000. Appliances were and continue to be tested for performance, energy efficiency, noise, convenience, and safety. Subscriptions had risen to 100,000 by 1946 and continued to grow, even during the McCarthy era when Consumer Reports was listed as a subversive magazine. The Consumers Union now has over 4.6 million subscribers, a children’s magazine (launched in 1980 as Penny Power, now known as Zillions) and a web site.

In the United Kingdom, the Good Housekeeping Magazine was established in 1922, largely aimed at the servantless middle-class woman. It founded the Good Housekeeping Institute in 1924 to test recipes and “submit all domestic appliances to exhaustive tests and bring those approved to the notice of all housewives,” which it continues to do today. The UK Consumers Association, based on the U.S. Consumers Union was founded in 1956 and first published Which?, a quarterly magazine of tests and reports in 1957. Which? became a monthly magazine in 1959. The UK Consumers Association currently has over a million members. The International Organization of Consumers Unions was established in 1960 and includes consumer associations from the United States, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Australia.

The marketing trends of the 1930s continued after 1945 and in-depth market research developed throughout corporate America in the 1950s. The British Market Research Association was established in 1957, the same year as Vance Packard’s critical study of advertising, The Hidden Persuaders, was published in the United States. The following quotation from Packard’s book illustrates how the advertising industry continued to use the twin themes of guilt and desire in the postwar boom years.

The cosmetic manufacturers are not selling lanolin, they are selling hope. . . . We no longer buy oranges, we buy vitality, we do not buy just an auto, we buy prestige.

If you tell the housewife that by using your washing machine, drier or dishwasher she can be free to play bridge, you’re dead! She is already feeling guilty about the fact that she is not working as hard as her mother. You are just rubbing her up the wrong way when you offer her more freedom. Instead you should emphasize that the appliances free her to have more time with her children and to be a better mother.

Advertisements of the period support this. A Hotpoint ad from Good Housekeeping of June 1951 carries the copy “Save 8 Hours Every Week with a Hotpoint All-Electric Kitchen—Gain Extra Time for All Your Extra Duties.” The time saved, the advertisement suggests, is “for your family as well as the many added duties you’re called on to shoulder these days.” Needless to say, the “you” in question was female.

These quotes reflect a set of cultural values that were already in the process of being challenged by the feminist, civil rights, and youth movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Unsafe at Any Speed, by the American lawyer and consumer advocate Ralph Nader, was published in 1965 and exposed the lack of safety in the General Motors Corvair automobile. Nader joined the Consumers Union in 1967. Congress passed twenty-five pieces of consumer legislation between 1966 and 1973.

The advertisers and manufacturers varied in their ability to respond to these social and cultural changes. The rise of the affluent teenager created a new market, one that clothing, publishing, and cosmetics companies responded to with vigor. The domestic appliance companies also had to change. By the late 1970s the impact of feminism had been such that the latter comment quoted in Packard was no longer tenable as an advertising concept, even though it was still a reality for many women. A mid-1960s ad for a Nevastik Teflon-coated frying pan from the UK Good Housekeeping Magazine had the copy, “Even a Man Can’t Go Wrong with Nevastik Pans.”

Market research had become more sophisticated, and markets were increasingly divided into socioeconomic groups that could become target markets. This analysis became more sophisticated during the 1980s and 1990s as markets were segmented by postal areas and lifestyles.

It has been assumed that manufacturers and consumers stood in opposition to each other, with the consumer organizations acting as monitors and protectors of the latter’s interests. Indeed, the efforts of consumer organizations have led to legislation to improve safety standards and consumers rights after a purchase has been made. But it would be wrong to believe that consumers have been passive recipients of what the producers have given them and that a docile and uncritical public leads to low standards of design. It has been argued that consumers’ desires and needs have been created by the producers and, with the aid of their advertisers, have been satisfied by those producers. This implies that consumption is a less authentic and satisfying activity than, for example, working. It also seems to imply that popular forms of culture and material culture are superficial. Given the sophisticated nature of advanced capitalist societies, this attitude can be contested: needs are often no longer natural, but cultural, informed by the many connections and discontinuities within those societies. Many modern objects do not simply—or, indeed, primarily—have “use or exchange” value but more importantly have “identity” value. This can clearly be seen in some of the more fashionable domestic appliances of the 1980s and 1990s. A Dyson vacuum cleaner or a Sony Walkman is a successful piece of technology, but each equally has become a purchase that reinforces its own brand identity and defines the identity of the consumer. The same can be said of older products such as the Aga cooker or the more self-knowing products from the Alessi stable.

The late twentieth century has produced a society where manufacturers, designers, and consumers are linked, knowingly or not. Companies continue to conduct market research but also are quicker to respond to and appropriate ideas that often bubble up from within popular or mass culture. This “circuit of culture” links the identity, production, consumption, regulation, and representation of a commodity within a circular relationship. This model has increasingly applied to domestic appliances over the last twenty years. Many domestic products that were once almost culturally invisible are now recognized as having a meaning. Consumers are now largely more sophisticated and are able to “read” the intended meanings of the manufacturers and to construct or appropriate their own, which will in turn influence the manufacturers and affect how that product is marketed or modified. Nevertheless, the findings of the 1960 UK Molony Report on consumer protection remain valid.

The business of making and selling is highly organized, often in large units, and calls to its aid at every step complex and highly expert skills. The business of buying is conducted by the smallest unit, the individual consumer, relying on the guidance afforded by experience, if he possesses it, and if not, on instinctive but not always rational thought processes.

Instant Photography

2010-01-16T16:33:00.000+02:00

The American Edwin Herbert Land became involved in the photographic industry when he developed a light-polarizing film in 1932 and began to produce polarizing camera filters from 1935. He founded the Polaroid Corporation in 1937. In 1947, he patented the innovative Polaroid Land camera, which produced instant photographs. The special Polaroid film consists of a sandwich of negative film and positive paper with a thin filling of developer gel encased in a fragile membrane. After exposure, the film pack passes between rollers, rupturing the membrane and dispersing the developer. The Polaroid Land camera marketed in 1948 produced sepia photographs, but a true black-and-white model became available in 1950. By 1952, half a million Polaroid cameras had been sold. In 1959, the developing time was reduced by a ten-fold increase in film speed to 3000 ASA. The first color film Polaroid camera was introduced in 1962, with a developing time of a minute, compared to 10 seconds for black-and-white. The SX-70 color model of 1972 was the first Polaroid camera of the SLR type and the first where the film pack was ejected immediately, before the positive had developed. Early Polaroid cameras had a novelty appeal, but the high price of Polaroid films and the one-off nature of the process (as with daguerreotypes) limited the market potential.

Deep Fat Fryers

2010-01-14T17:50:00.000+02:00

The traditional deep frying pan with a wire basket to hold the food has been in use throughout the twentieth century. Deep fat fryers have different associations in Britain and America. The British saw the stovetop deep fryer as the “chip-pan” used mainly for cooking chips (French fries). Americans tended to associate them more with deep-fried chicken.

The main disadvantage with these models was that left unattended an overheated pan full of fat could cause a dangerous fire. Electric fryers were introduced into the U.S. market in the late 1940s. By the early 1950s rectangular models included Dormeyer’s Fri-well and Dulane’s Fryryte. Sunbeam produced a circular model that also doubled as a roaster and a casserole. Most were thermostatically controlled so that the oil remained at a constant temperature. Cheaper models did not have this feature and relied on the experience of the cook or a fat thermometer. They could also be used without the frying baskets as electric casseroles and soup cookers.

Like other appliances the fundamentals of the earlier electric models remain but plastics replaced steel or aluminum as the outer casings in the 1970s and additional refinements and safety features have been added. Models in the 1990s featured locking lids, vertical oil drainage, “coolwalls” similar to toasters, replaceable or washable filters in the lids to absorb grease and odors, and controls to raise and lower the baskets without lifting the lids. The main manufacturers are De Longhi, Tefal, Moulinex, and Morphy Richards.

These appliances continue to compete with the traditional fryer, and both now have to meet the challenge of the even-more-convenient ready-cut frozen “oven” or “microwave” fries, which can simply be heated up.

Empowering or Entrapping?

2010-01-12T10:49:00.000+02:00

The sharp rise in home computer ownership during the 1990s and the associated growth in influence of the Internet provoked concerns about the social consequences of computerization. To some, the World Wide Web is a positive force for good worldwide as a virtual expression of the global village; to others, it is culturally imperialistic and a corrupting force. In many ways, the debate has paralleled earlier arguments about the role of television in society. On the one hand, computer technology was applauded as empowering and democratizing; on the other hand, it was denigrated as socially exclusive and escapist. As with television, concern centered on the potential negative effects on children of the home-computer generation. The image of the socially gauche computer nerd, more comfortable with the synthetic relationships of the Internet chat room than face-to-face interaction, has become familiar through movies such as Weird Science. However, it is the ready availability of pornographic material on theWorld Wide Web that has generated the greatest outrage. Like most technologies, computer technology is open to abuse, but only a minority of people would currently contend that the negatives of computerization outweigh the positives.

Baby Monitors

2010-01-09T15:11:00.000+02:00

Baby monitors became popular in the 1980s thanks to the availability of simple localized radio communication. Either battery and/or plug-in (mains-operated) standard models consist of a “baby’s” monitor, which is placed in the child’s room, and a “parent’s” unit for the room where the parent or caregiver is. Some baby’s units have incorporated nightlights and room temperature displays. The baby’s unit has a microphone and a transmitter that will alert the parent or caregiver if the baby cries or requires attention. More sophisticated models vibrate like a telephone pager. They have a range of between 50 and 100 meters.

One of the largest manufacturers is the Japanese Tomy Corporation, which was founded in Tokyo in 1927. Although its main business is toys for young children it also produces a range of baby monitors.

Such appliances reflect changing social attitudes about caring for small children. Many parents no longer think their children should cry themselves to sleep. Also, recent publicity given to “crib death” (SIDS) and asthma has made such devices almost essential for concerned parents. These appliances take advantage of the developments in communications technology; the Tomy Baby Watch can transmit live images of the sleeping infant onto the family television screen.

Crocker, Betty (U.S.)

2010-01-06T11:10:00.000+02:00

In 1921, the Washburn Crosby Company, a forerunner of General Mills, introduced the fictitious “Betty Crocker” as a signature for the advice and information produced by its Home Service Department. This idealized American housewife was the result of the thousands of baking and cooking inquiries that the company received after organizing a competition. “Betty” sounded friendly and homely, while “Crocker” was the surname of a recently retired company executive.

By 1940, Betty Crocker had become a household name, so it was not surprising that General Mills mechanical engineering division used the name when planning to diversify into domestic electrical goods in 1945. The Betty Crocker cake mixes followed in 1947. Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book was first published in 1950. Written for the growing number of suburban kitchens, it was the first cookbook to have photographs and became a best-seller.

General Mills produced the Tru-Heat electric iron, a toaster, a food mixer, an automatic fry-cooker, a waffle iron, a coffeemaker, and a steam ironer under the name Betty Crocker. Ironically this move to peacetime production was limited by the demands of the Korean War, and General Mills sold the business to McGraw Electric Company in 1954.

The Betty Crocker food brand remains strong, and the name is still used for recipe books and nutritional information. As for the fictional Betty, a series of models and actresses has ensured that her clothes and image keep up to date.

Crate&Barrel

2010-01-06T11:08:00.000+02:00

The Chicago couple Gordon and Carole Segal established Crate&Barrel in 1962. Like Terence Conran in the United Kingdom, they realized that others would enjoy the design and quality of kitchen and home products that they had found on journeys within the United States and abroad. The idea came to them while doing the washing up.

They renovated a 1,700-square-foot former elevator factory in Chicago’s Old Town district. The decor was, by necessity, very cheap; the walls were lined with crating timber and the products displayed in packing crates and barrels. The first store employed three people and offered gourmet cookware and other contemporary housewares in greater variety and at better prices than elsewhere in Chicago.

The first Crate&Barrel mail-order catalogue was produced in 1967 and the first store outside Chicago opened in 1977. Crate&Barrel opened in San Francisco in 1985 and in New York in 1995. In 1998, it entered a partnership with the world’s largest mail-order company, Otto Versand of Hamburg, Germany.

Crate&Barrel has grown into one of the most influential retailers in the United States, with over eighty stores. Its flagship store opened on North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, in 1990. Although the store has been described as resembling a giant food processor, its main forms are a cube with a cylindrical attachment, literally a crate and barrel.

Like Habitat, Crate&Barrel helped create “lifestyle” shopping and influenced both consumers and other retailers. Apart from furniture and linens it sells a wide range of stylish appliances from manufacturers such as KitchenAid and Dualit. The company has a strong philanthropic policy and passes unsold goods on to local charities. It also has financially supported AIDS-related causes.

Asahi Optical Corporation

2010-01-05T15:00:00.000+02:00

The Japanese company Asahi Optical Corporation produces cameras under the Pentax brand name. It came to international prominence as a camera manufacturer in the 1950s, when Japanese companies began to challenge the dominance of European manufacturers in the 35mm rangefinder and single-lens reflex (SLR) camera sectors. Asahi developed a reputation for innovation and was responsible for a number of camera industry firsts. As well as producing Pentax cameras, lenses, and accessories, Asahi also manufactures eyeglass lenses, binoculars, printers, scanners, and endoscopes.

The company was formed in 1919 as the Asahi Optical Joint Stock Company and began to manufacture lenses for use in cameras, binoculars, and other optical instruments. In 1939, the company moved into the manufacture of aerial cameras for military use. After World War II, Asahi began to develop cameras for the consumer market. In 1952, Asahi launched the Asahiflex I camera, the first Japanese 35mm SLR camera. At this time, most SLR cameras suffered from a problem known as “mirror blackout:” the angled mirror behind the lens, which reflects the image to the viewfinder, is slow to retract when the shutter opens, thus blocking the path between the lens and the film. In 1954, Asahi solved this problem by fitting the Asahiflex II with an instant-return mirror. The first camera produced under the Pentax brand name appeared in 1957. The name was derived from the elision of the words “pentaprism,” or five-sided prism, and “reflex,” because the innovative feature of the Pentax camera was the incorporation of the pentaprism in the viewfinder, which made it possible for the viewfinder to be set vertically, providing a more natural viewing position.

Mass production of Pentax cameras began in 1959, reflecting the growing popularity of Japanese SLR cameras. The next major advance came with the introduction of the Pentax Spotmatic camera in 1964. This featured a photoelectric cell positioned behind the lens, which meant that the light reading was as accurate as possible. This arrangement, known as “through the lens” (TTL) metering, became standard in SLR cameras. TTL metering was taken a step further in the Pentax ES SLR camera of 1971, which introduced automatic exposure control by incorporating an electronic shutter that was programmed to select the exposure time according to the light reading. Accelerating sales meant that by 1971, Asahi had sold a total of three million SLR cameras since 1952, with a third of total sales coming in the last two years.

Asahi turned its attention to developing smaller, lightweight cameras. The Pentax MX SLR camera of 1976 was the world’s smallest and lightest SLR camera to date. Another variant of the MX model, the ME, was the first camera that operated wholly by automatic exposure, with no manual override. Even at its most compact, the 35mm SLR camera was still heavy and bulky in comparison to the pocket-size Instamatic cameras, pioneered by Eastman Kodak in the 1960s. Asahi’s solution was to create an SLR camera that used the same compact 110 film cartridges as the Instamatics. The Pentax System 10 SLR camera, launched in 1978, was compact and convenient, but also had the superior functionality provided by interchangeable lenses and numerous accessories. Meanwhile other companies were working on another lightweight format—the non-SLR 35mm compact camera. Asahi entered this field in 1982, when it introduced the Pentax Sport 35 camera. This camera also featured the innovative auto-focus lens technology introduced in the Pentax ME-F SLR camera of 1980. Asahi also became the first camera company to achieve total sales of 10 million SLR cameras in 1980.

Asahi continued to be a pioneer in the automation of camera functions. The Pentax Super Program SLR camera, introduced in 1983, offered the user a choice of six types of exposure control, including the use of auto flash. Two years later, the Pentax A3000 SLR camera provided fully automatic operation, with the addition of automatic film loading and winding and film-speed sensing. In 1986, Asahi improved the flexibility of the fixed-lens 35mm compact camera by marketing the world’s first compact 35mm camera with a zoom lens, the Pentax IQZoom camera. Since then, Asahi has extended the range of the compact zoom lens, culminating in 1998 with the launch of the Pentax IQZoom 200 camera, with a 48 mm to 200 mm zoom lens, which is still the longest zoom lens on a compact camera. Meanwhile, the first digital Pentax camera, the EI-C90, came on the market in 1996, followed in 1997 by the first Pentax APS (Advanced Photographic System) camera, the efina. As Asahi was not a partner in the consortium that developed APS, it played to its strengths by concentrating on applying its compact zoom lens technology to APS.

Cookware

2010-01-04T11:06:00.001+02:00

During the nineteenth century the majority of cooking pots had been made of cast iron. A major United Kingdom company manufacturing cooking pots was Kenricks of Birmingham. Lighter wares were of sheet tin. Enameled cast iron was developed in the 1850s. It was easier to clean and more attractive, despite a limited color range. A mottled blue was one of the commonest colors. Germany, Austria, and France were all significant producers. The 1870s saw innovations in the metal industry. Pressed mild steel appeared as a result of the Bessemer and Siemens processes. Aluminum wares were produced in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom from the 1880s. The American West Bend Company of West Bend, Wisconsin, began production of aluminum cookware in 1911. Its main customer was the mail-order company Sears, Roebuck.

The new cooking methods of gas and later electricity had an effect on cookware. Enameled iron saucepans were unpredictable and milk pans boiled over due to the uneven conductivity of iron and enamel. American manufacturers did continue with cast iron, offering bright enameled colors on the outside. British manufacturers moved to steel and aluminum.

The cookware industries of Europe and America went into wartime production between 1914 and 1918 and emerged with improved technologies. The most popular British brands were Tower, Diamond Brand, Swan, and Goat. Steel cookware was often enameled in either green or beige with contrasting rims in a darker shade. In postwar Germany, the once mighty BMW company had to cease producing aircraft engines and move into pots and pans to survive.

Aluminum wares were well suited to electric stoves. In 1934 the Wear Ever Company produced a range with heat resistant plastic handles. Stainless steel, an alloy of steel, nickel, and chromium developed in the 1920s, offered better resistance to rust and acidic corrosion. West Bend introduced their Waterless Cooker in 1921. Based on the suggestion of one of its salesmen, the lid of the cooker was fitted with clamps that prevented the escape of steam during cooking, making the addition of water unnecessary. They sold well and led to the introduction of a range of waterless wares known as the Flavo-Seal line. The U.S. Revere Copper and Brass Company developed a range of stainless steel pans with copper plated bottoms. Marketed in 1939 as Revere Ware, they gave better heat distribution.

In addition to stainless steel materials, chrome plated steel and heatproof glass like Pyrex was becoming popular. Colored aluminum was also fashionable during the late 1940s and 1950s. Anodized aluminum wares have a satin gloss finish and were introduced in 1946 by the Aluminum Utensil Company. West Bend had introduced anodized wares with colored dyes by 1950; these materials improved the aesthetics of cookware during the 1950s when the look of a kitchen became more important to manufacturers and consumers. This trend continued throughout the late twentieth century.

The first nonstick pan was introduced in 1956 by a Frenchman, Marc Gregoire, and his wife, Colette. Gregoire had experimented with the low friction substance PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene) to produce a smoother running fishing reel. His wife suggested that it would have more commercial success if applied to cookware. The resulting Tefal company became a brand leader as nonstick Teflon-coated pans became popular during the 1960s and 1970s.

Traditional manufacturers also received a boost during the 1970s as a result of public interest in antiques and the positive reassessment of much Victorian taste. A refurbished range or new Aga in a suburban home required the “right” pans. The French firm of Le Creuset benefited enormously. Founded in 1925 at Fresnoy-Le Grand at St. Quentin, its heavy, hand-finished enameled cast-iron pots and pans were just right.

Cultural and social trends also influenced cookware. The success of Asian and Eastern restaurants during the 1960s and 1970s led to a rising interest in cooking such dishes at home. In the United Kingdom, the Habitat stores led the way, selling woks, rice steamers, and chicken bricks. Another trend was toward professional cookware as the Western media began to promote “lifestyle” eating and drinking in the 1980s. For those inspired by celebrity chefs, popular choices were the Elysee Line of 1981 by Cuisinox, a French company established in the 1930s, or Calphalon of 1978, a range of commercial, hard anodized aluminum wares made in Ohio. Another serious choice was Le Pentole designed in 1979 for Industrie Casalinghi Mori in Italy by Nika Sala. This is a stylish modern reworking of a stacking steamer with five pans.

A more recent innovation has been the specialized pan designed for use away from the stove burner (hob). The Tefal Le Saucier is a nonstick saucepan with an integral mixing paddle powered by an electric spindle through its base. It sits on an individual hot-plate with electronic controls for heating, timing, and stirring. Equally French is the Tibos electric crepe maker, with a nonstick griddle and spreading device.

