Inventions. . - Books about Antiques - 'Inventing the 19th Century: 100 Inventions that Shaped the Victorian Age: From Aspirin to the Zeppelin' - book review

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 2002 by Alfred May

Axiomatically, necessity is the mother of invention, unless you work in a patent office, where a huge number of orphaned inventions seek mothers. A delightful wallow in eccentricities, and many useful timesavers, is contained in Inventing the 19th Century--the tale of one hundred inventions arranged alphabetically. The discursive entiries also comprise a broad social history of the century, for almost everyone seemed to have turned their imagination to the task of inventing.

Abraham Lincoln, as a hired hand on a flatboat in 1831, ran aground on a trip down the Mississippi River. This caused him in 1849 to patent a method of lifting ships over shoals with ropes and inflatable chambers. He whittled the miniature model then required by law with his own hands, but his method was never put to the test, probably because the extra weight of the mechanism would have grounded the ship even faster.

Sir Arthur Sullivan in 1898 tamed his mind from the musical score to the runaway horse, patenting a quick release mechanism so that the carriage driver could free a panicky horse before it dragged the carriage and its occupants to destruction. The entry goes on to discuss Sullivan's continuous feud with those who appropriated his copyrighted music. To prevent the music from The Pirates of Penzance from being pirated, he long refused to publish the score. Bouncers prowled the performances tossing out those caught writing down the melodies.

The Croatian immigrant Nikola Tesla, who invented alternating current (AC), arrived in the United States with four cents, having been robbed on the boat. Once he had worked out AC he was hired by Thomas Edison, the champion of direct current (DC), but they quarreled and parted, with Edison claiming that AC current was dangerous. Tesla sold his patent to George Westinghouse and went on to other things. In 1900 he set up a high tower in Denver from which he shot huge bolts of manmade lightning into the skyto signal other worlds. When neighbors objected to the noise, he moved his tower next to an asylum for the deaf and dumb. After dreaming up a death ray, a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, and an artificial aurora to light the world at night, he died in a New York City hotel tending his pet pigeons.

One necessity that was matched by an invention was the riveted blue jean. Miners lugged around lots of rocks, some in their pockets, which sagged. Levi Strauss saw profit in tough pants and moved from New York to San Francisco in 1853, where he sold denim (so named for serge de Nimes, where the cloth was originally made). A tailor in Nevada, having used Strauss's cloth, dreamt up the reinforcing rivets and offered to share the profits with Strauss if he would put up the money to develop the invention. Strauss did, and the original riveted denim pants were labeled "Quality riveted quality clothing" and showed two horses straining to pull the pants to pieces. The write-up concludes: "In 1943 a customer tried it with a pair of mules but the result was that one died from the effort."

When men still wore hats, and more importantly still tipped them on countless encounters each day, James Boyle of Spokane felt the urge to invent the automatically tipping hat. A slight bow activated the lifting mechanism, which, because of the machinery, was suitable only for a bowler. The entry then shifts to British patents for various improvements on hats, including a sort of sunroof for ventilation, and a tailor's invention of a hat to cushion blows, suggested for travelers, women, children, and lunatics.

More to the point then and now was the 1849 patent for the safety pin by Walter Hunt, an American mechanic who already had to his credit patents for an alarm for coaches, a stove, a saw, a type of caster for the feet of furniture, and a knife sharpener. He invented the safety pin to pay a small debt. His creditors offered him a long piece of wire and $400 for the rights to a useful object made from the wire. For the safety pin he netted $385 and the assignees made a fortune.

The entry for a patented antitheft pocket protector leads to an enlightening discussion of crime in Victorian London where "it has been said that the reason why so many thieves look famished was that it was an overcrowded profession.... "Tailing' was the business of stealing handkerchiefs from back pockets. Pickpockets were dubbed 'buzzers' or 'dippers' while those who helped by obstructing pursuit were the 'stalls'. Those who specialized in stealing purses were 'finewires' or 'maltoolers,' a reference to their fondness for using (unpatented) devices... [that] included slender blades to rip pockets, or tools which had a three-way gripping hold that could be inserted into pockets." The evolution of fashion away from coattails for men and billowing crinolines for women put pockets nearer the body and less pickable.

Ottmar Mergenthaler, a watchmaker's apprentice in his native Wurttemberg, Germany, immigrated to the United States to avoid the army. Here he worked for the son of his German employer who had a machine shop making signal equipment. Then, in 1884, Mergenthaler patented the first significant improvement in printing since his compatriot Johannes Gutenberg in the fifteenth century. Mergenthaler's machine, operated from a typewriter keyboard, arranged a line of matrices each representing a letter, poured molten metal into them, and, when the metal had hardened, inserted the line of type into a galley and put the matrices back where they belonged. "It was first tried out at the New York Tribune on 3 July 1886. The editor and owner, Whitelaw Reid, cried out, 'Ottmar you've done it! You've cast aline of type!' which provided the trademark for the product".