Cookware has largely retained its traditional forms throughout the twentieth century; the main advances have been in the better performing and lighter materials used and the aesthetic choices available. Most cookware performs well, dependent on price, and both manufacturers and consumers are equally influenced by popular fashions and tastes.

Size, Speed, and Price

2010-01-03T10:47:00.000+02:00

The desktop personal computer has become the dominant computer type for business and home use. Hardware has grown in size in order to accommodate more devices, provide more storage capacity, and generally enhance performance. In the mid-1980s, the typical PC consisted of a 12-inch (30 cm) monitor, a keyboard, and a central processing unit (CPU) that accommodated a 20-Mb (megabyte) hard-disk drive and a 5.25-inch (13 cm) floppy-disk drive, and had a number of ports (connection sockets) for optional peripheral devices. The printer was the most common peripheral device. By the late 1990s, 14- and 17-inch (36 cm and 43 cm) monitors were standard, in order to provide improved display of pictorial content. The CPU, usually in a tower format, typically accommodated a several gigabyte hard-disk drive, a 3.5-inch (9 cm) floppy-disc drive, a CD-ROM (compact disc read-only memory) or DVD (digital versatile disk) drive, and a modem. It had sufficient ports to take a range of peripheral devices, including scanners, digital cameras, CD writers, loudspeakers, and extra storage drives, such as the Zip or Jaz drives. The CD-ROM, introduced in 1984, has become the standard format for applications software, games programs, and educational software such as multimedia encyclopedias. Recordable CDs (CD-Rs), requiring a CD writer, became available in 1990. Introduced in 1995, the DVD can hold a full-length motion picture.

However, the key determinants of performance, the microprocessor and the RAM chip, have grown in processing power, speed, and capacity without growing in size. Since its introduction in 1993, the 32-bit Intel Pentium chip, the dominant PC microprocessor chip, has evolved from running at a speed of 60 MHz (megahertz) to 600 MHz. A 64-Mb RAM chip is now regarded as no more than average. Therefore, while desktop models dominate, portable computers are now available in sizes ranging from the palmtop to the notebook. In the 1970s, portability was more of a relative concept. The first portable computer, the Baby suitcase computer of 1976, was a CPU without a monitor, like the Altair desktop. Even by 1981, when the Osborne I portable computer was introduced, portable computers were still suitcase-size and referred to as luggables rather than portables. Compaq, which introduced a portable PC in 1982, was the first company to really focus on the portable computer market. By 1986, the portable computer had shrunk from the luggable to the briefcase-size laptop, and by 1989, from the laptop to the thinner notebook. The notebook is the smallest type of PC that retains full functionality; it can accommodate hard disk, floppy disk, and CD-ROM drive as well as an internal modem. Subnotebooks and hand-held palmtops or personal organizers economize on size by having limited data storage facilities and small keyboards, but can transfer data to desktop or notebook computers by wired or infrared linkages. Some palmtop computers, such as the Apple Newton, introduced in 1993, omit the keyboard entirely and instead allow input to be written onto an LCD “notepad” using a stylus. They have built-in optical character recognition (OCR) software.

Prices have continued to fall, thanks to economies of scale, increases in production efficiency, and competitive market forces. While big American manufacturers, including IBM, Dell, and Compaq, still have sizeable market shares, the nature of computer retailing has allowed small companies to prosper. Purchasing direct from the manufacturer or from computer warehouses via mail order or electronic commerce has become a significant feature of the personal computer trade. Although personal computers may be ostensibly made by European, Canadian, or U.S. companies, in this context “making” means assembling, and the majority of the manufacturing process takes place in the Far East. Japanese companies, such as Toshiba, Sony, and Fujitsu, have been particularly successful in the portable computer market. Portable computers continue to be significantly more expensive than desktop models offering equivalent performance. This largely reflects the relatively high cost of flat liquid crystal display (LCD) screens in comparison with conventional cathode ray tube-based monitors.

The Influence of the Fitted Kitchen

2010-01-02T11:05:00.001+02:00

While feminists and household economists of the rational school had long espoused the concept of the fitted kitchen, few homes had fitted kitchens until after World War II. The United States was well ahead of Britain in this respect, and U.S. companies began to use the desirability of the fitted kitchen as a marketing vehicle for a range of appliances in the late 1940s. In terms of cookers, this brought an emphasis on ergonomic design and materials. Surplus wartime stocks meant that aluminum became an affordable lightweight option for some cooker parts. Features such as glass doors, introduced in the 1930s, and eye-level grills were heralded as aids to efficiency and economy of movement. The 1950s fitted kitchen also prompted the revival of the split-level cooker with a waist-level or eye-level oven. The term “split level” is used to signify that the cooking units are not integrated vertically, but dispersed horizontally. Split-level electric cookers first appeared in the early years of electric cookers and were initially the more common design in the United States. However, their double width meant that they were too large to fit comfortably in smaller kitchens. In the 1960s, in search of new selling points, manufacturers developed features that extended the potential for producing meals requiring different types of cooking. One option was the cooker with two ovens, allowing simultaneous cooking at different temperatures. Oven fans helped to distribute the heat more evenly, facilitating the use of the whole oven, while attachments, such as rotisserie spits, tailored the oven for specialized cooking.

The standard cooktop held four fast radiant rings, and boiling ring technology changed little from the 1930s to 1966, when the ceramic electric hob, or cooktop, appeared. The ceramic hob was the commercial result of an accidental discovery at the Corning Glass Works in the United States in 1952. A malfunctioning furnace produced an opalescent, tough glass with distinctive thermal properties. Heat from bare electric elements placed beneath the glass, and demarcated by patterns on the upper surface, is conducted vertically, but not horizontally. Not only is the ceramic hob extremely efficient, but with its flat surface, it is easy to clean and available as a work surface when not in use for cooking. Manufacturers also gave much attention to the cleanability of ovens. One “self-cleaning” method, introduced in 1969, was the application of a grease-resistant coating to the oven interior. This is known as catalytic cleaning. Another method, introduced in 1978, was pyrolitic cleaning, whereby a short burst of maximum heat after cooking prevents the build-up of hardened grease. Cleanliness was also the motive for the development of the electric cooker hood, which is placed directly above the hob to absorb greasy vapors and cooking smells. Such hoods contain an extractor or exhaust fan and filters. Depending on the hood design, the extracted air may either be recirculated in the kitchen after filtration or vented outdoors.

Since the 1970s, when the fitted kitchen approached its peak of popularity, manufacturers have designed kitchen appliances to fit in with the standard sizes of kitchen units. This also prompted the evolution of the split-level cooker into the modular cooker, whereby the oven, hob, and grill might be completely separate, self-contained units. Modularity has allowed consumers to mix and match gas and electric cooking units to suit their individual needs or preferences. The German manufacturer Neff has been particularly noted for its modular cookers. The Italian company Zanussi has focused more on offering a range of colors, finishes, and style details. For example, the Zanussi ID cooker (1999) could be tailored in terms of types of doors, handles, and knobs, as well as color and finish, to achieve a customized specification. Another trend, associated with a revived interest in cooking as an art rather than a necessity, has created a consumer market for the cooker built to professional catering standards and usually high-tech in design. The latest development in hob technology is the induction hob, which dispenses with heating elements in favor of magnetic heat induction coils. While a British company, the Falkirk Iron Company, experimented with induction cooking in the 1920s, the idea lay dormant until the 1990s. Price, familiarity, and availability of types of energy were the prevailing influences on choice of cooker in 1900, but today the equivalent factors are more likely to be price, performance, convenience, and design. These factors mean that gas and electric cookers are likely to co-exist on more or less equal terms for the foreseeable future.

Margarine

2010-01-01T10:55:00.000+02:00

In its original form, margarine was merely cheap and no more convenient than butter. The first margarine was developed by a French chemist, Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès, in response to a national competition in 1867 to find a cheaper alternative to butter. The name came from the Greek word for pearl, as margarine was whitish rather than yellow. It was based on animal fats such as suet. In Britain, an improved version, developed by the Dutch butter merchants Jan and Anton Jurgens was marketed as “butterine” until 1887, when that was forbidden. In 1903, the development of a process called hydrogenation by the French chemist Paul Sabatier made it possible to use vegetable oils as the main ingredient of margarine. By bubbling hydrogen through liquid oils in the presence of nickel, which acts as a catalyst, the oils are hardened. However, hydrogenation also had the effect of changing unsaturated oils to saturated fats, which are less easily metabolized. The introduction of healthier margarines that were high in polyunsaturated oils, such as sunflower or safflower oil, had the added benefit of producing a softer, more spreadable margarine. The convenience of spreading “straight from the fridge” was used as a major selling point for soft margarines. The more recent spreadable butters are actually a more or less equal mixture of butter and vegetable oils.

Computer Software

2009-12-31T10:46:00.000+02:00

The key to the mass-market success of the microcomputer lay, not in the hardware itself, however small or cheap it became, but in the development of a range of generic applications. Compatible computer hardware meant that there was a huge incentive for companies to develop software that would enable users to exchange data easily. From the beginning to the present day, the business-software industry has been dominated by American companies. The first mass-market applications provided the means of computerizing the tasks that were common to all businesses—accounting and word-processing. In 1979, Software Arts introduced VisiCalc, the first commercial spreadsheet, to run on the Apple II computer. Spreadsheets create files in the form of tables in which numerical data can be sorted and manipulated. Launched in 1982, the Lotus Development Corporation’s 1–2–3 application for PCs, which added database and graphics display functions to the core spreadsheet functions, soon became the market leader. In the same year, Ashton-Tate released dBASE II, the first commercial relational database. While the pre-PC WordStar was the first commercial word-processing package, WordPerfect—launched in 1982—became the market leader of the 1980s.

Japanese Domination of the Camera Market

2009-12-30T17:00:00.000+02:00

After World War II, Japanese companies began to compete very effectively in the international camera market. At the top end of the professional camera market, Rolleiflex and other European companies, including Sweden’s Hasselblad and Austria’s Voigtlander, maintained their supremacy. For example, Voigtlander introduced the zoom lens, widely used in motion-picture photography since the 1930s, for still photography in 1958. However, Japanese companies made serious in-roads into the lower end of the professional camera market. Nippon Kogaku launched its first camera, the Nikon I rangefinder 35 mm camera, in 1948. Exceeding a million units in sales, its Nikon F SLR camera of 1959 was the first commercially successful SLR model. In 1953, Nikon was also the first maker to produce a camera with motorized drive, but motorized drives were uncommon until the 1960s. Another Japanese company, Olympus, produced the first compact SLR camera, the Olympus Trip, in 1968. Twenty years later, sales of the Olympus Trip reached 10 million.

Even the smallest SLR cameras could not be described as pocket-size, so there was a gap in the market between low-performance cartridge cameras that were small and lightweight and the bulkier SLR cameras. In the late 1970s, this gap was filled by the introduction of fully automatic, compact 35 mm cameras. These cameras improved in the early 1980s as a result of the development of auto-focus lenses. As cameras gained more electronic functions, their styling reflected this transition by becoming increasingly high tech. The harder lines of the older metal-bodied mechanical SLR cameras gave way to the sleek lines of plastic-bodied electronic compact and SLR cameras.

The serious image of the camera was only challenged by the modern equivalents of the Brownie. Eastman Kodak had continued to periodically reinvent the simple “point and press” camera. The cheap Kodak Instamatic camera of 1963 used easy-to-load film cartridges and achieved sales of 50 million units by 1970. Its successor, a pocket-size model introduced in 1972, was equally successful. In 1982, a new Kodak format, the film disc, was launched. Single-use disposable cameras followed in the late 1980s. Kodak’s colorful Fun Saver disposable cameras achieved dramatic market penetration, reaching sales of 50 million units by 1995. In the United States, single-use cameras accounted for 75 percent of annual camera sales. In keeping with environmental concerns, Eastman Kodak recovers more than 80 percent by weight of the materials in disposable cameras by reuse or recycling.

Cooker Design

2009-12-29T11:05:00.000+02:00

While gas-cooker manufacturers tended to be more innovative in design terms than their electric-cooker counterparts during the interwar period, the time lag was much shorter. After 1920, gas and electric cookers gradually evolved their own identity through the use of new materials and surface finishes. Manufacturers began to apply vitreous enamel, which had previously been used sparsely on splashbacks and cooktops, to all surfaces, outside and inside. Although mottled black enamel was used in conjunction with white, mottled grey enamel and white enamel became more common, as a visible break from the traditional black-leaded range. In the 1930s, other colors, such as mottled blue and green, were also popular. Aside from its appearance, the great advantage of the enameled surface was that it was easily cleaned. By 1930, the typical gas or electric cooker stood on four short legs and consisted of an oven, surmounted by a grill compartment, and a cooktop with between two and four boiling rings.

Sheet steel, which was light and more flexible, was available in the 1920s, but was too expensive to be used extensively. The pioneer of the sheet steel cooker was the American designer Norman Bel Geddes, who produced the Oriole cooker design for the Standard Gas Corporation in 1932. Sheet steel was a logical choice for Bel Geddes who, as an advocate of streamlining, sought materials that could provide a seamless profile. The construction process entailed the clipping of bendable sheets to a steel chassis rather than the bolting of rigid plates to a cast-iron frame. The Oriole cooker in white porcelain-enameled steel was notable for its rounded edges, flush front with plinth, and folding splashboard cum tabletop. The plinth served the dual purpose of inhibiting the accumulation of dust and food debris under the cooker and providing storage space. The full-line cooker with a warming drawer below the oven became standard by the 1940s. In Britain, the first white steel gas cooker was the Parkinson Renown, designed for the 1935 George V Jubilee House and produced commercially from 1937. The use of sheet steel encouraged the standardization of core components, which could then be assembled in different combinations, and this standardization lowered production costs.

Instant Foods

2009-12-28T10:55:00.000+02:00

The term “instant food” covers any dried product that is prepared for cooking simply by adding a measure of liquid, usually water or milk. The first ready-mix food was Aunt Jemima’s pancake flour, produced in St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1889. Other instant baking products, such as cake mixes, had their heyday in the 1960s, when the level of female employment rose. These products were marketed on the basis that home baking was a badge of good housewifery, so instant mixes enabled the busy working woman to cheat a little. In 1946, the R. T. French Company of Rochester, New York, introduced the first instant mashed potato product. General Foods introduced Minute Rice, a dried precooked rice, in 1950.

Before the 1950s, all instant products were produced by traditional air-drying, either at ambient temperature or with added heat. By 1940, a new method, freeze-drying, had been developed in Sweden. Food was rapidly frozen and then placed in a vacuum chamber to dry, because, at low pressures, water passes directly from the solid state to the gaseous state, a process known as sublimation. This was particularly effective for any foods with a high water content, as the water is removed rapidly without damaging the structure of the food. The freeze-dried food is sponge-like in texture and therefore absorbs water rapidly. However, the high speed of freezing and drying required for effective results means that the food pieces need to be no more than 2.5 cm (1 inch) thick. The first factory for freeze-drying food opened in Russia in 1954. Freeze-drying is used commercially for drying vegetables and meat, as well as coffee.

Personal Computers

2009-12-27T10:46:00.000+02:00

In terms of mass-market potential, the problem with the microcomputer industry in the late 1970s was the proliferation of incompatible machines. No company was able to establish a sufficiently large market share to shape the direction of microcomputer production. IBM initially adopted a disdainful approach to the nascent microcomputer industry. However, once the demand for single-user computers became evident, IBM entered the market in 1981 with the launch of the 5150 PC. The key features of this IBM PC were an Intel 16-bit microprocessor, 64K RAM, and the Microsoft Disk Operating System (MS-DOS). IBM appropriated the term “personal computer,” which—shortened to PC—became used to describe the system architecture. Reputation, marketing channels, and immense research and development resources soon gave IBM a decisive competitive edge in the business market, in spite of its relatively high prices. In 1983, IBM introduced an upgraded PC, the 5160 PC XT, which had a hard-disk drive as well as a floppy-disk drive, and the cheaper IBM PC jr, aimed at the home consumer. (The floppy disk had been introduced as a convenient portable storage medium in 1971.) By the end of 1983, IBM had sold 800,000 PCs. In 1984 came the IBM 5170 PC AT, which introduced the 16-bit ISA (industry standard architecture) data bus, which accelerated the flow of data.

PC architecture was soon cloned by other companies to create a range of IBM-compatible models. At first, would-be imitators had to use the practice of “reverse engineering,” whereby they deconstructed an IBM PC to analyze its technical design. This became unnecessary when IBM decided to publish its system architecture in order to encourage software companies to develop PC applications and thus stimulate the growth of PC ownership. While IBM achieved its goal of making the PC the industry standard for microcomputers, it lost out in terms of computer sales to companies making cheaper clones. For example, the British Amstrad PC1512 personal computer, introduced in 1986, was both cheaper and faster than the IBM PC. In the United States, Compaq, a spin-off from Texas Instruments, was so successful with its IBM clones that in 1986 it superseded Apple as the fastest-growing American corporation ever.

Film and Flash Technology

2009-12-26T16:29:00.000+02:00

Photograph quality relied as much on the performance of film and the lighting of the subject as on lens technology. In the days of long exposures, professional photographers became proficient at calculating exposure times through trial and error and controlled the light entering the camera merely by removing and replacing a lens cap. Exposure tables, calculators, and strips of photochromatic paper assisted the amateur photographer. Cameras began to incorporate simple mechanical shutters to control light input, and the first leaf shutter, the Deckel, was developed in Germany in 1902. Accurate short exposures only became possible when the photoelectric cell (or photocell) was invented. The first practical photoelectric cell was invented by the German physicists Julius Elster and Hans Friedrich Geitel in 1904. The photoelectric cell was first incorporated in a separate exposure meter in 1931 by the American William Nelson Goodwin Jr. and was developed commercially by the Weston Electrical Instrument Company of Newark, New Jersey, in 1932 as the Photronic Photoelectric Cell. The U.S. Time Corporation (Timex) produced an “electric eye” camera in 1950, but the first camera to feature a built-in photoelectric cell positioned behind the lens was the Pentax Spotmatic, introduced in 1964 by the Japanese Asahi Optical Corporation. Built-in exposure meters meant that cameras could be operated by the selection of foolproof automatic settings. The first automatic-exposure SLR camera was the Pentax ES model of 1971.

From the 1880s, electric lights could be used to enhance indoor lighting, and flash photography was possible through the use of flash powders and magnesium ribbon. Flash photography became easier with the invention of the electric flashbulb, patented by the German inventor Johannes Ostermeier in 1930. The electronic flashbulb was invented in the United States in 1935. Flashbulbs were initially mounted in separate flashguns, but as they became smaller, they were embodied in attachments that fitted directly onto the camera. The hot shoe flashgun attachment, a metal “shoe” on top of the camera into which a metal “foot” on the flash was slid, was introduced in 1939. As cameras became fully electronic, the flash became an integral part of the camera.

In the 1930s, highly flammable celluloid film was replaced by nonflammable cellulose acetate. While the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell expounded the principles of the three-color photographic process in 1861, it was another thirty years before the French doctor Gabriel-Jonas Lippman developed a process for color photography. In the early twentieth century, a number of color processes were developed, including the Lumière brothers’ Autochrome process, but these were for plates rather than film and were time-consuming and expensive. In the 1930s, Eastman Kodak and the German company Agfa (A.G. für Anilin, the Aniline Company) began to develop color film in transparency form. Kodachrome film became available in 35 mm cartridges and roll film in 1936, and Agfacolor film was available in 35 mm cartridges the next year. The first color negative film, Kodacolor, did not come on the market until 1944 and was quickly followed by faster Kodak Ektachrome transparency film until 1946 and negative film in 1947. While Eastman Kodak’s domination of the camera market began to wane when Japanese companies moved into the camera industry in the 1950s, the company continued to be a leading force in film technology.

After the introduction of color film, the main improvements in photographic film lay in the development of faster films. Film speed is a measure of light-sensitivity. The first system for measuring film speed was developed in Britain in 1890, but from 1947, the American Standards Association (ASA) ratings became the industry norm. Eastman Kodak has continued to be a leader in film technology: for example, it launched a series of high-speed X films, starting with Tri-X black-and-white roll film in 1954. A significant advance in 1963 was the development by the Swiss company Ciba-Geigy of the Ultrachrome process, which allowed prints to be made from transparencies.

Competition between Gas and Electricity

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By 1920, solid fuel ranges were out of general favor, except in rural areas where gas and electricity supplies were absent. They remained so thereafter, although the Aga stove, invented by the Swedish physicist Gustav Dalen in 1924 and marketed commercially from 1929, has sustained a small but devoted customer base. In Britain, the growing importance of gas as a cooking and heating fuel was confirmed by the 1920 Gas Regulation Act, which changed the basis for gas prices from illuminating value to calorific value. The situation was much the same in the United States, where consumption of gas for lighting fell from 75 percent in 1899 to 21 percent in 1919, when consumption as domestic fuel reached 54 percent. World War I had provided an opportunity to demonstrate the convenience of electric cookers, which were adopted for field canteens. In the intensifying competition between gas and electricity, the gas cooker manufacturers had the upper hand, in terms of both price and performance. In 1915, the American Stove Company of Cleveland, Ohio, had introduced the first thermostat for gas ovens, the Lorrain oven regulator. The British equivalent, the Regulo thermostat, was developed by Radiation Ltd. (John Wright & Company) in 1923 and fitted to the Davis Company’s New World gas cooker, which also featured a slag wool lagging for better insulation and a base flue. Previously, oven controls, like boiling ring controls, had settings that simply expressed the rate of gas flow, with no reference to the temperature produced. Similarly, electric cookers were fitted with mercury current regulators, and this remained so until the early 1930s. A thermometer attached to the oven door showed the effect of the regulator setting. In Britain, the first automatic temperature controller for electric ovens was the Credastat regulator, introduced in 1931.

Gas boiling rings were also much more efficient than electric ones because the electric elements were slow to heat up, compared to the instant heat of gas. The flat electric plates only provided good heat transmission to pans with similarly flat bottoms that maximized surface contact. Electric boiling rings began to improve in the mid-1920s, when enamel-coated, metal-sheathed elements appeared. This design of boiling ring meant that the pan was in close contact with the heating source without an intervening plate. In the early 1930s, the U.S. company General Electric developed a new type of faster-heating radiant ring, the Calrod strip element, which consisted of resistance coils set in magnesium oxide and sheathed with chromium iron. Combined with bimetallic controls, akin to the automatic oven regulators, the new boiling rings were much more comparable in performance with gas burners.

One of the few inherent advantages of electric cookers at this time was variety of size. Plumbing in a gas outlet was more space-consuming and obtrusive than the electrical equivalent, so gas cookers were invariably full-size cookers. People living alone or families in houses or apartments with small kitchens constituted a ready market for smaller cookers. The British company Belling made particular efforts to exploit this market. In 1919, it introduced the Modernette cooker, a compact, lightweight floor-standing cooker, and in 1929 it launched the Baby Belling, a tabletop cooker.

In Britain, the price differential between gas and electric cookers was largely a result of the non-standardization of electricity supply. This meant that manufacturers needed to produce electric cookers specified to meet the range of voltages in use. The construction of the national grid from 1926 eventually removed this disadvantage. Moreover, in 1930, a group of British electric cooker manufacturers agreed to a common standard that reduced the number of options, thus consolidating production. The electricity utilities introduced cheap rental schemes to overcome the purchase disincentives. An indication of the success of these schemes is that rental of electric cookers was more common than buying until 1938. In the United States, with its standardized electricity supply, electric cookers were much cheaper, but the combined advantages of gas cookers gave them a dominant market position in both Britain and the United States. In Britain, about 75 percent of homes had gas cookers in 1939, compared with about 8 percent of homes that had electric cookers. However, as electric cookers accounted for about a quarter of total cooker production, the balance was shifting in favor of electric cookers. In the United States, gas was less dominant because the larger and more dispersed rural population created a continuing demand for solid fuel and oil stoves. By 1930, gas cookers were the most popular type and were found in 48 percent of homes, while electric cookers were found in just 6 percent of homes.

Frozen Foods

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The pioneer of frozen foods was Clarence Birdseye, who based his freezing process on the natural freezing of meat and fish that he had observed in the Arctic zone. He noted that naturally frozen meat and fish seemed fresh when cooked and eaten months later. After returning to the United States, he formed Birdseye Seafoods in 1922 and initially concentrated on chilling fish fillets at a plant in New York. By 1924, he had developed a method of “flash-freezing” by placing cartons of food between metal plates under pressure. He formed the General Seafood Corporation to exploit the flash-freezing technique. In 1929, he sold his company to the Postum Company for $22 million, on the condition that his surname was used as two words, hence the Birds Eye brand name. The expanded company was renamed as the General Foods Corporation. In 1929, cartons of Birds Eye frozen vegetables went on sale in the United States. They were intended to be eaten on the day of purchase, as refrigerators, which were found in only a minority of homes, were only suitable for short-term storage of frozen foods. In 1930, twenty-six varieties of Birds Eye Frosted Foods were test-marketed in Springfield, Massachusetts. The line that was introduced across the United States in 1931 consisted of fish, meat, peas, spinach, loganberries, raspberries, and cherries.

By 1933, 516 stores were stocking Birds Eye Frosted Foods. In 1939, Birds Eye introduced precooked frozen dishes based on chicken, beef, and turkey. As consumption of frozen foods began to increase rapidly in the 1940s, the first specialist self-service frozen-food centers appeared, initially in the New York area in 1945. In Britain, frozen foods became available for the first time in 1946, after a Birds Eye plant was set up in Great Yarmouth. The U.S. company Sara Lee Kitchens produced the first frozen baked foods for the mass market in 1953. A year later, the complete frozen meal appeared when C. A. Swanson & Sons of Omaha, Nebraska, launched TV dinners. In 1957, a new method of cooking frozen foods emerged when the U.S. company Seabrook Farms launched Miracle Pack Prepared Foods, the first boil-in-the-bag frozen foods. The first frozen food to make a major impact in Britain was Birds Eye Fish Fingers, introduced in 1955. These cod sticks coated in breadcrumbs became a favorite children’s food.

In the energy-conscious 1980s, a new competitor to frozen foods appeared—chilled foods. The chilling process involves keeping cooked foods at constant temperatures of 0° to 4°C (32°F–40°F), the recommended temperature range for refrigerators. Although chilled foods have a shorter storage life than frozen foods, they are also quicker to cook and therefore save energy.

Frozen foods have had a profound effect on both the food industry and consumer behavior. For growers of food crops, selling produce to frozen-food companies meant reducing wastage and loss of income through natural decomposition. Some farmers may therefore prefer to sell their whole crop to the frozen food industry. One consequence of this has been that some types of fruit and vegetables are less widely available as fresh produce. The convenience of stocking up on food less frequently is another factor that has reduced the role of fresh food in the diet. An advantage of frozen foods for consumers, however, is that foods are available out of season, thus providing a more varied diet all year round. Calorie-counted, nutritionally balanced frozen or chilled meals may be a boon to the busy consumer, but traditional cooking skills have suffered as a result. Today, for many people, traditional cooking has become a hobby rather than a necessity.

Early Electric Cookers

2009-12-23T11:03:00.000+02:00

The first electric oven was installed in the Hotel Bernina, near St. Moritz in Switzerland, in 1889. Electricity was supplied by a hydroelectric power generator.

In Britain and the United States, electric cookers began to feature in public demonstrations and model electrical kitchen displays at major exhibitions in the early 1890s, including the 1891 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London and the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The companies that pioneered the commercial production of electric cookers included Crompton & Company in Britain and the Carpenter Company in the United States. The heating elements in these early electric cookers took the form of resistor wires embedded in enameled panels. This heating technology was improved in 1893 by the English electrical engineer H. J. Dowsing, who sandwiched the steel heating wires between two panels, creating a safer and more practical design. Crompton & Company began to manufacture and market cookers to Dowsing’s design in 1894. The heating panels were at first placed on the oven sides and later at the top and bottom. The performance of electric cookers benefited from the improvement in heating technology created by the invention of Nichrome (or nickel and chrome) wire by the American Albert L. Marsh in 1905. The boiling plates on the cooktop took the form of radiant coils on fireclay supports, topped by perforated or solid metal plates.

The main problem for electric cooker manufacturers was that there were few electrified homes to sell their products to. Moreover, even fewer homes had a power circuit as well as a lighting circuit. Electric cookers were, and still are, the electric appliances with the highest power rating and, as such, require a dedicated power supply and fuse box. The investment in wiring an electric cooker and the high costs of the heavy electricity consumption were a major disincentive at a time when electric cookers had nothing extra to offer in terms of functionality. Up until World War I, both gas and electric cookers were modeled on the rival solid fuel range. This meant box-shaped ovens with safe-like doors, made of cast iron with a black lead finish. Given the persistence of fears about the safety of gas and electricity, gas and electric cooker manufacturers may have felt that a familiar design would provide a sense of reassurance. Not surprisingly, with such limited sales potential for full-size cookers, manufacturers concentrated their marketing efforts on small, tabletop cooking appliances, such as electric frying pans and chafing dishes. These appliances had the advantage that they could be used in the dining room as well as the kitchen and had no nonelectric rivals.

The Home Computer Arrives

2009-12-22T10:45:00.000+02:00

In 1975, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), a small firm based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, introduced the world’s first microcomputer, the Altair 8800. Lacking its own monitor and keyboard, the Altair 8800 was intended for the serious home enthusiast. Bill Gates (William Henry Gates III) and Paul Allen developed a modified version of the BASIC programming language for the Altair. They registered the Microsoft trade name in November 1976 to market the new language as MS-BASIC. Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, two computer enthusiasts based in Silicon Valley, the heart of the semiconductor industry, were inspired by the example of the Altair. Using a cheaper 8-bit microprocessor, the MOS Technology 6502, they built their own microcomputer. Encouraged by the response of fellow enthusiasts, they began small-scale production of the Apple I computer in 1976. Snubbed by the companies offered the commercial rights but convinced of the commercial potential of the microcomputer, Jobs and Wozniak raised venture finance and set up Apple Computer in 1977. The Apple II computer, the world’s first commercial microcomputer, had generated $2.5 million in sales revenue by the end of the year.

The immediate success of the Apple II energized the computer industry. Other companies, particularly calculator manufacturers, were quick to see the potential of the standalone, desktop computer and began to develop rival products. Like Apple, they hoped to appeal simultaneously to the potential home user and the small business. The U.S. company Commodore Business Machines, founded by Jack Tramiel in 1958, introduced the PET 2001 only two months after the launch of the Apple II. By 1980, a number of U.S. companies were producing microcomputers (all of which were mutually incompatible) and companies such as Epson were selling compact, cheap printers to complement microcomputers. In Britain, Clive Sinclair, developer of the first pocket calculator, introduced the Sinclair ZX80 home computer in 1980. The ZX80 became the cheapest microcomputer on the market. It was designed to use a television set as a display screen rather than a dedicated monitor.

The fall in the price of microcomputers was largely due to the astonishing decrease in the costs of microchip manufacture. No other industry has matched the semiconductor industry for sustained reduction in costs coupled with faster performance. While U.S. companies such as Intel and Motorola dominated the microprocessor market, Japanese companies such as Fujitsu and NEC (Nippon Electric Company) began to make major inroads into the memory-chip market. In 1970, Intel’s first RAM (random access memory) chip had a mere 1K (kilobyte) capacity. Over the next decade, the capacity of RAM chips rose to 4K in 1973, 16K in 1976, and 64K in 1979. Japanese manufacturers were able to rapidly penetrate the memorychip market by taking an approach different from that of the U.S. memory-chip companies. Instead of investing time trying to get more memory on the same size of chip, they opted for the simpler approach of making bigger chips. They also championed the CMOS chip design, which consumed less power than the NMOS chip and was more resilient.

Breakfast Cereals

2009-12-21T10:53:00.000+02:00

Prior to the 1860s, breakfast cereal came in one variety—oatmeal porridge. This was not a quick breakfast dish, as it needed to be cooked for a long time. The solution was to cook a large batch and then reheat daily. In 1877, prepacked American Quaker brand rolled oats that had a much faster cooking time than oatmeal were introduced. The first ready-to-eat breakfast cereal, Granula, was invented by James Caleb Jackson of Dansville, New York, in 1863. Jackson found that small cooked granules of graham cracker dough made a suitable cold breakfast cereal, served with cold milk. However, it was not until the 1890s that the idea of ready-to-eat breakfast cereal really took off. John Harvey Kellogg had become director of the Battle Creek Sanitarium and, with his brother, Will, had begun to develop easily digestible foods for invalids. They developed a baked wheat flake cereal that was marketed in 1895 as Granose, the first flaked breakfast cereal. Soon after, a second breakfast cereal enterprise came into being in Battle Creek, when C.W. Post, founder of the Postum Company, developed Grape Nuts in 1897.

In 1898, Will Kellogg developed Cornflakes, the cereal that became most closely associated with the Kellogg name. Kellogg’s became the company name in 1922, replacing the Sanitas Nut Food Company (1898) and the Battle Creek Toasted Flake Company (1906). The first ready-to-eat breakfast cereal to reach the British market was Force Flakes, made in Canada, in 1902.

Although early breakfast cereals followed very healthy formulas, with only small amounts of malt and sugar added for extra flavor, as time went on, sugar content increased dramatically and fiber content fell accordingly. Kellogg’s Sugar Smacks, introduced in 1953, had a 56 percent sugar content. In the more health-conscious society of the late 1950s, Kellogg’s did introduce healthier cereals, such as Special K in 1955, but the company no longer had a healthy whole-foods image. Muesli, a favorite Swiss breakfast food that contains nuts and dried fruit, has become the epitome of the healthy breakfast cereal.

Early Gas Cookers

2009-12-20T11:02:00.000+02:00

In the late eighteenth century, the Reverend John Clayton provided the first account of cooking with gas when he described how eggs and beef had been boiled at a natural gas spring near Wigan, in northwest England. The first person to attempt gas cooking inside he home was the German gas pioneer Frederick Albert Winsor, who began experimenting at his home in Braunschweig in 1802. However, in the early decades of town gas production, gas was mainly piped to factories, public buildings, and street-lighting installations. In Britain, the first gas cookers were intended for commercial catering use. They bore little resemblance to modern gas cookers, consisting merely of an oven with burners at the bottom and a meat jack suspended from the top. Gas cookers were displayed at the Great Exhibition, held in London in 1851, by which time household gas provision was becoming more widespread. By 1869, gas cookers had evolved into a form closer to the modern gas cooker, with internal shelves and top burners, and were available for hire in Britain. During the late nineteenth century, gas became a relatively cheap fuel in Britain as the industry was by then largely municipally owned, whereas in the United States gas was a more expensive alternative to solid fuel. Therefore, in Britain, gas cookers became slowly but steadily more popular and, by 1900, were found in 2 million homes.

The Evolution of the Kitchen Range

2009-12-19T11:02:00.000+02:00

For centuries, cooking arrangements in Europe were based on the system developed by the Romans and diffused throughout Europe in the wake of the military conquests. At its simplest, this involved a raised brick hearth to hold an open fire, set within a wide chimney base. As smoke and hot air rose, they were drawn up the chimney. Different methods of cooking could be achieved by adding devices such as spits, supports for pots and pans, and brick-oven compartments. Cooking on an open fire was slow and inefficient because a lot of heat was absorbed by the chimney walls and by the air in the room. In the mid-eighteenth century, the American statesman and scientist Benjamin Franklin invented a ventilated cast-iron wood-burning stove, through which the hot combustion gases circulated before escaping.

This idea for concentrating the heat source and retaining heat was developed further by Benjamin Thompson, Count von Rumford, in the 1790s. Rumford was born in the United States, in Massachusetts, but his early career as a spy for the British led to his forced departure to Europe. During his employment by the elector of Bavaria in various senior ministerial roles, he developed the solid-fuel range for use in a variety of large-scale catering contexts, including workhouses, army canteens, and hospitals. Perhaps the most innovative feature of Rumford’s ranges was the sunken chambers for pans in the range top. The pans were heated by the combustion gases rising up the surrounding flues. Although Rumford produced scaled-down versions of his basic range design, it was another American inventor, Philo Penfield Stewart, who developed the prototype of the nineteenth-century household range. Stewart patented his first range design in 1834 and later moved from Ohio to Troy, New York, where he established himself as a manufacturer.

Bread

2009-12-18T10:53:00.000+02:00

Flour milling and baking became industrialized in the United States in the nineteenth century. Increasingly, bread was not baked at home but purchased from shops and bakeries. One sign of the changing nature of food production and distribution was the formation in the United States in 1898 of the National Biscuit Company (later shortened to Nabisco), which was an amalgamation of 114 bakeries, representing 90 percent of American commercial biscuit production. In Britain, the dominance of national bakery chains is a much more recent phenomenon, with no more than 40 percent of all bread consumed produced in large plant bakeries as late as 1953.

The automation of bread-making began with the introduction of roller milling of flour in the 1870s. Roller mills could produce much finer and whiter flour of a more consistent quality than grindstones. This had two major implications for bread-making: the finer flour could absorb more water, producing a lighter and more malleable dough, and the natural oils in the wheat berry were extracted at an early stage, leaving a flour with a longer life. In the 1920s, the factory bread-making process was accelerated when high-speed dough mixers became available.

The phrase “the best thing since sliced bread” appeared in the United States in the 1930s following the introduction of presliced Wonder Bread. In 1928, after sixteen years of development work, Otto Frederick Rohwedder launched the first practical bread-slicing and wrapping machine in Battle Creek, Michigan. In the same year, the Continental Bakery in NewYork introduced Wonder Bread, the first nationally distributed wrapped loaf of bread. Two years later, using Rohwedder’s machines, it introduced presliced Wonder Bread. Wrapped, presliced bread also appeared in the United Kingdom in 1930. By 1933, 80 percent of the bread sold in the United States was presliced and wrapped.

Sliced bread was convenient and of a standard thickness. Its introduction no doubt helped the sales of electric toasters throughout the 1930s. However, healthfood campaigners argued that the convenience of the presliced white loaf came at the expense of its nutritional value. By the 1940s and 1950s, white bread was routinely enriched by the addition of vitamins and minerals. Stoneground whole wheat flour and unwrapped loaves enjoyed a revival from the late 1950s as a result of the growth of the health foods movement. For example, the American health food guru Gayelord Hauser was a strong advocate of the benefits of wheat germ.

Microelectronics

2009-12-17T10:44:00.000+02:00

While the minicomputer widened the market for computers, they were still too expensive and complex for small businesses, let alone individuals. For computers to be brought within the reach of a mass market, they needed to become still smaller, cheaper, and easier to use. The next advance in fundamental electronic technology after the transistor was the integrated circuit. While it had taken the research resources of the world’s largest company, AT&T, to invent the transistor, within ten years transistor manufacture was dominated by new specialist semiconductor companies. The first integrated circuit was created in 1958 by Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments. It consisted of five components on a single germanium chip. A year later, Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor, founded in 1957, produced the first planar transistor. The planar process involved oxidizing a silicon wafer, coating it with a photosensitive material, photographing a pattern onto it and etching the pattern into the oxide, washing off the coating, and selectively introducing impurities. It was a repeatable process that enabled complex circuits to be built on a silicon wafer. By 1970, the price of an integrated circuit, also known as a silicon chip, had fallen from about $30 to $1, and an integrated circuit might contain up to 100 components.

The use of integrated circuits meant that the printed circuit boards of devices such as calculators became much more compact. Integrated circuits began to be used in computers in the late 1960s, but the central processing unit of a computer required thousands of integrated circuits. In 1968, Robert Noyce cofounded Intel, which began to develop large-scale integrated circuits. While Noyce had predicted that the way forward would be to fit the whole central processing unit onto a single chip, it was one of his employees, Ted Hoff, who actually achieved that. Hoff developed the Intel 4004 chip, the world’s first microprocessor, which made the pocket calculator possible. In terms of mathematical processing power, the Intel 4004 chip was virtually the equivalent of ENIAC. However, its limitation was that as a 4-bit chip (meaning that it could handle four binary digits simultaneously) it could not process alphabetical characters, because it could only define 16 4-bit characters, or bytes. The IBM 7030 computer of 1961 had established the 8-bit character, or byte, as the standard for general computing. Intel launched its first 8-bit microprocessor, the 8008 chip, in 1972, followed by the improved 8080 chip in 1973, paving the way for the first generation of home computers. The 8-bit chip could define 256 different 8-bit characters.

Miniaturization of the Precision Camera

2009-12-16T16:29:00.000+02:00

The Kodak Brownie was technically very basic. The cheap fixed focus lens was adequate for snapshots of places and people, but was incapable of close-up photography. Meanwhile, a number of technical advances benefited professional photographers. German camera manufacturers led the way in this sector of the market. The first anastigmatic lens, the Protar f7.5, was developed in 1889 by the German physicist Paul Rudolph for Carl Zeiss, manufacturers of optical equipment based in Jena, eastern Germany. An anastigmatic lens guarantees that all points of the image are accurately aligned in both the vertical and horizontal planes. The Zeiss Tessar lens of 1902 reduced the maximum aperture to f4.5, which improved the depth of field. In 1898, the American inventor William F. Folmer developed the Graflex camera, the first camera capable of high-speed photography in split focal planes. The first compact precision camera, the 35 mm Leica, was manufactured by the German company Leitz, based in Wetzlar. Although Oskar Barnack developed the prototype in 1914, the production model was introduced at the Leipzig trade fair only in 1925.With its rangefinder optical viewing system, interchangeable lenses, and range of accessories, the Leica became an industry standard, and the 35 mm format is the dominant format today. The Zeiss Ikon, marketed from 1932, was another popular professional 35 mm camera.

The portability of the Leica also encouraged the growth of photojournalism, although many publishers insisted on contact printing from large-format negatives. A number of magazines with high photographic content, including Life in the United States and Picture Post in Britain, were launched in the 1930s. Reflex cameras were invented in Britain in the nineteenth century but became a standard camera type only in the 1930s. The key advantage of the reflex camera is that the photographer sees the same image that the lens “sees,” enabling accurate focusing. This is achieved through an arrangement of angled mirrors and prisms that reflects the image entering the lens to the viewfinder. The single-lens reflex (SLR) camera, invented in 1861, was followed by the twin-lens reflex (TLR) camera in 1880, which had a separate lens supplying the viewable image above the main lens. In 1929, the German company Rolleiflex produced a TLR camera with a large viewing screen in the top panel, which became a popular professional model.

SLR cameras, which were compact and more suitable for amateurs, were available from the mid-1930s but did not became common until the 1960s when Japanese camera makers brought out more affordable models. They were easier for hand-held, rather than tripod, use because they had a conventional front-facing viewfinder, which received the image from a hinged mirror that swung back out of the path of the lens when the shutter release was activated. A subminiature precision camera, the Minox, was produced from 1937 by the Latvian company V.E.F.

Alessi

2009-12-15T14:57:00.000+02:00

Giovanni Alessi Anghini established a plate-turning workshop at Bagnella, Omegna, Italy, and founded the Alessi Company in 1921. It initially worked in nickel silver and brass and later electroplated with nickel, chrome, and silver. The first articles produced were coffeepots, trays, and table accessories. In 1928 the company moved to Crusinallo in order to utilize hydroelectric power and began to shift from the traditional turned products to pressed ones in stainless steel.

Alessi always produced stylish products, including Carlo Alessi Anghini’s Bombe coffee set of 1945. Ettore Alessi, the technical director, opened the company up to collaboration with external designers in 1955. Working with architects, the company produced stylish objects such as the stainless-steel-wire Citrus basket that is still in production. When Alberto Alessi took over the running of the company he began to use star designers, and the company increased its reputation for very stylish objects during the 1970s, working with Ettore Sottsass from 1972. This trend continued into the 1980s and 1990s with commissions from well-known designers and architects for kettles, coffee sets, and table accessories. These included Michael Graves, Philippe Starck, Aldo Rossi, Richard Sapper, Robert Venturi, and Frank Gehry. Although not always the most functional of objects, they were seen as status symbols for the style conscious. Produced for the top end of the market, these and in-house Alessi designs have influenced the look of many mainstream products. In the 1990s Alessi collaborated with Philips on kettles and toasters.

Alessi is an unusual company with a mission to act as a patron for designers; according to Alberto Alessi, it is “not a normal factory—it is closer to being an applied art research laboratory.” It produces three ranges, Alessi (mass-produced stainless steels and plastics), Officina Alessi (small or middle-series production, including reproductions of outstanding late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century designs by the likes of Christopher Dresser and Marianne Brandt), and Tendentse (porcelain). Still a family-owned company, it continues to celebrate

Cookers

2009-12-14T10:56:00.000+02:00

The character of cooking in the home underwent a dramatic transformation during the twentieth century, partly as a result of technological developments, but also as a result of social changes. In 1900, most households had coal-fired ranges with solid hotplates above small ovens and consumed relatively little preprocessed food. On the whole, processed foods were valued more for their longer shelf lives than for time savings in preparation and cooking. A hundred years later, most households had freestanding or built-in gas or electric cookers (stoves in American parlance) and consumed a wide range of processed foods.

Beverages

2009-12-13T10:52:00.000+02:00

Even simple processes like brewing tea and coffee could be simplified by processing. The flavor in coffee beans is a volatile essence, which begins to dissipate when the roasted bean is ground. Hence, traditionally, coffee beans would only be ground immediately before use. In 1878, Chase & Sanbourn of Boston, Massachusetts, packaged ground, roasted coffee in sealed cans to preserve its flavor. In 1901, a Japanese-American chemist, Satori Kato, produced the first soluble instant coffee for the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. Eight years later, George Constant Louis Washington of New York produced a soluble coffee powder, which he sold under the George Washington brand name. However, instant coffee was not mass-produced until the late 1930s. The Swiss food company, Nestlé, developed a mass-production method for instant coffee in order to exploit the surplus of Brazilian coffee beans. Nestlé mass-marketed their instant coffee as Nescafé from 1938. The American food giant General Foods produced an instant coffee in 1942 specifically for supply to the United States Army. It was marketed to the public as Maxwell House instant coffee after World War II. However, the American public tended to shun instant coffee, whereas in Britain and Japan, it made up about 90 percent of coffee sales. The standard drying technique involves spraying brewed coffee into a rising column of heated air, which removes the water as steam, leaving a powder residue. Freeze-drying technology improved in the 1950s and was applied to instant coffee in the mid-1960s. Freeze-dried coffee retained more flavor because the volatile oils remained.

Although coffee is the dominant hot beverage in the United States, the British public has always preferred tea. This may explain why the idea of the tea bag originated in the United States, where consumers needed more persuasion to drink tea. In 1904, a New York tea and coffee merchant, Thomas Sullivan, decided to send customers tea samples in muslin pouches. It was in this form that tea bags were first commercially produced in the United States in 1919. At first, manufacturers saw the catering industry, rather than private consumers, as the main market for tea bags, but by the mid-1930s, Tetley, of NewYork, was mass-marketing tea bags. In Britain, the public at first shunned the tea bag as an inferior product. This was justified insofar as tea bag manufacturers were able to use the fine “sweepings,” previously treated as a waste product. These sweepings would have leaked out of the paper cartons used to package loose-leaf tea. Improvements in tea bag technology, giving improved infusion, helped to sell the concept of the tea bag. By 1993, over 80 percent of tea sold in Britain was in the form of tea bags.

Early Computing

2009-12-12T10:41:00.000+02:00

The origins of the computer lie in the development of large mechanical calculating machines from the early nineteenth century. The English mathematician Charles Babbage is considered to have invented the concept of the programmable computer when he devised his Analytical Engine, which was never completed. Babbage’s idea of storing instructions on punched cards was adopted with commercial success by the American inventor Herman Hollerith. Hollerith’s first punch-card data-processing machine was developed specifically for tabulating U.S. census returns in 1890. From 1896, Hollerith’s company, the Tabulating Machine Company (which later became part of the International Business Machines Corporation), built similar machines for a range of uses.

While punched-card calculating machines proved an effective means of speeding up lengthy tabulations, they were not suitable for carrying out more complex mathematical tasks, such as differential equations. In 1876, the Irish physicist Sir William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) put forward the concept of a mechanical differential analyzer for solving differential equations. However, as with Babbage, Thomson’s ideas were too advanced for contemporary engineering capabilities. The idea of the differential analyzer resurfaced in the 1930s. In the mid-1920s, the American scientist and electrical engineer Vannevar Bush began work on a mechanical-electrical differential analyzer, which he called the product integraph. As the product integraph could only solve the simplest differential equations, in 1930 Bush began to develop a more complex differential analyzer that could handle eighteen independent variables.

The leading European computing pioneers of the 1930s included Douglas Hartree, who constructed the first British differential analyzer, and Konrad Zuse, a German engineer who built the first binary calculator, fed by a punched-tape reader, in 1938. The significance of Zuse’s work is that it laid the foundations for digital computing. Earlier mechanical and electromechanical calculating machines were analogue computers, meaning that each of their components yielded a range of values, which combined to produce a result. Zuse’s binary calculator was based on the binary algebraic method of the nineteenth-century English mathematician George Boole, who demonstrated that equations could be reduced to a series of true or false propositions. This is known as Boolean logic, and in binary code the values of 0 and 1 are used to represent false and true. The advantages of the binary system became more apparent when electronic computers were developed in the late 1940s. The binary system lends itself perfectly to circuits where the state at any point depends on the presence or absence of a pulse of current or the low or high voltage of a component. A long series of bivalue electronic transactions is much simpler to engineer reliably and much more flexible in terms of program routines than fewer transactions with many possible values. In 1939, John V. Atanasoff and Clifford Berry of Iowa State University built the world’s first electronic calculator, which had an external magnetic drum to store a binary code program.

Intelligence and Interoperability

2009-12-11T10:48:00.000+02:00

In 1981, the Japanese government announced the launch of the Fifth-Generation Computer Project. While the preceding four generations were defined by their core electronic characteristics—valves, transistors, integrated circuits, and microprocessors—the fifth generation was a more holistic concept. The objective of the project was to develop computers with artificial intelligence over a ten-year period. The idea of artificial intelligence was not a new one. The term came into use in the mid-1950s, and long-term research had been undertaken in the United States at universities including Stanford and Carnegie-Mellon. However, the focus had been much narrower and progress had been limited. While the algorithmic logic advocated by Von Neumann was expressed in a sequential data processing architecture, artificial intelligence required parallel processing architecture, which was more akin to the heuristic reasoning patterns of the human brain. Heuristic is the process whereby we draw on our knowledge of many things to infer solutions to problems. The success of the solutions depends on our expertise, in terms of the quality and range of our knowledge. By 1980, only the most powerful computers, known as supercomputers, used parallel processing. In 1965, the U.S. company Control Data Corporation introduced the first supercomputer, the CD6600, designed by Seymour Cray, who went on to set up Cray Research, which became the leading producer of supercomputers. These computers were designed for complex tasks such as weather and aerodynamic modeling.

Aside from artificial intelligence, the other significant strategic trend of the 1980s and 1990s has concerned the development of software that allows greater interoperability of computers. While hardware compatibility is one way of achieving interoperability, it was evident that total hardware compatibility was extremely unlikely to occur. UNIX, the pioneering hardware-independent operating system, had provided a means of establishing a common platform across a network of nonmatched computers. In the early 1990s, another operating system on similar lines, Linux, named after its Finnish inventor Linus Torvalds, was released as “open source (code)” a term for nonproprietary systems that are made freely available. Further developments in open systems were stimulated by the introduction of the World Wide Web in 1993. As the whole concept of the Web is that it is accessible to all computers irrespective of platform (hardware and operating systems), it fostered new languages and applications. It has become accepted for Web applications, such as browsers and document readers, to be made available as freeware. One of the first of these applications was Adobe’s Acrobat Reader, which allows documents to be downloaded onto any platform. The leading web browsers, Netscape Navigator and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, were introduced as freeware, in 1994 and 1995, respectively. Released in 1995, Sun Microsystems’s Java programming language has become the main language for Web applications.

Baird Television Company

2009-12-10T15:11:00.000+02:00

John Logie Baird, the first person to transmit television pictures, was born in Helensburgh, Dumbartonshire, Scotland, in 1888. He studied electrical engineering at the Royal Technical College, Glasgow, and began a degree at Glasgow University that was suspended by the outbreak of World War I. Ill health, which was a recurrent feature of his life, ruled him out of military service. Instead, he became superintendent engineer of the Clyde Valley Electrical Power Company. After the war, Baird did not resume his degree. He set up a successful business, marketing a range of goods including soap and patent socks.

In 1922, Baird suffered a serious physical and nervous breakdown, which made him unable to continue working. He began to experiment with television after moving to Hastings on the English south coast. Baird developed a mechanical scanning system, based on a design patented by the German engineer Paul Nipkow in 1884. At this stage, Baird’s experiments were a hobby with no immediate business prospects, so he was forced to improvise by using cheap or waste materials, such as biscuit (cookie) tins and bicycle lamp lenses. In early 1924, he succeeded in transmitting a still image of a Maltese cross to a receiver in the same room. Convinced of the potential of his invention, he moved to London and was hired to give television demonstrations in Selfridge’s department store. With family financial backing, he set up Television Ltd. and refined his basic technology to improve the quality of the picture. By October 1925, he was able to transmit the live image of a person. He repeated this demonstration for members of the Royal Society in January 1926. Baird then applied for a license to transmit television signals and began trials over a distance of 10 miles. In 1927, he made the first long-distance telecast from London to Glasgow. The next milestone for Baird came in 1928 with the first transatlantic television broadcast from London to a radio station in Hartsdale, New York.

With new financial backing, Baird formed the Baird Television Development Company in 1927 and set up a studio near the Crystal Palace headquarters of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in 1928. He negotiated a contract with the BBC to provide trial television broadcasts, initially twice weekly for half an hour, using its Crystal Palace transmitter. Baird’s receivers, known as “televisors,” cost the equivalent of three month’s average wages. Not surprisingly, fewer than a thousand homes in London invested in this novelty. In 1932, the BBC decided to take control of Baird’s broadcasts.

More ominous for the long-term prospects of the Baird system was the launch of a powerful television consortium. EMI and Marconi, aware of American experiments with electronic television that promised picture delivery superior to Baird’s 32-line picture at 12.5 frames per second, had been conducting their own research and development. In 1934, they formed the Marconi-EMI Television Company. A parliamentary committee, the Selsdon Committee, was set up in 1934 to investigate the existing systems and recommend standards of service. Baird decided to improve the performance of his system by making a licensing agreement with the American inventor, Philo Taylor Farnsworth, for use of his Image Dissector. In 1935, the BBC was given responsibility for television broadcasting and invited the Baird Television Company and Marconi-EMI to carry out trial broadcasts at “high definition” picture quality, defined as at least 240 lines. After four months of trials, in February 1937, the BBC decided in favor of the Marconi-EMI 405-line system.

The Baird system was rendered redundant, but Baird himself received some consolation when his pioneering work was rewarded with the gift of the Gold Medal of the International Faculty of Science, which had never previously been awarded to a Briton. Baird’s company continued to manufacture televisions that met the Marconi-EMI standard, while Baird himself pursued a new challenge—color televison. In 1928, he had demonstrated color television using mechanical scanning, and he now returned to the development of color television. He experimented with a mixture of electronic and mechanical techniques that yielded 600-line color television pictures by late 1940. Earlier in 1940, the Rank Organisation had taken control of the Baird Television Company, which became Rank Cintel Ltd., leaving Baird free to pursue his color television interests. By 1944, he had developed the Telechrome tube, a two-color system that used two electron guns whose beams converged on a translucent screen that was coated on one side with blue-green phosphors and on the other side with red-orange phosphors. He found another financial backer in British music hall star and actor Jack Buchanan and set up John Logie Baird Ltd. Unfortunately, this new venture proved to be short-lived as Baird died in 1946.

The Mainframe and Mini Computers

2009-12-09T10:43:00.000+02:00

In 1948, IBM decided not to manufacture computers commercially, believing, based on market research, that expense and size were prohibitive factors. Howard Aiken, who had joined IBM, remarked in 1950 that he could not ever see the need for more than six computers in the world. However, other scientists who had built prototype computers thought otherwise and assisted in the development of commercial models. The Manchester University team collaborated with the Manchester-based electrical engineering and electronics company, Ferranti, to create the first commercial computer, the Ferranti Mark I, launched in 1951. Eckert and Mauchly set up in commercial partnership in 1947, but sold their business to Remington Rand three years later. They developed the first commercial American computer, UNIVAC, for Remington Rand in 1951. The original UNIVAC model, supplied to the U.S. Bureau of Census, was the first computer to use magnetic tape for storage. More unusually, the Cambridge University team entered into collaboration with the catering company J. Lyons, which operated a chain of tea shops, to develop the LEO (Lyons Electronic Office) computer for processing business data.

IBM soon reassessed its position and in 1952 Aiken designed its first commercial computer, also its first electronic computer, the model 701. IBM soon acquired a reputation for innovation in computing and overtook Remington Rand’s early lead in the U.S. computer market. It recognized that the high power consumption (up to 100 kilowatts) and heat output of valve computers were disadvantageous, causing valves to burn out too frequently and creating uncomfortable working conditions. The alternative to the valve was the smaller and more resilient solid-state transistor, invented in December 1947 by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley at Bell Laboratories of AT&T. At first, commercial transistor production had a high failure rate, so transistors were expensive. As an intermediate measure, IBM began to manufacture hybrid computers incorporating valves and transistors, which brought some gains in size and power reduction. The experimental hybrid model 604 computer, built in 1954, led to the commercial model 608 computer of 1957. IBM contracted Texas Instruments, a company that began as a manufacturer of geophysical instruments in the 1930s and moved into the semiconductor industry in the 1950s, as its transistor supplier. Two years later, the IBM model 7090 computer was fully transistorized. Reductions in size were not only beneficial to customers in terms of space savings, but also increased the speed of data processing because the electric impulses had less distance to travel.

Computer storage capacity also improved during the 1950s. In 1953, Jay Forrester of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology installed the first magnetic core memory in the Whirlwind computer, which had been developed specifically for the U.S. Navy in the 1940s. IBM’s contract to develop a successor to the Whirlwind, the SAGE computer of 1956, provided the opportunity to work on magnetic core memory and magnetic drum storage. The magnetic drum evolved into the magnetic disk. In 1957, IBM’s 305 Random Access Method of Accounting and Control (RAMAC) was the world’s first commercial computer disk storage system. In the 1950s, there was no concept of generic software, as each computer was programmed to perform the specific tasks required by the individual client. The programming process was simplified by the development of high-level computer languages that were designed for particular programming purposes. The high-level languages were supported by interpreter or compiler programs, which translated the language into binary machine code. The first of these languages, introduced by IBM, in 1956 was FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation), which was intended for scientific and mathematical programs. For business applications, COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) was introduced in 1959.

These large computers running specialized programs became known as mainframe computers. IBM had sold 1,800 mainframe computers by 1960 and 12,000 by 1964. IBM’s sales philosophy placed great emphasis on a continuing close relationship with customers. However, by the early 1960s, it became clear that smaller customers might favor a more generic approach. In 1963, the American company Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) introduced the PDP-8, the world’s first minicomputer. The launch of the more generalist minicomputer was closely followed by the development of the first general-purpose computer language, BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), in 1964. BASIC was written by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College. IBM did not immediately embrace the change in business strategy that the minicomputer represented, as it had too much invested in its mainframe strategy. However, it did respond by developing a more flexible type of mainframe architecture. In 1964, IBM launched the System/360 computer, which was conceived of as a “family” of mainframe equipment. System/360 was modular rather than highly tailored and offered a choice of processors, peripherals, and complementary software packages, allowing upgrading or expansion over time. It was a commercial success and total sales of IBM computers rose to 35,000 by 1970.

The long-term future of the mainframe was threatened by developments that made it possible to link up, or network, separate computers. AT&T’s core business gave it a vested interest in computer systems that were interoperable and accommodated multiple users, such as individual telephone exchanges. In 1969, Bell Laboratories developed the UNIX operating system, which became widely used for networking computers. Bell researchers developed a high-level, general-purpose computer language, C, which made UNIX compatible with virtually any of the existing minicomputers. When C became too restrictive for more demanding computer applications, it was modified by a Bell Laboratories researcher, Bjarne Stroustrup, to become C⁺⁺, introduced in 1983. C⁺⁺ incorporates object-oriented programming, a more flexible way of modeling data relationships and has become one of the most widely used programming languages.

Convenience Foods

2009-12-08T10:51:00.000+02:00

Convenience food is very much a twentieth-century concept. In the nineteenth century, the main reason for processing food before sale was to increase its shelf life. This was a matter of increasing concern, given that the growth of the urban population meant that food had to be transported from further and further afield to the place of consumption in order to meet rising demand. Bottling, canning, and drying were methods that assisted food preservation and were amenable to mass-production and distribution. The archetypal canned food is Heinz baked beans, made by the U.S. H. J. Heinz Company, which is now sold all over the world. The disadvantage of canned foods was that the high temperatures at which the food was cooked, in order to kill enzymes and bacteria, also destroyed some vitamins. Canned foods also have a high content of sugar and salt, which are used as flavor enhancers.

Increasing production of preserved foods containing additives led governments to impose legal standards. In Britain, the Sale of Food and Drugs Act of 1875 imposed much stricter guidelines and penalties than earlier legislation. In the United States, the Pure Food and Drugs Act was passed in 1906. A number of minor religious sects stressed the importance of a healthy diet. Notable amongst these were the Seventh-day Adventists, whose headquarters were in the small town of Battle Creek, Michigan. The name of Battle Creek became familiar internationally owing to its emergence as the center of breakfast cereal production. The Adventists championed breakfast cereals because of their nutritional value, but the cereals became popular in the twentieth century because of their convenience. It was the convenience factor that spurred the development of new preservation techniques, including deep-freezing, irradiation, and freeze-drying. These techniques not only extend the life of food, making fewer shopping trips necessary, but also shorten the cooking time, an increasingly important factor as more women went out to work. The convenience of bulk buying led to a shift in food retailing from the local store offering personal service to the self-service supermarket. By 1959, supermarkets accounted for 69 percent of American food sales. In Britain, supermarkets were slower to take hold, but were dominant by the 1970s.

The First True Computers

2009-12-07T10:43:00.000+02:00

World War II stimulated computer development as military advantages could be gained through designing weapons according to more sophisticated ballistic calculations and deciphering the encoded communications of the opposing side. In the early 1930s, the U.S. Navy Board of Ordnance sponsored the American mathematician Howard Aiken, and in 1939, in collaboration with engineers at the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), he was contracted by the Navy to develop a machine for ballistic calculations. Aiken’s electromechanical Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, also known as the Harvard Mark I, was completed in 1944 at a cost of $500,000. It was operated by a punched-tape program and weighed 5 tons.

In Britain, computer research efforts were concentrated on code breaking. Alan Turing, the British mathematician who in 1936 had formulated his vision of a “universal computing machine,” was one of the team that created the Colossus code-breaking machine. Colossus succeeded in breaking the supposedly impregnable German Enigma code, but, for obvious reasons, the project was kept top secret. The most influential of the computers developed in the course of military research was not completed until 1946. This was the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC), commissioned by the U.S. Army Ordnance Department. ENIAC was built by a team at the University of Pennsylvania, led by John Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly. Drawing on Atanasoff and Berry’s design, ENIAC was the world’s first electronic computer. Weighing 30 tons and occupying 160 square meters (1,600 square feet) of floor space, it contained 19,000 thermionic valves, which acted as gates controlling the flow of electric current. Each calculation was programmed by operators feeding in punched cards, and the results were also presented on punched cards.

Feeding in punched cards was a slow and laborious process, so university scientists elsewhere began working on methods of internal program storage. In 1945, the eminent Hungarian-born American mathematician John Von Neumann outlined his theory of a stored-program computer with a central unit to control and process operations in sequence and with read-write random access memory. In Britain, teams at the Universities of Manchester and Cambridge were also addressing this issue. The Manchester team was led by Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn and assisted by Alan Turing. In 1948, the Manchester electronic computer, known as the Small Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM) and nicknamed the Baby, ran the world’s first stored program, which was stored on cathode ray tubes. Von Neumann’s ideas first came to fruition in the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC), built at Cambridge University and operational from 1949. EDSAC used mercury delay line storage, a technology developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. EDSAC was completed in advance of the Von Neumann computers developed in the United States, namely the Electronic Discrete Variable Computer (EDVAC) at the University of Pennsylvania and the MANIAC-1 computer at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

Consumers

2009-12-06T10:50:00.000+02:00

The growth of industrialization in the nineteenth century was stimulated by, and linked to, a rising population that created bigger markets. The establishment of modern capitalism grew in association with many of these developments. The innovations within technology and science were not driven only by “pure” experimentation but also by the desire to commercially develop the results. This culture of mass consumption was already advanced in Europe, Canada, and the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century and was initially enjoyed by the middle classes. The post-1945 increase in prosperity allowed more and more working people to purchase consumer durables.

The cosmetic manufacturers are not selling lanolin, they are selling hope. . . . We no longer buy oranges, we buy vitality, we do not buy just an auto, we buy prestige.

If you tell the housewife that by using your washing machine, drier or dishwasher she can be free to play bridge, you’re dead! She is already feeling guilty about the fact that she is not working as hard as her mother. You are just rubbing her up the wrong way when you offer her more freedom. Instead you should emphasize that the appliances free her to have more time with her children and to be a better mother.

The business of making and selling is highly organized, often in large units, and calls to its aid at every step complex and highly expert skills. The business of buying is conducted by the smallest unit, the individual consumer, relying on the guidance afforded by experience, if he possesses it, and if not, on instinctive but not always rational thought processes.

The Graphical User Interface

2009-12-05T10:47:00.000+02:00

By the mid-1980s, personal computers were becoming common in the workplace, but they were still rare in the home. Expense was not the only factor; other factors were operational skills and functionality. While the microcomputer was domestic in scale, it made few concessions to the casual user in terms of usability. Personal computers were marketed as “user-friendly,” but many people were intimidated by disc operating systems that offered only an enigmatic prompt, signifying the active disk drive, on the opening display screen. Apple again demonstrated its inventiveness when it introduced the Lisa in 1983. The Lisa introduced the graphical user interface (GUI), a screen display that showed program options as graphic icons, pull-down menus from menu bars, and “windows,” screens that could be overlaid and sized. It also offered a pointing device called a mouse as an alternative to the keyboard for navigation and activating menu commands. The computer mouse had been developed in the 1960s at the Stanford Research Institute by Douglas Engelbart, who obtained a patent in 1970. It was commercially developed by the Xerox Corporation in the 1970s, but only became a standard computer device when GUI displays arrived.

Although the Lisa was too expensive to have a major impact on the microcomputer market, the launch of its cheaper sibling, the Apple Macintosh, in 1984 established the GUI as the truly user-friendly face of computing. The Macintosh, familiarly known as the Mac, became particularly popular with graphic designers as it ran the first commercial desktop publishing (DTP) package, Adobe PageMaker. With its streamlined shell, the Mac was also the first microcomputer to be hailed as a design icon. While purist DOS users disparaged the Mac as a WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointing device), Microsoft was quick to recognize the mass-market appeal of the GUI. As the developer of the Word and Excel applications for the Mac, Microsoft had privileged access to the Apple GUI program code, which became a bone of contention when Microsoft began to develop its own GUI operating system, Windows, for PCs. A legal judgment imposed restrictions on the design of the first version (1.0) of Windows, launched in 1985, but the restrictions ceased to apply thereafter. Nevertheless, it was only with the release of version 3.0 in 1990 that Windows achieved equivalent user-friendliness to the Mac interface. The later versions, Windows 95 and 98, improved the multitasking performance of the interface, which allows separate applications to be open at the same time.

Microsoft’s monopoly of the PC operating system gave it clear advantage in the development of PC applications, as its applications programmers had first access to new code. Microsoft’s first PC application was the PC version of the Excel spreadsheet, introduced in 1987. Since then, its suited Office and Office Pro packages of business applications have become the PC market leaders.

Bang & Olufsen

2009-12-04T15:12:00.000+02:00

The Danish company Bang & Olufsen is a leading manufacturer of top quality audio equipment and televisions. Bang & Olufsen products are renowned for their blend of high-tech performance and elegant, minimalist styling, summed up in the slogan it registered in 1931, “B&O—the Danish Quality Brand.”

Two young Danish engineers, Peter Bang and Sven Olufsen, who had met while studying at the School of Engineering in Århus, founded the company in 1925. They were fortunate to have families wealthy enough to back them financially, and their first workshop was in the attic of the Olufsen family’s country manor near Struer. Their first product was a mains radio receiver, that is, one that was powered by a wired electricity supply—unusual at a time when most radios were battery-powered. However, the company’s first commercial success was not the mains radio itself, but its eliminator, the device that rectified the incoming alternating current to produce direct current. B&O began to manufacture the eliminator as a separate device that enabled any battery-powered radio to be run off mains electricity. Expanding production led Bang & Olufsen to open its first factory in 1927 in the town of Gimsing. In 1929, the company returned to producing mains radios with the launch of a five-valve radio that delivered high output.

In the 1930s, Bang & Olufsen diversified into the production of a range of audio equipment, including gramophones, amplifiers, and loudspeakers. The company’s products and advertising graphics were heavily influenced by the design aesthetics of the Bauhaus school. The key design characteristics were simple, geometric lines and detailing that emphasized the function of the product and an absence of ornament for purely decorative effect. B&O was a pioneer of the radiogram, a radio receiver and record player combined in one cabinet. The first B&O radiogram, the Hyperbo, was launched in 1934. The tubular steel frame of the Hyperbo was influenced by the chair designs of the German Bauhaus designer Marcel Breuer. Bang & Olufsen’s first radio with a Bakelite cabinet, the Beolit, was introduced in 1939. From the mid-1960s, the prefix “Beo” was incorporated in all B&O model names. In the same year, B&O’s Master de Luxe radiogram incorporated a feature that became very popular—push-button radio-station selection. The radio was pretuned to 16 radio stations.

Bang & Olufsen went through a quiescent period during World War II because it refused to cooperate with the occupying German forces. Worse still, after liberation from German occupation in 1945, the factory was bombed by Danish Nazi sympathizers. After the rebuilding of the factory, Bang & Olufsen entered the field of television manufacture. In the 1950s, B&O commissioned a number of Danish architects, including Poul Henningsen and Ib Fabiansen, to design the cabinets for its audio and television equipment. It was keen to produce cabinets that were lighter and easier to move around. In 1962, B&O introduced the Horizon TV, its first television to be mounted on a four-wheeled metal stand.

The transistorization of audio equipment and televisions paved the way for compact, modern product designs. The Beomaster 900K, designed by the Danish architect Henning Moldenhawer, was the world’s first low-line radio cabinet, a forerunner of the stereo receivers that formed part of the popular modular hi-fi systems of the late 1960s and 1970s. The designer who did most to establish a distinctive B&O style of audio equipment was Jakob Jensen. His designs, beginning with the Beolab 5000 music system of 1965, were expressive of the technical sophistication of B&O’s products. This system introduced user-friendly sliding controls. The Beolab system was accompanied by cube stereo loudspeakers, with the angular speaker cone mounted on thin stems with a circular base. However, Jensen’s most famous design for B&O was the Beogram 4000 stereo turntable of 1972, because this introduced the world’s first tangential pickup arm. The straight double tone arm was electronically controlled by a spot of light, and its tangential path eliminated the wandering in the groove that curved arms were prone to.

Recognizing that its products were never going to achieve the mass-market penetration of rival Japanese electronics products because high quality meant high prices, B&O concentrated on lifestyle marketing and design. It targeted a wealthy international clientele for whom style and quality were the tantamount product characteristics. B&O’s continuing commitment to functionality and ease of use was exemplified in the controls of the 1976 Beomaster 1900 receiver. The most frequently used controls were mounted visibly at the front for easy access, while the secondary controls were behind, concealed beneath a hinged lid. Similarly concealed controls became standard on televisions in the 1980s. The other innovative feature of the Beomaster 1900 controls was that the buttons were touch-sensitive electronic buttons, not mechanical push buttons. The Beosystem 5000 modular hi-fi system of 1983 eliminated controls from the hi-fi units in favor of a unified remote-control panel. This concept was taken a step further in 1984 with the introduction of the Beolink 1000 remote-control unit that incorporated television as well as audio controls.

In the 1990s, B&O broke away from stacking, modular hi-fi design in order to distinguish its products from those intended for the mainstream mass market. The Beosystem 2500 of 1991 was an integrated unit with the decks mounted vertically and therefore more visibly. The Beosystem 2500 and its successor, the BeoSound Century, also echoed the slim verticality of B&O’s televisions. Introduced in 1984, the BeoVision MX 2000 television was the first of B&O’s slim televisions. Its shallow cabinet and the minimal frame around the screen emphasized the picture, the core function. Audio and television were brought together in the BeoCenter AV5 of 1997, a complete home-entertainment system. As the twentieth century ended, Bang & Olufsen’s final contribution to user convenience was the development of the BeoVision 1 television, which incorporates an intelligent automatic program selection function, whereby the user selects the preferred types of program and the television matches the selection to the programs available.

Computers

2009-12-03T10:40:00.000+02:00

Since the creation of the first electronic computer in 1946, computer technology has evolved with unparalleled speed. Conceived as a machine to automate and accelerate the calculation of complex sums, the computer became the universal machine for business and personal use because of its ability to process verbal as well as numerical data. Ownership of computers in the home became feasible in the late 1970s when computers of desktop size were developed. As the price of personal computers plummeted and the functionality of the computer became more diverse, home ownership rose. In 1995, the United States led the home ownership rankings with a 37 percent home ownership rate, while Britain, ranked sixth, had a 25 percent home ownership rate. Today, with appropriate software and peripheral devices, the home computer can provide many services, including processing of household financial accounts, word-processing, electronic mail, entertainment, and information.

Compact Disc Players

2009-11-30T17:07:00.000+02:00

Launched in 1983, the compact disc player (or CD player) is the digital recording equivalent of the gramophone (or record player). It is a device for playing back sound recorded on a small optical disc. The term “compact disc” was used because the first commercially produced optical discs were 30 cm (12 in) videodiscs, whereas audio optical discs, which had less information to record, were only 12 cm (4.75 in) in diameter.

Optical disc technology uses a laser both to embed the recording and to decode it for playback. During recording, a laser beam removes tiny dots from the etch-resistant chemical coating of the glass master disc. The dots vary in length according to the digital sound input and form a spiral track up 5 km (3.3 miles) long as the disc rotates. The master disc is then placed in a bath of hydrofluoric acid, which etches pits in the glass where no coating remains. In the mass production process, the master disc is replicated as plastic discs with a thin aluminum coating. The disc provides up to 100 minutes of sound. Inside the CD player, the disc rotates on a turntable and is scanned by a laser beam that detects reflection from the nonpitted surface and its absence from the pitted track. The laser transmits pulses of light to a photodiode, which converts the light to electrical pulses for transmission to an amplifier and loudspeakers.

The compact disc was developed through a joint venture between the Dutch company Philips, the pioneer of videodisc technology, and the Japanese company Sony. When the joint venture was agreed upon in 1979, both companies had reason to pool their resources rather than go ahead independently. Both had recently lost out to Matsushita, the world’s leading electronics producer, when the VHS format outsold their separate videocassette formats. Moreover, Philips was then involved in a costly videodisc rivalry with JVC (Japanese Victor Company) and the U.S. company RCA. By 1980, the two companies had agreed on the standard for audio CD and began to develop their products independently. In 1982, Sony launched the CDP-101 CD player in Japan. It was designed to fit in with existing hi-fi stacking systems.

The CD player became the fastest-selling machine, as of then, in the history of consumer electronics, although it has recently been surpassed by the digital versatile disk (DVD) player. In the United States, the sales of CD players grew from 35,000 in 1983 to 700,000 in 1985, while CD sales grew from 800,000 to 15 million. The introduction of portable CD players increased the popularity of the CD format. Sony launched its first portable CD player with headphones, the D-5, in 1984. The Sony D-88 Pocket Discman, a slimmer model based on the successful Walkman personal cassette player, arrived in 1988. CD players were also incorporated in ghetto blasters, or boom boxes. Two new variants of the audio compact disc format were introduced in 1999: the DVD-Audio format, developed by the Japanese company Matsushita, and the Super Audio Disc format, developed by Sony and Philips. Both offer enhanced sound quality through increasing the rate of digital sampling.

The CD player was marketed as a major advance in the quality of sound reproduction on several grounds: greater dynamic range (essentially loudness), the inherent superiority of the digital copying that permits the master recording to be exactly reproduced, and the absence of wear and surface noise compared to the gramophone (phonograph) or tape recorder. Other factors favoring the CD player include the convenience of operation by remote control and programmed track selection. While studies have shown that the majority of people, including trained musicians, cannot reliably distinguish between analogue recordings (LPs) and digital recordings (CDs), by 1988 CDs were outselling LPs. Today, the CD player has supplanted the record player in the majority of homes.

Compasso d’Oro

2009-11-29T17:29:00.000+02:00

The Golden Compass Awards (Il Compasso d’Oro) are a series of industrial design awards that originated in Italy in 1954 when Aldo Borletti of the Milan department store La Rinascente founded them as a one-off. It was an immediate success, attracting 5,700 entries. The Compasso d’Oro was important in promoting good design in everyday things at a time when Italian industry was reestablishing itself after World War II. It also encouraged Italian designers to consider such mundane objects as being worthy of their attention as well as encouraging manufacturers to invest in designers. The 1954 winners set the pattern for future competitions; they in cluded a sewing machine, an electric fan, a typewriter, and kitchen components.

The awards continued in 1955, 1956, 1957, and 1959. Due to organizational or economic reasons, the awards are not given every year. The panel of judges is small, usually consisting of around six people drawn from the relevant industries. Judges have included designers such as Marco Zanuso, Vico Magistretti, and Philippe Starck. Awards were given four times in the 1960s, only twice in the 1970s, and four times in the 1980s. Winners have included plastic buckets, sewing machines, lemon squeezers, collapsible dish-racks, washing machines, lamps, gas cookers (stoves), and telephones as well as cars and furniture.

Il Compasso d’Oro is now run by the Associazione Design Industriale (ADI), an association of 750 manufacturers, architects, and designers working in Italy.

Coffeemakers

2009-11-28T17:06:00.001+02:00

The application of technology to assist the art of making a good cup of coffee began in the nineteenth century with the invention of the percolator by the American-born Count Rumford in Germany in 1806, with at least one aim being to discourage the heavy drinking of Munich workmen. His invention improved upon the traditional Turkish method of heating both ground beans and water in the same container. Water trickled down through a central cylinder that contained the coffee and filter and then up into the outer body of the vessel. The other long-favored method was the tinplate or enamel “drip-pot” that simply filtered the hot water from an upper vessel, through the ground coffee and into a lower one.

By the mid-1830s the first true coffee machines, large alcohol-heated drip machines, had been developed, primarily for cafés. Steam pressure was popular for smaller domestic models, especially in Italy. Simple steam-pressure machines featured a water container with a filter for the ground coffee. A metal tube dipped into the water, and as it heated, the pressure of the resulting steam forced the water through the coffee and out of the tube. Italian companies like Pavoni and Snider produced a variety of these models in the early twentieth century. Later models were electrically heated.

Coffee was a popular drink in Europe and America, and it was here that the major developments took place. The earliest electric appliances were percolators (the first introduced in 1908 by Landers, Frary & Clark under their Universal trade name) with a heating element attached to the base. Two types of vacuum coffeemakers were developed in Britain. The Siphon percolator of the 1850s used the principle of the vacuum siphon patented by Robert Napier in 1830. The apparatus consisted of two flasks linked by a pipe. Boiling water was poured onto ground coffee in a glass flask. The steam generated by hot water in another flask, usually of china, created a vacuum that drew the liquid coffee through. It was then served from a tap on the side. Another nonelectric solution was the Cona vacuum system developed by Alfred Cohn in London in 1910. It consisted of two glass vessels. The bottom one held the water and was connected to the top one, which held the ground coffee. Once heated the water rose into the top to infuse the coffee, while the cooling lower half created a partial vacuum, which drew the liquid coffee back down. The Cona remains popular today. The Danish Bodum company introduced their version, the Santos, designed by the architect Kaas Klaeson, in 1958 and it is also still in production.

The United States and Germany, both coffee-drinking nations, continued to develop electric models that were effectively percolators with electric heating elements in the base. AEG produced an electric siphon model during the 1920s. West Bend developed the Flavo-Drip coffeemaker that did not require a filter in 1922. Its popularity led to a stove-top percolator called the Flavo-Perk. The popular American Silex of the 1930s was a glass, two-bowl drip model that sat on a separate electric burner. Like kettles of the period, few were automatic. In 1937, S.W. Farber introduced the Coffee Robot that proclaimed to “do about everything but buy the coffee.” It was a vacuum type with an automatic shut-off and a thermostat to keep the coffee warm. Its success tempted other American appliance manufacturers into the market.

The postwar trend in the United States was for sleeker all in one, automatic electric coffeemakers. Glass was replaced by chrome bodies with Bakelite handles. Many had simple engraved patterns on their sides. Popular models included the Sunbeam vacuum Coffeemaster and the Universal Coffeematic percolator.

Meanwhile, Italy produced more important developments, both in 1933. Alfonso Bialetti designed and produced the Moka Express, a two-part machine that forced the heated water up through the coffee into the upper vessel. Made of cast aluminum, it is still popular today, and it still carries the distinctive trademark of the cartoon caricature of its inventor. If the Moka was uncomplicated, the cafetiere designed by fellow Italian Calimani was simplicity itself. Its now familiar form is that of a glass vessel with a plunge filter that is pushed down through the infusing coffee. It began to be used in French cafés after 1945 and became popular in the 1950s. The cafetiere is now ubiquitous on both sides of the Atlantic.

Italy was also the birthplace of espresso, a coffee produced through pressurized machines based on the 1901 patent of the Milanese engineer Luigi Bezzera. The main drawback of these machines was that the steam was forced through the coffee at a relatively slow rate, resulting in a bitter flavor. A Milanese man, Cremonesi, experimented with a piston mechanism to increase the pressure. He fitted it to the machine in Achille Gaggia’s bar in Milan. The piston method of forcing water through a bed of coffee at high pressure resulted in a fresher cup of coffee with a creamy head or crema. Cremonesi died during World War II, and Gaggia went on to develop the idea, with the Gaggia machine going into production in 1948. This machine was synonymous with the rise of coffee bars in Europe and America during the postwar period and stimulated the desire for authentic espresso at home. Gaggia produced the first domestic electric espresso machine in 1952. It was named Gilda, after the film that starred Rita Heyworth. A further improvement was the pump system developed by the Faema Company of Milan in the 1950s. A pump forced the water directly through the coffee at a constant temperature of 200°F. This method produced espresso very quickly and was adopted as the preferred method for domestic machines.

During the 1960s and 1970s these European methods began to make headway in the United States and Britain. Fresh filtered coffee was simple to make, and there was less chance of overheating it, which could happen with percolators. Manufacturers like Braun, Philips, and Rowenta produced well-designed automatic filter coffeemakers with plastic cases. The cafetiere was also successfully marketed by Bodum, which introduced their Bistro cafetiere in 1974, beginning their successful Presso line. Coffee was now one of the world’s favorite beverages, although it must be remembered that the majority of sales were for the instant granulated variety. Instant coffee was the result of eight years research by the Swiss Nestlé Company and was introduced in 1938. The coffee was freeze-dried to eliminate the water but leave the oils that gave the taste. By the mid-1990s, it accounted for 90 percent of all coffee drunk in the United Kingdom, over 70 million cups a day.

Nevertheless, the 1980s saw the manufacturers respond to an increasingly sophisticated market. The domestic espresso machine came of age with sleek matt black miniatures from the likes of Braun, Bosch, Gaggia, Krups, and Siemens, fully equipped with steam pipes to froth up milk for cappuccinos. Initially expensive, these models forced the water through the coffee with either an electric pump or a centrifugal system that spins the water at high speed. In the early 1990s Russell Hobbs, Tefal, and Krups produced combination machines featuring an espresso maker, milk frother, and filter coffeemaker.

As the kitchen had become both a stylish room and a workspace, the coffeemaker, like the kettle has not escaped the attentions of contemporary designers, especially those working for Alessi. Aldo Rossi produced an espresso maker and a cafetiere, Richard Sapper an espresso maker, and Michael Graves a cafetiere.

Coffee remains popular throughout the world and the public taste for distinctive coffee has been stimulated by the growth of specialist coffee shops and cafés. Such is the market that brands like Starbucks are becoming global. In this environment appliances that replicate the coffee shop taste remain in demand.

Carpet Sweepers

2009-11-27T17:03:00.000+02:00

The carpet sweeper is manually operated. Its rotating brushes pick up dust, which is then deposited in the pan above. In the late 1850s, many patents for carpet sweepers were lodged in the United States. They were based on the same principles as the first street-sweeping machine patents granted to the British engineer Joseph Whitworth in 1840 and 1842. These early patents did not result in commercial production.

In 1876, Melville Reuben Bissell, of Grand Rapids, Michigan, patented an improved design of carpet sweeper. He began production and the Bissell carpet sweeper became the first commercially successful model. It consisted of a long pivoted handle, a wooden dust box on wheels and a set of rotating brushes. Bissell’s innovation was the central bearing brush, which allowed the sweeping brushes to self-adjust to suit different surfaces. By 1906, annual production of Bissell carpet sweepers had exceeded the one million mark. In Britain, similar carpet sweepers appeared in the 1880s. Carpet sweepers have become even more portable since being made of plastics and lightweight metals but their design has changed little, except for minor details such as the addition of corner brushes. They have retained a market niche because of their convenience for small cleaning jobs.

The Popularization of Photography

2009-11-26T16:28:00.001+02:00

A number of American and European inventors developed coated paper films, but the big breakthrough was the invention in 1889 of celluloid roll film by the American chemist Henry Reichenbock. George Eastman, former bank clerk and founder of the Eastman Kodak Company, was Reichenbock’s employer. Based in Rochester, New York, Eastman Kodak revolutionized the camera industry by concentrating on the mass market. Before 1888, when Eastman launched his first camera, camera developments were geared to the needs of the professional user. Studio cameras had large, heavy wooden bodies, while field cameras, with folding bellows, were more portable, but expensive. The first Kodak camera, loaded with a 100-frame paper roll film, was advertised with the slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest.” Once the film was completed, the owner returned the camera to Eastman Kodak for processing. The camera plus film cost $25, and the cost of the prints and a new film was $10.

Eastman’s next step was the introduction of the Pocket Kodak box camera, the first truly portable camera, in 1895. When the Kodak pocket bellows camera followed in 1898, Eastman Kodak had sold one and a half million cameras. By 1900, about 10 percent of the population in both the United States and Britain owned a camera. A small, cheap box camera, the Kodak No. 1 Brownie was introduced in that year and sold for just $1, plus 15 cents for a six-frame film. Designed by Frank Brownell and made from wood and cardboard, the No. 1 Brownie brought photography within the means of the average person.

By the 1920s, the amateur camera market was more competitive, so makers began to use design to increase the desirability of their products. In 1927, Eastman Kodak employed the American designer Walter Dorwin Teague to redesign the Box Brownie. Teague’s Beau Brownie design was launched in 1930 and featured a two-color Art Deco geometric front panel. Teague also designed the 1928 Vanity Kodak bellows camera, which came in a range of colors and with a matching case. The availability of Bakelite and other new plastics made it possible to produce cheaper cameras in a variety of shapes and colors. The Kodak Baby Brownie of 1933, again designed by Teague, had a squat Bakelite shell with rounded edges and a distinctive ribbed lens panel. A particularly innovative use of plastics was made by the American designer Raymond Loewy, in his 1937 Purma Special camera design for the British company R. F. Hunter. The streamlined black Bakelite shell incorporated an integral viewfinder and wind-on mechanism, while the lens was not glass, but Perspex, thus reducing the costs. Fun cameras are exemplified by the Coronet and Corvette Midgets, made by Britain’s Coronet Camera Company. These miniature cameras had rounded Bakelite bodies with domed tops housing the viewfinder and came in a range of striking, mottled colors.

Apple Computer, Inc.

2009-11-25T14:58:00.000+02:00

Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak founded Apple in 1976. In 1975, Jobs and Wozniak were both working in Silicon Valley, California, for Atari and Hewlett Packard, respectively. They were also members of the Home Brew Computer Club, a group of computer enthusiasts. Inspired by recent microprocessor developments, they built their own microcomputer, the Apple I, in Jobs’s garage. They received orders from a local computer shop and began small-scale production. Encouraged by this, they looked for financial backing. Mike Markkula became the third partner, taking over the financial and administrative side. The company was incorporated in 1977.

The world’s first commercial personal computer, the Apple II, was displayed at a San Francisco computer fair in 1977 and was an immediate success. Wozniak was injured in a plane crash in 1981, and although he returned briefly after recovering, he subsequently quit Apple. Apple became the first personal computer company to achieve annual sales of $1 billion and the fastest growing American corporation ever, but by 1983 it needed to counter the challenge of the fast-selling IBM PC. Its response was the Apple Lisa, a computer featuring an innovative, user-friendly interface. Program options were displayed in the form of graphic icons, pull-down menus, and windows, with easy navigation via a mouse. However, the Lisa was too expensive for the home computer market. Its basic features were incorporated in the Apple Macintosh, styled by the Californian branch of the German design consultancy, Frogdesign. The Mac received a high profile launch in January 1984 with the showing of an unusually long (60 seconds) TV commercial, directed by acclaimed British film director Ridley Scott. In addition to the graphical user interface (GUI), the Apple Mac had the advantage of compactness. With the monitor, processor unit, and disk drive contained in one streamlined shell, the Mac became a style icon.

Disagreements with John Sculley, the company’s president and chief executive officer, led Jobs to resign in May 1985, and Apple faltered as IBM-compatible personal computers began to flood the market. A dispute with Microsoft over the alleged infringement of Apple’s design rights by Windows 1.0 was settled in a way that left Microsoft free to mimic the Apple GUI in later versions of Windows. In 1986, Apple bounced back by making desktop publishing affordable with the launch of PageMaker software for the Mac and the LaserWriter printer. A portable Apple Mac was introduced in 1989. The introduction of Microsoft Windows 3.0 in 1990 made Apple increasingly vulnerable to competition from PC manufacturers and allied software companies. Apple initially sustained its market share thanks to its loyal existing customer base and then bolstered its position with the introduction in 1991 of the Macintosh PowerBook, a notebook computer with networking and multimedia capability.

A joint venture with the Japanese company Sharp led in 1993 to the Apple Newton. This hand-held computer featured built-in optical character recognition software, allowing input to be handwritten onto the liquid crystal display with a plastic stylus. In 1994, the technical performance of the Mac was boosted by the adoption of the PowerPC chip, a fast microprocessor. In spite of such innovations, Apple’s market share declined steeply, prompting major corporate changes. The decision to license the Mac operating system came too late to be effective. In December 1996, Steven Jobs returned when he agreed to Apple’s acquisition of his NeXT software company. Jobs soon regained control of Apple as acting chief executive officer and in 1997 negotiated a five-year software development deal with Microsoft whereby Microsoft also invested $150 million in Apple.

While Apple continued to improve technical performance through the G3 (and later G4) versions of the PowerMac and PowerBook, it also developed a more competitively priced computer, the iMac. Like the first Mac, the 1998 iMac has a single-shell monitor-cum-processor-and-disk drive. Its distinctiveness lies in its rounded lines and availability in a range of five strong colors combined with translucent white. Back on a profitable footing, Apple consolidated its position in 1999 with the introduction of the iBook notebook computer.

Computer Printers

2009-11-24T17:34:00.000+02:00

Information stored on computer can be read off the screen, but many people find that reading from a computer screen is more physically wearing in terms of eye strain and postural fatigue than reading from the printed page. In the days of mainframe computers, printing was a batch job and required large, durable machines. The development of the first personal computers in the mid-1970s led to the corresponding development of desktop printers.

In the period 1976 to 1979, several types of printer became available. The best print quality was delivered by printers that used the same printing technology as contemporary typewriters. Indeed, some models were converted typewriters that retained the keyboard for dual-purpose use. The print head was a daisy wheel, a disk with spokes and raised characters around the circumference, and the printing medium was a carbon tape. Daisy-wheel printers were comparatively slow and noisy. An acoustic hood could be placed over the printer to deaden the noise, but this made the printer more bulky.

The alternatives to the daisy-wheel printer were cheaper, faster, and quieter, but delivered much lower print quality. In the late 1950s, dot-matrix printers were developed for use with mainframe computers. Dot-matrix printers use carbon tape, but the printer head consists of tiny pins that are selectively used, as instructed by the built-in microprocessor, to form characters. The print quality of desktop models improved somewhat in the early 1980s, when 24-pin heads superseded the original 9-pin heads. The cheapness of dot-matrix printers made them a popular choice where print quality was not the main consideration. Thermal and electro-sensitive printers were quieter still because they were nonimpact printers. Instead of a printer head, they used a stylus and the printing medium, carbon, was impregnated in the paper. The carbon was released in response to electric current flowing through the stylus. The print was fainter and less crisp than that produced by a daisy wheel. Low print quality together with the high cost of the special paper limited the sales of these printers. However, thermal printing is still used in many fax machines.

Two methods of nonimpact printing have proved very successful: the ink-jet printer and the laser printer. The ink-jet printer first appeared on the market in the early 1980s. The Japanese optical and electronics company Canon pioneered “bubble jet” ink printers in 1981. In 1984, the American electronics company Hewlett-Packard introduced the first of its ThinkJet series of ink-jet printers. Ink, supplied in cartridges, is sprayed through a matrix of perforations in the printer head. As with the dot-matrix printer, each character is a composite of dots. In the early days of ink-jet printers, there was a tendency for the ink to “bleed,” creating a fuzzy effect. Bleed-resistant papers were created but these, predictably, were more expensive than ordinary computer paper. By the late 1980s, improvements made to reduce the bleed problem and a steep drop in prices established the ink-jet printer as the favored budget purchase, in place of the dot-matrix printer. Ink-jet printers also have the advantage of compactness. When the notebook generation of portable computers emerged in the late 1980s, complementary portable models of ink-jet printers followed.

The only printer to match the daisy-wheel printer in terms of quality is the laser printer, which has more in common with the photocopier than the typewriter. The world’s first laser printer, the IBM 3800, was introduced by the U.S. office machine giant in 1976, but it took another ten years for the price to fall sufficiently for laser printers to become commercially competitive. Laser printers use powdered ink known as toner and contain a light-sensitive drum, a laser, and a rotating mirror. Where light from the laser beam falls on the electrostatically charged drum, the charge is dissipated; where no light falls, the charge remains and toner is attracted. The toner is transferred to paper and fused in place by heating. While characters and images are formed as patterns of dots, as with dot-matrix and ink-jet printers, the laser printer dots are so small and closely spaced that lines appear to be continuous.

Both ink-jet and laser printing technologies brought another advance—color printing. Canon introduced its first color ink-jet printer in 1982, only a year after its first monochrome model. It is now standard for ink-jet printers to operate as dual monochrome or color printers. Color printing is slightly more expensive because a tri-color ink cartridge has to be replaced more often than a black ink cartridge. Ink-jet models have a huge price advantage over color laser models. Hewlett-Packard, the company that has set the standards in laser printer technology since the launch of its first LaserJet printer in 1984, did not introduce a color model until 1994.

As printer technology changed, different manufacturers became involved. Makers of daisy-wheel printers included major typewriter manufacturers such as IBM and Olivetti as well as Xerox and Tandy/Radio Shack. Since then, Japanese companies have taken over the printer market. Epson became a leading maker of dot-matrix printers, and Canon, with a pedigree in the unrelated field of camera manufacture, is a leading maker of ink-jet printers. In the laser printer field, Japanese companies such as Canon and Panasonic dominate the lower end of the market, but Hewlett Packard of the United States is still a major supplier of top quality models.

Clothes Dryers

2009-11-23T17:05:00.001+02:00

There are two types of mechanical aid to drying washed clothes: appliances for extracting water by pressure and appliances for producing evaporation through heat. In 1900, with the exception of very large households, the only equipment available for drying clothes was the mangle or wringer, where wet clothing was passed between heavy rollers to squeeze out water. The production of new electrical appliances for drying clothes began in the 1920s but only reached the mass market from the 1950s onward.

The first widespread improvement of the twentieth century was the fitting of powered wringers to electric washing machines. The wringer was connected to the electric motor at the base of the washing machine by a vertical driveshaft. The user still had to lift out the wet clothing and guide it through the rollers. Washing machines with wringers were the most common type of washer from just before World War I until the late 1950s.

Electric spin dryers were introduced in the 1920s but did not find an immediate market as domestic appliances, although larger models for public laundries were more commercially successful. The spin dryer is based on the principle of centrifugal force: wet clothing is placed in a perforated drum that rotates about a vertical axis, forcing the clothing against the walls and pressing out the water, which drains downward naturally or can be pumped out upward to a sink. In the late 1940s, the relaunch of the automatic washing machine with its integrated spin-drying function provided new impetus. By the mid-1950s, manufacturers had begun to exploit the domestic potential of the spin dryer both as a separate appliance and in combination with the washer. In Britain, where ownership of automatic washing machines with integral spin drying grew slowly, the first spin dryer aimed at the mass market was introduced by Creda in 1956. The spin dryer has changed little in essence except in being made lighter (by replacing steel casing with plastic) and more compact.

The drying of clothes by applying heat has evolved from the practice of placing damp clothes on racks in front of a fire or in airing cupboards near a hot water tank. Some versions of the lamp radiator type of electric room heater (circa 1905–1915) had rails at the top for hanging towels or clothes on. This was the only type of room heater that was safe for placing in direct proximity to damp clothes. Electric fans could also assist in the drying of clothes, but these were scarcer than room heaters. The next step was separate heated towel rails and drying cabinets, which appeared in the 1920s. The standard design

Ceramics

2009-11-22T17:04:00.000+02:00

The use of ceramic vessels in the home is, of course, age-old, and most of the major developments in production techniques had been achieved before the twentieth century. Nevertheless, there were a number of processes that helped to further democratize the range and style of products available.

Photolithographic images for ceramics were developed during the late 1930s. This process allowed exact copies of original artwork to be reproduced on a piece via a transfer. It was first successfully exploited in the United States in the 1950s. A further improvement was the Murray-Curvex offset litho process that became available during the mid-1950s. This process transferred the still wet print onto the ceramic article via a gelatin pad or “bomb,” allowing the print to cover the sides of bowls and tureens, producing an “all-over” pattern.

These techniques were exploited by American and European designers and manufacturers and gave rise to a new wave of brightly patterned wares, often influenced by current artistic movements such as abstract expressionism. Some products were criticized as simply having new surface decoration applied to older shapes, but others were genuinely new combinations of exciting shapes and patterns, available at affordable prices.

The 1960s and 1970s saw less creativity in design, but technological development continued with tougher glazes able to withstand electric dishwashing.

Casco Products Corporation

2009-11-21T17:04:00.000+02:00

Casco Products, an industrial-products company, began producing domestic appliances in 1949 with a successful electric iron. Soon after the company was aquired by Standard Kollsman Industries in 1960 it introduced the Lady Casco range of appliances. Pots and pans had long been sold as matching sets that could also be displayed, especially if enameled or colored; the Lady Casco range took this concept one step further. It attempted to “theme” appliances to match the American “dream kitchen,” an inducement to replace existing appliances with a new set all by the same manufacturer. The line of ten matching appliances centered on the Chef Mate, a motor-driven base with a range of attachments, including a mixer and a blender. The rest of the Lady Casco set consisted of a toaster, coffeepot, iron, and frying pan.

If this approach was novel, so was the method of marketing the products. The line was to be offered to stores on a franchise arrangement with the added gimmick that each set carried an exclusive five-year guarantee backed by Lloyd’s of London! By the close of 1961 over 2,000 stores had signed up to the franchise deal and sales were encouraging. Then in 1962 the parent company decided to abandon the project and the Lady Casco program was discontinued. In 1963 the appliance section of the business was acquired by Hamilton Beach.

Most domestic appliances follow a “house style,” and smaller pieces such as toasters and kettles have been themed to complement each other, even if sold separately. A recent trend has been the marketing of “double” or “triple packs” of products by manufacturers like Hinari, Breville, and Morphy Richards. These usually consist of a toaster and a kettle, the third element being either a sandwich toaster or a coffeemaker.

Can Openers

2009-11-20T17:02:00.000+02:00

Tinplate canisters or “cans” for food were developed by the Frenchman Nicholas-François Appert and the Englishman Peter Durrand in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was thanks to Louis Pasteur’s work on bacteria and improvements in sterilization that by 1860 canning had become commercially viable. It established the emerging food-processing industry, delivered more reliable food supplies, and led to new forms of food retailing. The earliest can openers were of the “spike and blade” variety. A spike was driven into the top of the can and the lid cut off with the blade. Although still on sale until the late 1930s they were superseded by the “blade and cogwheel” type with “butterfly” handles. These cut off the lid far more cleanly. They were usually made of either all steel or with wooden handles and are still on sale today, usually with plastic bodies and steel blades and cogs.

The 1950s and 1960s saw the variety of canned goods increase. Wall-mounted can openers were introduced with gear-driven cutting wheels operated by a handle. Most featured a magnet to hold the lid once it had become separated from the body of the can. They were available in a range of colors to match the increasingly brighter kitchen units of the time. In 1968 Sunbeam produced an electric combination can opener/knife sharpener in avocado green.

Electric openers became available in the 1960s, either as wall-mounted or free-standing appliances. The can is placed against the cutting wheel and held in place by a lever. The motor drives the blade around the can, switching itself off automatically once the can is open. Black & Decker currently produce seven types, some with built-in knife sharpeners and bottle openers.

Early Photography

2009-11-19T16:27:00.000+02:00

“Camera” is the Latin word for vault or chamber. It was adopted as the name for the photographic device because early demonstrations of the basic photographic principle involved a dark chamber, hence “camera obscura,” with a pinhole in one wall, letting in light and forming an image of an external scene on the opposite wall. The Italian artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci was the first person to describe the camera obscura in 1515. In the form of small wooden box with a simple lens instead of a mere pinhole, the camera obscura became an optical toy. The addition of a prism to reflect the image downward onto paper created the camera lucida, which could be used for tracing a scene or subject. In the eighteenth century, chemical experimenters discovered that certain salts, such as silver nitrate, reacted to light. The next discovery was that an image could be retained by placing an item such as a leaf on a surface coated with an emulsion of silver salts and exposing it to light. The exposed surface darkened, and the covered surface remained unchanged. Images produced by this contact process were called photograms.

In the early nineteenth century, pioneers in England and France invented true photography. In the early 1820s, the French doctor Joseph-Nicéphore Niepce developed his “heliographic” process, whereby a pewter plate coated with bitumen was placed in a camera obscura and exposed to light for eight hours. Another Frenchman, Louis-Jacques Mandé Daguerre, developed the first commercially successful photographic process in 1838. He captured the image on a metal plate coated with silver iodine and used mercury vapor to “fix” the image. However, daguerreotypes were delicate and needed careful handling. They were typically mounted in hinged cases to prevent fading and protect the surface. In 1839, Alphonse Giroux of Paris developed an improved camera for Daguerre, and exposure times began to shorten.

The major disadvantage of the daguerreotype was that the image could not be reproduced. The one-step process was soon superseded by the calotype process, patented by the Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot in 1841. Fox Talbot’s process produced a negative image, with the black and white portions reversed, which was developed and fixed.

The image was then reversed to produce one or more positive images by placing the negative in contact with photosensitive paper and re-exposing it to light. In 1843, Fox Talbot invented an enlarger, which created a positive photographic print larger than the negative. However, his calotype paper was soon supplanted by more durable and fast-exposure glass-plate negatives. The wet-plate or wet collodion process, developed by the Englishman Frederick Scott Archer in 1851, required the photographer to coat the glass plates immediately before use and develop them straight afterward, a rather messy procedure that tended to discourage amateur interest. The introduction of dry gelatin plates, consisting of glass with a coating of silver bromide, in the 1870s made outdoor photography easier and stimulated amateur photography. It was the invention of roll film in the 1880s, however, that made photography attractive to a mass audience.

Broilers

2009-11-18T15:26:00.000+02:00

Broiling, the cooking of meat on a fire or on a grid over it, is one of the most ancient forms of cooking. The first electric broilers appeared in 1916. The first table model was the Broil King, manufactured by the International Appliance Company in 1937. Table broilers were usually cylinders with hinged or removable lids. The meat sat on a perforated metal tray while the cooking element was housed in the lid. Farberware introduced the Open Hearth broiler in 1962. This featured a heating element placed below the food.

A variant was the Rotissimat of 1946, produced by the Rotissimat Corporation, which, as its name implied, featured a rotisserie for poultry. The product was promoted in supermarkets by using them to roast chickens, and it has been suggested that this stimulated the introduction of shop-roasted chicken. Rotissimat went into liquidation in 1954, but the name remains as a generic term.

Manufacturers in the United States also produced open gas broilers or indoor barbecues in the 1940s and 1950s that were companions to gas or electric stoves. Broilers were not so popular within the United Kingdom and Europe, where the home rotisserie became combined with a grill. Moulinex produced such table models in the 1970s. The 1960s saw “top-of-the-range” electric ovens having rotisserie attachments within their “eye-level” grills. Table broilers are no longer such popular items due to the increasing speed and sophistication of ovens, grills, and microwave ovens.

Paradoxically, the classic method of broiling food on a gridiron has become more popular with the outdoor barbecue. Here traditional charcoal, whether ignited by fire-lighters or gas jets continues to be the popular fuel.

Divestiture

2009-11-17T15:08:00.000+02:00

Despite periodic government restraints, AT&T survived intact until 1984. In 1969, the recently licensed Microwave Communications Incorporated (MCI) obtained FCC approval to connect its microwave long-distance service to the local Bell networks. With major changes in the offing, including the expansion of mobile telephone services, the FCC decided to challenge AT&T’s monopoly in a landmark 1974 antitrust suit, with the initial intention of separating its manufacturing and service functions. After prolonged pretrial hearings, the case finally reached the trial stage in 1981. Only a year later, AT&T surprisingly agreed to a negotiated settlement whereby the company was dismantled to create eight separate companies. The settlement was approved by the courts in 1983 and took effect in January 1984.

Prior to divestiture, AT&T was the world’s largest private company by such a large margin that the downsized AT&T was still in the world’s top three. AT&T retained its long-distance telephone network, its international telephone services, its manufacturing function (Western Electric), and its research and development function (Bell Laboratories). It also gained the right to branch out into data communications, an activity previously prohibited by the FCC. AT&T lost the twenty-two Bell System local networks, which were restructured to form seven regional operating companies, nicknamed the “Baby Bells”—Nynex, Bell Atlantic, Bell South, Southwestern Bell, Ameritech, U.S. West, and Pacific Telesis. Deregulation did not end there, as the Baby Bells began to test the regulatory limits by applying to expand both geographically and functionally. Moreover, in 1995, AT&T announced a voluntary demerger, whereby it would split into three independent companies. In October 1996, AT&T’s manufacturing and research business was reconstituted as Lucent Technologies. Two months later, its computer business, the NCR Corporation followed. (NCR had been acquired after the original divestiture.) This left AT&T, now redesignated the AT&T Corporation, with the long-distance telephone network, cellular phone services, a business-communications consultancy, a credit facility, and Internet services.

Camcorders

2009-11-16T16:08:00.000+02:00

The camcorder, or video camera, captures moving images and sound on videotape. Camcorders targeted at the amateur user came on the market in the 1980s within a few years of the first professional models. Although camcorders were initially a luxury item, reductions in their price and size boosted ownership, particularly in their birthplace, Japan.

The camcorder’s predecessor, the motion picture (cine) camera, was never found in more than a small minority of homes. In the late nineteenth century, Thomas Alva Edison in the United States and the Lumière brothers in France pioneered the development of equipment for recording and playing moving pictures for public entertainment. Early motion picture cameras were hand-cranked, which required skill and was therefore a deterrent for amateur users. To create the illusion of continuous motion, the cameras had to capture 24 images per second, each of which was shown twice (i.e., at 48 frames per second) when the film was projected for viewing. Any change in the rate of hand-cranking would ruin the illusion.

The motorization of the motion picture camera made it more user-friendly, so cheaper models designed for amateur use were marketed in the 1920s by makers such as Kodak and Pathé. Although 8 mm motion picture film was available from 1932, 16 mm remained the standard for amateur cine cameras until the 1950s when more compact 8 mm models appeared, mainly produced by Japanese companies such as Canon. Motion picture cameras still had distinct disadvantages for leisure use. One disadvantage was the need for a projector and screen to show the films, and another was the absence of sound. Although professional motion picture film incorporating a sound track was developed in the 1920s, the equipment was not economically feasible for the amateur market.

The camcorder followed in the wake of the videocassette recorder, which gave the television set a new role as a playback device rather than just a broadcast receiver. As a sophisticated piece of technology, the camcorder was initially expensive and designed as a portable tool to meet professional broadcast standards. The conventional television camera owed much of its bulk to the size and shape of the orthicon electron tube. The first generation of camcorders contained a vidicon tube, which was much shorter and slimmer than the orthicon tube. Inside the camcorder, light entering the lens strikes the faceplate of the vidicon tube. The faceplate’s photoconductive lead-oxide coating converts light to an electric charge, which is picked up by the scanning electron beam and delivered as an output signal to the video recording head. The video track is recorded diagonally across magnetic tape, whereas the sound track, recorded simultaneously through a microphone, is placed along one edge. A small screen allows the user to preview shots and to play back the recording.

As Japanese companies had become dominant in the motion-picture-camera market in the 1950s, predictably they have also dominated camcorder production. In 1982, Sony released the Betacam professional camcorder, which used half-inch tape. Sony recognized that the Betacam format, which had already been overtaken by VHS in the videocassette recorder market, was too large to be successful for consumer camcorders. In 1982, a group of electronics manufacturers, including Sony and the Dutch company Philips, agreed to work on developing a standard miniature format, Video8, based on an 8-mm tape cassette. The Japanese company JVC (Japanese Victor Company), developer of the VHS format, soon pulled out of the Video8 consortium to concentrate on a compact version of VHS. In 1984, JVC launched the world’s first compact VHS camcorder, the GR-C1. The CompactVHS cassette (VHS-C) had a running time of one hour and was only a third of the size of a standard VHS cassette, but could be placed in a special adaptor shell for playback on VHS videocassette recorders. The Video8 specification was agreed in 1983, and the first Video8 camcorders appeared in 1985. In the United States, Kodak launched the KodaVision 8 mm camcorder, which was manufactured for Kodak by Panasonic, a subsidiary of the Japanese company Matsushita. Sony’s Handycam solid-state camcorder was more compact, weighing only 1 kg (2.2 lb), and the running time of the 8 mm cassettes was ninety minutes. In the case of camcorders, absolute standardization of tape format proved to be less critical than it had been in the case of videocassette recorders, largely because there was no prerecording issue and no need to use a videocassette recorder for playback.

Camcorders had far greater inherent consumer appeal than motion picture cameras, partly because of the convenience of playback via the television set. Other advantages were that videotape entails no external processing costs and is reusable. Recordings can be viewed immediately and then shot again if the results are not satisfactory. Since the mid-1980s, camcorders have evolved rapidly. In 1989, Sony brought out Hi8, a higher resolution 8 mm tape. The replacement of the vidicon tube with solid-state imaging devices not only reduced the size and weight of camcorders, but also improved the video quality and reduced power consumption. There are two types of solid-state video pickups—the metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS) and the more popular charge-coupled device (CCD). Both consist of an array of tiny photodiodes that convert light to electrical energy, but CCDs employ a scanning method that produces a higher output signal. The CCD was invented at American Telephone and Telegraph’s Bell Laboratories in 1969 by George Smith and Willard Boyce. It was first used in Sony’s Handycam camcorder.

Air-Conditioning

2009-11-15T14:56:00.000+02:00

Air-conditioning is an integrated, automated system for controlling the temperature, humidity, and cleanliness of air in a building. The concept arose from the known sensitivity of certain industrial processes to air temperature and humidity. In nineteenth-century textile mills, the use of water sprays to cool and humidify the air was a primitive attempt at air-conditioning. True air-conditioning was the invention of an American mechanical engineer,Willis Haviland Carrier. In 1902, only a year after graduating from Cornell University, Carrier installed a system for controlling air temperature and humidity in a printing plant in Brooklyn, NewYork. He patented his “apparatus for treating air” in 1906. Early customers for Carrier’s system included textile mills, where dry air could cause fibers to become unmanageable owing to the effects of static electricity. Interest was not restricted to cotton mills in the American South; the first foreign customer was a silk mill in Yokohama, Japan. In 1911, Carrier made public the formulae for his air-conditioning calculations, which still form the basis of air-conditioning technology today.

In order to capitalize on his invention, Carrier formed the Carrier Engineering Corporation with six partners in 1915 and began manufacturing air-conditioning units in 1922. By then, Carrier had invented a new machine—the centrifugal chiller. This refrigeration device provided the first practical solution to the problem of cooling very large spaces. As air-conditioning became well established in the industrial context, operators of other types of large buildings, such as theaters and hotels, became aware of the more general benefits of air-conditioning as a means of improving human comfort levels. The first public building to feature a Carrier centrifugal chiller was the J. L. Hudson Department Store in Detroit, Michigan, where three chillers were installed in 1924. Four years later, the Carrier company developed the “Weathermaker,” a small air-conditioning unit specifically designed for household use.

Calculators

2009-11-14T16:07:00.000+02:00

The term “calculator” may be applied to any device that assists the process of calculation. However, in practice it has become shorthand for one such device, the electronic calculator, which was the first to achieve widespread ownership beyond the workplace.

The ancestors of the electronic calculator were the desktop mechanical calculating machines developed in the late nineteenth century. These were based on principles established in the seventeenth century by the French mathematical philosopher Blaise Pascal and the German Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and were commonly known as adding machines. By 1900, two main types had emerged: machines operated by setting levers; machines with numerical keyboards, of which the first was the Comptometer of 1886, invented by the American Dorr E. Felt. The American inventor William S. Burroughs developed an adding and listing machine in 1892, with a built-in printing facility for producing a paper record. Adding machines soon became a standard piece of office equipment.

The purely mechanical adding machine evolved into the more compact, electrically powered version, which became typical in the 1950s. The first commercial electronic calculator was a transistorized desktop model introduced by the American Bell Punch Company in 1963. Texas Instruments produced a hand-held electronic calculator in 1967. Early American and Japanese hand-held calculators were still large by today’s standards. Home ownership remained low because people’s needs outside the workplace could be met more cheaply and conveniently by the use of “ready reckoner” tables and slide rules, or simply by mental effort.

The image and role of the calculator changed only when the advent of microelectronics enabled the production of small, cheap calculators. The world’s first true pocket calculator was the Sinclair Executive calculator, designed by the British inventor Clive Sinclair and launched in 1972. It featured an LED (light-emitting diode) display. In the same year, Hewlett-Packard pocket calculators became available in the United States. In 1973, the Japanese company Sharp introduced the first electronic calculator with a liquid crystal display. Within five years, the price of pocket calculators had fallen dramatically. In 1979, the pocket calculator became the card-size calculator when Sharp developed a super-thin model.

The pocket calculator is an example of a product that created demand where it did not previously exist. Today, the sophistication of the pocket calculator has reached such a level that even cheap models incorporate a range of scientific functions well beyond the needs of the average user. More expensive models have larger displays so that results can be presented graphically. The leading manufacturers are Japanese companies such as Casio and Sharp. In environmental terms, the pocket calculator has another distinction: it is the only commonplace device available in a solar-powered form. The solar unit in a calculator is a semiconducting photoelectric cell, which converts light energy into electric energy, thus removing the need for batteries. Pocket calculators may be wholly solar-powered or dual-powered, with back-up battery power to compensate for low light levels.

Atari, Inc.

2009-11-13T15:10:00.000+02:00

Atari Inc., the world’s first electronic games company, was founded by the American engineer and entrepreneur Nolan Bushnell in 1972. Bushnell was previously employed by the Ampex Corporation, manufacturers of audio and videotape recorders. The name Atari describes a move in the Japanese game “Go.” The company was based in Sunnyvale, California. Bushnell’s first electronic game was Pong, an electronic version of tennis, originally developed as a coin-operated machine for use in bars and amusement arcades. Atari introduced a home version of Pong two years later, but by then, another American company, Magnavox, had launched its Odyssey electronic ball game. While Atari was doing business with its coin-operated games machines, it lacked the capital to compete with the larger companies that were entering the home-entertainment market. Therefore, in 1976, Bushnell decided to sell Atari to Warner Communications, although he continued to work for Atari until 1978.

In 1977, Atari introduced a games console called the Video Computer System (VCS) that took interchangeable game cartridges. By 1979, there were more than twenty VCS games available, including Space Invaders, which had been developed as an arcade game by the Japanese company, Taito. The popularity of the home version of Space Invaders persuaded Atari to develop VCS versions of its own arcade games, which, by 1982, included Asteroids, Battle Zone, Missile Command, and Pac-Man.

Meanwhile, the company had also turned its attention to the growing home-computer market. Steve Jobs, cofounder of Apple, was employed by Atari in 1976 when he and Stephen Wozniak developed the Apple I microcomputer. While Atari rejected an offer to acquire the rights to the Apple I at a time when the market was untested, two years later it introduced the Atari 400 and 800 home computers. The Atari home computers were technically sound and were well supported with peripherals, but their commercial success suffered because of Atari’s divided commitments. By the early 1980s, Atari was facing stiff competition on all fronts. The launch of the IBM PC in 1981 was followed by a savage price war in 1982, as companies such as Commodore and Texas Instruments cut prices in an effort to maintain sales. While other companies were continuously updating their home computers, Atari was tied up in the rather lengthy development of a new line of home computers, the XL series. The introduction of the XL computers in 1983 did little to offset the financial problems caused by the slump in Atari’s games sales.

In 1984, Warner Communications was glad to offload Atari by selling it to Jack Tramiel, who had founded Commodore in 1958. Tramiel streamlined Atari by reducing the workforce and suspending existing projects, and he also developed new products. Atari’s prospects began to look healthier when the launch of the 5200ST home computer was favorably received. The 5200ST was nicknamed the “Jackintosh” because of its similarity to the Apple Macintosh. Aimed at and priced for the home market, the 5200ST’s disadvantage was a limited range of software. To capitalize on the burgeoning range of PC software, Atari launched its first PC-compatible computer, the i8088 PC-1, in 1987. Its other strategy was to compete for Apple’s share of the non-PC business-computer market by developing a more powerful successor to the 5200ST. Like Apple, Atari used Motorola microprocessors. The Atari TT computer, based on the Motorola 68030 chip, was launched in Europe in late 1989, a year before its American launch. Europe, where Apple had a lower market share than in the United States, had proved a more receptive market for the predecessor ST computer. The Atari TT was cheaper than its Apple equivalent but software was again a stumbling block.

Meanwhile, Atari had not entirely given up on the games market, but it was under increasing pressure from the Japanese companies Nintendo and Sega. While Atari was largely relying on its back catalogue of games, Nintendo and Sega were developing new, inventive games. The Atari 7800, 2800Jr., and XEGS games consoles were primitive technologically compared to the Japanese rival systems, but Atari showed that it was still capable of innovation in the games field when it unveiled its Lynx portable games console with a full color LCD display in 1989. However, Nintendo’s cheaper Game Boy, also launched in 1989, was more commercially successful.

With its computer sales stagnating, Atari pinned its hopes on overtaking its Japanese rivals in the games market by developing an advanced console. The Atari Jaguar console, launched in December 1993, was the world’s first 64-bit games console. It featured high quality sound and color rendering. A contract securing IBM manufacture of the hardware and the commitment of numerous software developers to produce games for the Jaguar were promising signs. However, Atari made the fatal mistake of underestimating the time required for software development after the release of the programming code. Consumers lost interest in the superior Jaguar hardware when a suite of games was slow to appear. Atari was unable to recoup sufficient lost ground before the arrival of the Sony PlayStation and Nintendo 64 consoles in 1996.

The commercial failure of the Jaguar was the last straw for Atari. No longer viable as an independent company, it merged with JTS, a disk-drive manufacturer. This proved to be a short-lived reprieve as JTS folded in 1998. The American toys and games company Hasbro purchased the rights to all Atari’s games. This was just one of a series of strategic acquisitions in the 1980s and 1990s that broadened Hasbro’s product range. In 1995, Hasbro had set up an “interactive” division to develop games on CD-ROM for the personal computer and the Sony PlayStation. Old favorite Atari games, such as Centipede and Frogger, are now available in CD-ROM format. In Europe, Atari’s main computer market, computers are still being made to the specifications of Atari’s architecture and operating systems.

British Telecom

2009-11-10T15:24:00.000+02:00

British Telecommunications plc, more familiarly known as British Telecom or BT, was formed by the privatization of Britain’s national telephone system in 1984. As a private-sector company, it not only retained its core business of supplying local, long-distance, and international telecommunications services and equipment in Britain, albeit in a new competitive environment, but also gained new international business opportunities. British Telecom now operates joint ventures in thirty other countries worldwide, including Spain, India, and South Africa.

The industry had been run as a state monopoly since 1912. Telephone services were introduced in Britain in the late 1870s and 1880s by privately owned companies, including the United Telephone Company, which was jointly owned by America’s National Bell and Edison. In 1880, the government awarded licensing control over telephone services to the state-owned Post Office, which already had a monopoly of telegraph services. In 1889, when a number of competing private companies merged to form the National Telephone Company, the Post Office took over the operation of long-distance lines. The Post Office assumed full control of telephone services following the nationalization of the industry in 1912, although a few local telephone services continued to be owned and operated by local authorities.

In the late 1960s, a combination of factors prompted recognition of the need for institutional change within the British telephone industry. The introduction of automatic distance dialing, known as subscriber trunk dialing (STD), in 1959 and international subscriber dialing in 1963 put pressure on telephone exchanges, many of which needed upgrading. As a government department, the Post Office was subject to Treasury constraints on investment. In 1969, the Post Office gained a greater degree of financial autonomy when it became a national industry rather than a government department operating on a budget allocated by the Treasury. Consequently, it was able to commission a consortium of three British companies, GEC, Plessey, and STC, to develop a computer-controlled digital telephone exchange system, named System X. After prototype testing in 1978, it was introduced in London in 1980 and gradually extended.

Privatization came as a result of the 1979 election of a Conservative government on a free-enterprise platform. Under the ensuing British Telecommunications Act of 1980, the Post Office lost its monopoly of telephone services. In preparation for privatization, it was restructured in 1981 into two independent divisions, mail and telecommunications. A second telephone service supplier, Mercury Communications, was granted a license in 1982. In 1984, the newly privatized British Telecom opened its first digital international exchange, installed by Thorn-Ericsson Telecommunications Ltd.

Privatization and deregulation coincided with the introduction of cellular phone services. In 1982, the British government decided to grant two nationwide licenses for cellular phone services. One license was awarded to the Cellnet consortium, led by British Telecom in partnership with the security company Securicor, and the other went to the Vodafone consortium led by Racal Electronics. Both cellular phone services became operational in 1985. A second phase of telecommunications deregulation followed the release of the government’s 1990 discussion paper “Competition and Choice: Telecommunications Policy for the 1990s.” The duopolies in both the fixed telephone and cellular phone systems were discontinued, opening the market to new operators.

British Telecom’s response to increased competition was to strengthen its commitment to customer care by launching a new BT mission in 1991 that promised to put customers first. While British Telecom has retained its overall leadership in British telephone services according to market share, in terms of financial success, it has been overtaken by the mobile phone company, Vodafone.

Brillo Pads

2009-11-06T15:22:00.000+02:00

Brillo pads are steel wool pads impregnated with a special soap containing jeweler’s rouge. They were introduced by the Brillo Company of Brooklyn, NewYork, in 1930.

The company was the result of what would now be called a “market-led” approach. A Mr. Brady, a New York door- to-door salesman, was selling aluminum pots and pans and noted that his customers complained about how difficult they could be to keep clean. Brady consulted his brother-in-law, Mr. Ludwig, a costume jeweler. It was Ludwig who struck upon the idea of combining soap with jeweler’s rouge to produce the required shine. Brady then found that his soap was beginning to out-sell the pans. Brady and Ludwig approached a lawyer, Milton B. Loeb, for advice on establishing a company to begin commercial production. Loeb must have seen the potential as he joined them, as well as providing the brand name, Brillo, after the Latin beryllus (shine). Loeb went on to become treasurer and president of the company. The Brillo soap was patented and registered as a trademark in 1913.

Brillo’s main product was the soap that was sold with pads of steel wool. Initially sold by door-to-door salesmen, they were soon taken up by grocery and hardware stores and chains such as Woolworth’s. The steel-wool pads, impregnated with the soap, were introduced in 1930. Brillo remains one of the world’s best selling pan cleaners, along with its main rival SOS. They have survived the arrival of motorized scouring pads in the 1960s. The Kent Kordless of 1962 was one such product, but was deemed not worth its cost by Consumer Reports.

Thanks to AndyWarhol’s oversize replicas, the Brillo pad’s bright and simple packaging, along with the Campbell’s Soup can, became an icon of 1960s pop art. The company is now a part of Church & Dwight Co. Inc

Barbecues

2009-11-05T15:14:00.000+02:00

Barbecues, or open-air meals, date back to large social events such as ox or hog roastings. Such events were communal affairs; today the barbecue is seen as a more private affair conducted in a suburban garden (yard). They still maintain their social functions, as they often double as parties. Barbecues became popular in the United States in the 1960s and spread to Northern Europe in the 1970s. The large barbecues offered as part of Mediterranean package holidays were another stimulus.

The garden barbecue grills or spit roasts food with the heat supplied by hot charcoal or compressed hardwood briquettes. There are many different shapes and sizes, but they are all used in much the same way.

The simplest type is based on the Japanese hibachi, or fire bowl, a simple rectangular container with a grilling rack. Larger models stand on legs and can also be circular. They usually have a windshield with slots to accommodate different grilling positions and spits. Rounded kettle barbecues are more sophisticated, with domed hoods and vents.When closed the hood allows it to act more like an oven, capable of broiling joints or fowl.

The most difficult part of barbecue cooking is to get the charcoal to light. This has been assisted by the use of solid and liquid firelighters. An easier way is to light the fuel by liquid petroleum gas. More sophisticated models also have small gas rings. Funnel barbecues use lightly folded newspaper that is set alight to deliver rapid intense heat to the fuel.

The appeal of barbecue cooking is that it can make simple sausages and burgers taste better. One interesting sociological factor is that, although women still do most of the cooking, the control of the barbecue is often a male preserve.

Breadmakers

2009-11-04T15:22:00.000+02:00

The baking of bread at home declined during the twentieth century due to the rise of industrialized baking and retailing. By 1950 most people bought their bread from small local bakeries, which in turn were overtaken by the large supermarket chains.

In the United Kingdom, the late 1970s saw a reaction, led by food writers, to the rather bland industrially produced bread and a demand for greater choice. This feeling was amplified when more people took holidays in France, where the tradition of the small local bakery has remained intact, even in large cities. Supermarkets responded with “instore” bakeries and a much wider variety of breads inspired by French and Italian recipes.

Bread could be baked in the home in a gas or electric oven, but during the early 1990s manufacturers developed countertop breadmakers designed to give good results every time. West Bend produced the first American model in 1993. The company moved very quickly to enter this niche market, completing the project in only thirty-five weeks, from concept to shipping. A breadmaker is essentially a mixer, proofing oven, and mini-oven in one. They have plastic “cool wall” cases, usually with viewing windows. They automatically knead, proof, and bake, and they can take up to three sizes of loaf tin. The ingredients are placed in a nonstick baking tin, a cycle is selected, and the machine does the rest. A paddle in the bottom of the bread pan kneads the dough, stopping two or three times to let it rise. Settings are usually for overnight baking, but some models offer high-speed programs that deliver a loaf in less than two hours. Most models have midcycle indicators to allow extra ingredients such as fruits and nuts to be added. They come in a variety of sizes, which usually relate to the size of the loaf, from one to two and a half pounds.

Popular manufacturers include Black & Decker, Breville, Oster, Panasonic, Prima, Sunbeam, Toastmaster, and West Bend.

Braun

2009-11-03T15:21:00.001+02:00

The Braun company was founded in Frankfurt in 1921 by Max Braun (1890–1951), an engineer from East Prussia. It originally produced connectors for machine belts and later moved into components for radios and gramophones in 1923. By 1925 the company was producing many of its own plastic components, and by 1929 it had begun to make complete sets. Braun became one of Germany’s largest radio manufacturers. It began to innovate during the 1930s, introducing a combined radio and phonograph in 1932 and a battery powered portable radio in 1936. By 1938 its modern Frankfurt factory employed 1,000 people.

During the postwar reconstruction it added domestic appliances and electric razors to its range of products. The Braun S50 shaver and the Multimix appeared in 1950. In 1954 Braun struck a deal with the Ronson Company, who were licensed to manufacture Braun shavers in the United States.

Max Braun was succeeded in the early 1950s by his sons Artur and Erwin, who were interested in design and brought in a range of talented designers to work on their products. Dieter Rams joined the company in 1955, along with Hans Gugelot, Otl Aicher, and Gerd Alfred Müller. The following year it set up its own design department, which Rams headed from 1960.

The result of this corporate approach was a unified range of products that possessed a sculptural simplicity. The electronics of razors, food mixers, and heaters were enveloped in white metal or plastic covers with minimal, easy-to-use controls. The KM 321 Kitchen Machine of 1957, a food mixer, exemplified this approach. This “neofunctionalist” approach could also be seen in the audio products such as the Phonosuper of 1956, nicknamed “Snow White’s Coffin” because of its rectangular shape, white body, and clear Perspex lid. Braun set a standard that influenced other companies to take design more seriously. Its products were selected by the New York’s Museum of Modern Art and praised at the 1958 Brussels World Fair as “outstanding examples of German manufacturing.”

The aesthetic merit of Rams’s designs was reflected in the work of U.K. “Pop” artist Richard Hamilton in his Toaster screen print and collage of 1967. He stated, “My admiration for the work of Dieter Rams is intense and I have for years been uniquely attracted towards his design sensibility; so much so that his consumer products have come to occupy a place in my heart and consciousness that the Mont Sainte-Victoire did in Cézanne’s.”

The controlling interest in Braun was bought by the U.S. Gillette Company in 1967. Since then its style has become a little diluted but the ET22 calculator and the Micron shaver have ensured that Braun products remain distinctive. Braun has, more than probably any other company, managed to successfully marry modernist principles to industrial production. The results have largely been just what Erwin Braun wished them to be: “honest, unobtrusive, and practical devices.”

Bodum

2009-11-02T15:20:00.000+02:00

The Danish Bodum company was founded in 1944 by Peter Bodum, importing glassware from Europe into Denmark. It produced its first coffeemaker, the Santos, in 1958. This was designed by the architect Kaas Klaeson and is still in production. In 1974, the company began the production of its highly successful cafetieres with the Bistro model that sat on a distinctive cork base.

The Bodum company has always invested in design, reflecting a humane Scandinavian modernism. It has expanded its range of glassware products and has also moved into plastics and a limited number of related appliances, such as the Osiris (1981) stove kettle and the Ibis (1998) electric kettle.

The company remains in family ownership; the present manager is Peter Bodum’s son Jorgen. The company has a number of shops throughout Europe and a design company, Pi Design, based in Switzerland.

Blenders/Juicers

2009-11-01T15:19:00.000+02:00

Extracting juice from fruits has long been necessary either for producing drinks or for cooking. Juicers are a good example of the continuing use of traditional models alongside more sophisticated electric versions that have been introduced in response to the changing tastes of modern consumers.

Traditional citrus juicers of beech wood that are simply reamers to be placed into the fruit and twisted are still sold today, as are juicers with dome-shape reamers over which the halved fruit is twisted. Initially made of glass, the dome-shaped juicers were also made of aluminum and are now produced in plastic. One of the most stylish of these is the Italian Kartell lemon squeezer designed by Gino Colombini in 1958. Produced in low-density polyethylene it features a sharply fretted pivot inside a container onto which the halved lemon is placed. This is covered by a ribbed cap that is turned to pulp the lemon juice down channels in the pivot into the container. Electric versions operate in similar ways.Wooden or cast-iron hinged presses for lemon and limes were also popular for the first half of the century.Wooden models, usually of beech, often had glazed ceramic bowls. There are also aluminum hinged presses with inverted domed reamers.

Lever-operated juicers and presses were developed in the United States for professional use in restaurants, bars, and diners. The domestic versions of the 1950s, such as the Juice-O-Mat by the Rival Company, were available in sprayed aluminum or stainless steel.

Electric blenders were developed by the American Stephen Poplawski who had patented a commercial drink mixer in 1916. The Greene Manufacturing Company produced blenders based on this in 1932. Two successful models from the 1940s are the Osterizer by Oster Manufacturing Company (now part of Sunbeam) and the Blendor by Waring Corporation. These blenders (known in the United Kingdom as liquidisers) had a glass jug with a lid and cutting blades in the base, operated by an electric motor. Blenders are essentially simple appliances, and the main changes in them have been the addition of extra speeds. The arrival of the food processor meant that the blender became an inexpensive commodity. Recent changes have been the introduction of high-powered “pro-style” models capable of chipping ice without liquid and more dominant bases with electronic touch pad controls. The main manufacturers are Cuisinart, Hamilton Beach, Kenwood, KitchenAid, Krups, Moulinex, Oster, Philips, and Sunbeam.

The 1980s saw the introduction of smaller hand-held blenders capable of blending foods and liquids in a cup or small container. One of the earliest lines was introduced by Braun, which remains a leader in this market. Hand blenders are especially popular for making baby food.

Cultural trends in healthy eating have led to an increase in fresh fruit consumption and the promotion of premium juices produced only from fresh fruit. Manufacturers such as Kenwood, Braun, Sunbeam, Hamilton Beach/Proctor-Silex, and Breville have responded with improved electric countertop juice extractors designed to produce fruit juices directly into an internal jug in seconds for the domestic market. A simpler appliance designed to produce just enough juice for flavoring is the Lemon Mate, a small plastic device that turns a single lemon into a small jug by topping and tailing it with a screw-in reamer and a base to keep it upright.

Despite their efficiency, the most influential juicer of the late twentieth century was a reworking of the traditional hand-held juicer by the French designer Philippe Starck. His cast aluminum Juicy Salif lemon squeezer of 1990 for Alessi placed the reamer on three legs, which allowed it to be placed over a glass. The lemon juice flowed down the reamer to a point and then into the glass below. Available in either a polished or PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene) nonstick coating, it quickly became a “must-have” item for the fashionable kitchen.

Answering Machine

2009-10-30T13:58:00.000+02:00

An answering machine is a device that allows incoming phone calls to be received and messages recorded when the phone user is unavailable. It may be a separate machine that is connected to a telephone or combined with a telephone to form an integrated telephone answering machine. Today’s answering machines may be either analog or digital. Analog answering machines use conventional audiotape recording, whereas digital answering machines use memory chips. The modern tape format is the continuous-loop microcassette, identical in size to the double-sided microcassettes used in dictating machines. Most machines take one cassette, which holds both the user’s message and incoming messages, but some machines take two cassettes so that the user has two prerecorded messages available. When analog answering machines first became available in the late 1940s, they were marketed as business machines. The use of the name “electronic secretary” conveyed their main selling point—as a secretarial substitute. In the 1980s, as answering machines became cheaper and more compact, they became standard items for the home as well as the office.

The Monopoly Issue

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The legitimacy of AT&T’s monopoly was an issue that recurred periodically. In 1907, AT&T’s president, Theodore Vail, asserted that service efficiency dictated that telephone services should be controlled by a single provider, with government regulation supplying restraints in lieu of market forces. Many other countries accepted the notion of telephone services as a natural monopoly and created state-owned telephone utilities to prevent the potential abuses that might arise from private ownership. While state ownership did not accord with American free enterprise ideals, concerns about monopolies had resulted in the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which was intended to prevent monopolistic practices. In practice, the Sherman Act was applied only selectively, and AT&T built up its business in the early twentieth century with little opposition.

One acquisition that did attract government scrutiny was AT&T’s purchase of 30 percent of Western Union’s stock in 1909. Threatened with the possibility of antitrust action, AT&T sold off the stock only four years later. Meanwhile, the company was expanding internationally and had Western Electric manufacturing plants in Europe, the Far East, Australasia, and South America. For a short period during World War I, the government took over the running of a number of key industries, including telephone and rail services. In the postwar boom, the government was keen to stimulate the economy and remove restrictions. One consequence of this was the Graham Act, which exempted telephone services from antitrust law. With its national role thus strengthened, AT&T decided to divest itself of its foreign interests, except those in Canada. In 1925, AT&T sold the International Western Electric Company to the new International Telephone and Telegraph Company. Four years later, AT&T became the first American company to reach the $1 billion mark in annual revenues.

Improving Telephone Services

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Despite the divestiture of most of its foreign interests, AT&T was active in improving services to its American customers by developing international telephone services. Bell System engineers had been experimenting with transatlantic voice transmission by radio since 1915. The research and development activities of AT&T were boosted in 1925 by the establishment of Bell Laboratories as the company’s dedicated research department. In 1927, AT&T launched a commercial telephone service between New York and London, using two-way radio. While international radiotelephone services expanded over the next ten years, capacity was limited and call quality was adversely affected by signal interference. These problems were removed only in the 1950s and 1960s when transoceanic telephone cables were installed. AT&T installed a transatlantic cable in 1956. Meanwhile, AT&T expanded the capacity for long-distance calls within the United States by adopting microwave technology. The first long-distance microwave telephone relay linked NewYork and Chicago in 1950. A year later, AT&T introduced direct long-distance dialing, which was available to 90 percent of American telephone subscribers by 1964. Another method of international and long-distance telephone transmission became available from 1962, when AT&T launched Telstar, the world’s first commercial communications satellite.

AT&T also played a pioneering role in the development of mobile telephony. AT&T engineers recognized early on that limited capacity was a major impediment to the expansion of mobile phone use. They proposed a cellular solution in 1947, thirty years before such systems actually came into being. AT&T revived this proposal in the early 1970s when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) invited proposals for a new mobile phone service to operate in an ultra–high frequency band around 800 MHz. The FCC’s decision was delayed by the instigation of antitrust proceedings against AT&T in 1974, but AT&T was granted a trial license in 1977 and began its first public trial, in Chicago, in 1978. Commercial licenses were awarded in 1982 when AT&T was in the process of being restructured.

Research and Innovation

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From the 1920s, AT&T became renowned for invention and innovation, not just in the field of telephony, but also in the fields of sound recording and electronic engineering. In 1924, it pioneered commercial facsimile services by developing the technology for “telephotography,” the transmission of photographs by telephone line. Photographs were successfully sent from Chicago and Cleveland to New York. This system became widely used by the newspaper industry. The next step after the transmission of still images by phone was the transmission of moving images. In 1927, before television broadcasting existed, Bell System demonstrated long-distance television transmission by sending live images of Herbert Hoover, the secretary of commerce, from Washington, D.C., to New York. Bell System had introduced the concept of electrical sound recording in 1915, by demonstrating that the carbon microphone used as the telephone mouthpiece was equally suitable for capturing sound for phonographic reproduction. In 1931, engineers at Bell Laboratories developed an improved technique for “cutting” gramophone records, whereby the stylus vibrated up and down rather than from side to side. They went on to develop a method for stereophonic recording in 1933 that eventually became standard in the 1940s, although the first stereo experiments had been carried out in Britain two years earlier.

Perhaps the most significant single invention ever to emerge from Bell Laboratories was the transistor, which began the micro-electronics revolution. This stemmed from wartime research into the properties of semiconducting crystals, such as silicon and germanium, in relation to radar. In December 1947, three Bell research engineers—John Bardeen, William Shockley, and Walter Brattain—developed the n-type semiconductor diode. The three received the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for their work on the transistor. Further research into silicon revealed that sunlight caused a release of energy from silicon that could be converted to electric current. The first solar cell, or battery, was created at Bell Laboratories in 1954. The physicist Arthur Leonard Schawlow joined the research team at Bell Laboratories in 1951. Schawlow developed existing ideas on the laser (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation), an optical version of the maser (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation). In 1961, the first continuous-beam laser was made at Bell Laboratories. It was the combination of the laser and optical fiber cables that enabled telephone service capacity to be increased in the 1980s.

AT&T became involved in research into computer operating systems and computer languages from its perspective as a user of computers for the control of switching systems and call routing. The nature of its computer use meant that it took an early interest in the development of systems that were interoperable and accommodated multiple users. In 1969, Bell Laboratories developed the UNIX operating system. In the early 1970s, the Bell researchers refined the language on which UNIX was based to create C, a high-level, general-purpose computer language. This made UNIX compatible with virtually any of the existing minicomputers. UNIX became widely used on networked computers. By the early 1980s, C was becoming restrictive for more demanding computer applications. In 1983, a Bell Laboratories researcher, Bjarne Stroustrup, added the principles of object-oriented programming to C to create C++, which has become one of the most widely used programming languages.

Bed Warmers

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Climbing into a cold bed has never been a pleasant experience. The traditional method of dealing with this problem was the warming pan or the hot water bottle. Nineteenth-and early twentieth-century hot water bottles were made of either copper, stoneware, or (later) rubber.

The rise of electricity use in the 1920s prompted manufacturers to experiment with the humble hot water bottle. The Supreme Miracle was a 12-inch tubular element that screwed into an ordinary rubber hot water bottle and heated the water inside. This idea was developed by F. S. Spooner Wates, who also patented an electric bed heater encased in an asbestos tube. His patent was taken up by the British company Rothermel who produced an electric bed warmer with a brown Bakelite case in the shape of a rubber hot water bottle. The flex entered where the stopper would have been and the on/off switch was placed at the neck. Such products were probably best used to heat the bed before getting into it, as they were not grounded.

The first electric blanket appeared in the United Kingdom in 1927. This was the small Thermega heating pad, which had flexible electric heating elements within woolen fabric. Sunbeam was a major manufacturer in the United States. These were relatively expensive items, and electric blankets only became popular during the 1950s and 1960s, thanks to more reliable insulation, thermostatic controls, and developments in flame-proof materials. The British Burco Company, which began by making gas water heaters, started manufacturing electric blankets in the 1950s. It continues to produce them under the Cozee Cumfort brand. Most of these electric blankets were designed to go under the sheets and warm the bed before anyone slept in it, nevertheless the story of the electric blanket setting both bed and sleeper alight did enter popular folklore. The 1960s saw the introduction of electric over blankets designed to stay on all night. They could be washed in an electric washing machine, and the double models featured separate controls for each side of the bed, allowing sleeping partners to choose their own temperature. Although electric blankets are still in production, their popularity has declined due to the rise of central heating and warm duvets.

Bidets

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A bidet is a low, narrow basin intended for washing the anal and genital areas after using the water closet (toilet), although it may also be used as a footbath. The name is derived from the French word for a little pony, referring to the action of stepping astride it. Portable bidet pans were in use in France from the early eighteenth century. The Marquise de Pompadour, the mistress of the Louis XV, had two bidets, one with a rosewood surround and the other in walnut. Fixed pedestal bidets became available in the late nineteenth century when indoor plumbing and water closets became more widespread. For example, W. R. Maguire patented a combined water closet and bidet in 1888. After World War II, bidets began to lose their luxury status, but they are still uncommon outside France and other parts of continental Europe. Today, in addition to the basic type of bidet filled by hot and cold taps above the rim, there are bidets that feature an internal rising spray.

Black & Decker

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The Black & Decker Company was founded in 1910 by S. Duncan Black and Alonzo G. Decker as a small machine shop in Baltimore, Maryland. They produced their first electric drill in 1915, followed by patented pistol grip and trigger switch. These innovations became standards within the electrical tool industry.

The company has developed over the post-1945 period to become a multinational corporation manufacturing power tools, domestic appliances, hardware, and building products. It has a number of subsidiaries making Emhart fastenings, DeWalt industrial tools, Kwikset home security, and Price Pfister plumbing products. Black & Decker acquired the electrical domestic appliances section of the U.S. General Electric Company in 1984. It is the world’s largest producer of power tools and residential security systems and the third largest faucet manufacturer in the United States. Black & Decker products are produced in fourteen countries and marketed in over a hundred. It has a large power tool plant at Spennymoor within the United Kingdom. It also produced tools for the NASA space program in the 1960s and 1970s.

The company has continued to innovate in product development and can claim to have introduced genuinely new tools and appliances. Most notable are the DustBuster vacuum cleaner of 1979. This small rechargeable cordless hand-held cleaner was a logical development of the older Hoover Dustette. It remains popular for cleaning up small areas and spilt crumbs. Another innovation is the Workmate designed by English engineer Ron Hickman in 1968. Black & Decker was not convinced that the Workmate would be successful and had initially refused it. However, Black & Decker introduced it in the United Kingdom in 1972 and in 1975 in the United States. The Mouse (1998) is a small hand-held sander and polishing tool that produces 11,000 orbits a minute. It comes with twenty-three accessories.

More recently the corporation has invested in more sustainable methods of production using recyclable coppers and irons in its motors and identifiable plastics for future recycling. In the United States, it has a national disposition center in Nashville, established to deal with damaged or worn-out products.