Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (72 page)

Darrow’s friends and family so enjoyed playing the homemade entertainment that in 1934 they persuaded him to approach the Massachusetts game firm of Parker Brothers. Company executives test-played Monopoly, then unanimously rejected it on the grounds that the concept was dull, the action slow-paced, and the rules hopelessly complex.

Darrow persevered. And at Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia, he found an executive who not only enjoyed playing the game but offered to stock it in the store. With loans from family and friends, Darrow had five thousand Monopoly games manufactured and delivered to Wanamaker’s. When Parker Brothers discovered that Monopoly sets were selling swiftly, they replayed the game and found that it was imaginative, fast-paced, and surprisingly easy to master. The game was copyrighted in 1935, and soon the company’s plant was turning out twenty thousand Monopoly sets a week.

However, top company executives still harbored reservations. They believed the game was strictly for the adult market and merely a fad, which would not last more than three years. In December 1936, convinced that
the game’s popularity had run its course, George Parker, the company president, ordered the manufacturing plant to “cease absolutely to make any more boards or utensil boxes. We will stop making Monopoly against the possibility of a very early slump.”

The slump, of course, never came. And the unemployed Charles Darrow became a millionaire from royalties as his game gained popularity in twenty-eight countries and nineteen languages. There was evidence that the capitalist board game was even played in the Soviet Union: Six Monopoly sets displayed at the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959 all mysteriously disappeared. Today Monopoly is one of the two longest-and best-selling board games of this century, the other being Scrabble.

Scrabble: 1931, New England

Like Monopoly’s inventor, Charles Darrow, the man who conceived Scrabble, Alfred Butts, was left unemployed by the Depression. Unlike Darrow, who translated poverty into a game of fantasy fortune, Butts amused himself at home with pure escapism, translating the national mania for crossword puzzles into a challenging board game that, not surprisingly, he named Criss Cross.

As conceived in 1931, Criss Cross consisted of a hundred wooden tiles, each painted with a letter of the alphabet. But the game’s final rules, and each letter’s point value, based on its frequency of use, took Butts almost a decade to refine.

Alfred Butts was in no hurry. For Criss Cross was strictly a home entertainment for his family and friends. It was one friend, James Brunot, from Newton, Connecticut, who in 1948 convinced Butts of the game’s commercial potential and persuaded him to copyright it as Scrabble.

Scrabble, in a test playing, interested the game-manufacturing firm of Selchow & Righter, who had already scored a best-seller with Parcheesi. Echoing Parker Brothers’ belief that Monopoly would be a short-lived fad, Selchow & Righter were convinced that Scrabble, a faddish spin-off of crossword puzzles, would sell for no more than two years. Instead, it became the second all-time top-selling board game in America (between Monopoly and Parcheesi), was translated into more than half a dozen languages and issued in a Braille version for the blind, and continues to sell strongly today.

Silly Putty: 1940s, Connecticut

In the early 1940s, the U.S. War Production Board sought an inexpensive substitute for synthetic rubber. It would be used in the mass production of jeep and airplane tires, gas masks, and a wide variety of military gear. The board approached General Electric, and a company engineer, James Wright, was assigned to investigate the possibility of chemically synthesizing a cheaper, all-purpose rubber.

Working with boric acid and silicone oil, Wright succeeded in creating a rubber-like compound with highly unusual properties. The pliant goo stretched farther than rubber, rebounded 25 percent more than the best rubber ball, was impervious to molds and decay, and withstood a wide range of temperatures without decomposing. And it possessed the novel property, when flattened across newspaper print or a comic book image, of lifting the ink onto itself.

Unfortunately, Wright’s substance had no real industrial advantages over synthetic rubber, and it became an in-house curiosity at General Electric’s laboratory in New Haven, Connecticut. Dubbed “nutty putty,” it was demonstrated to visitors, and in 1945 the company mailed samples to several of the world’s leading engineers, challenging them to devise a practical use for the strange-behaving substance.

No scientist succeeded. Rather, it took a former advertising copywriter, Paul Hodgson, operating a New Haven toy store, to realize that the putty had a future not as an industrial marvel but as a marvelous toy.

Hodgson, who had recently moved from Montreal, had the good fortune to be at a New Haven party where a wad of nutty putty was demonstrated; it kept a group of adults amused for hours. Entering into an agreement with General Electric, Hodgson bought a large mass of the stuff for $147 and hired a Yale student to separate it into one-ounce balls, to be marketed inside colored plastic eggs. That year, 1949, Silly Putty outsold every other item in Hodgson’s toy store. And once mass-produced, it became an overnight novelty sensation, racking up sales during the ’50s and ’60s of over six million dollars a year.

Americans wrote to the manufacturer of their own uses for the substance: it collected cat fur and lint, cleaned ink and ribbon fiber from typewriter keys, lifted dirt from car seats, and placed under a leg, stabilized teetering furniture. Though the list was endless, no one then or now discovered a really practical application for the unsuccessful rubber substitute.

Slinky: Mid-1940s, United States

As Silly Putty was a failed war effort to develop an inexpensive rubber, Slinky, the spring that descends steps with grace, elegance, and stealth, was the failed attempt of an engineer to produce an antivibration device for ship instruments.

In the early 1940s, marine engineer Richard James was experimenting with various kinds of delicate, fast-responding springs. His goal was to develop a spring that would instantaneously counterbalance the wave motion that rocks a ship at sea. A set of such springs, strategically placed around a sensitive nautical instrument, would keep its needle gauges unaffected by pitching and yawing. In attempting to improve on existing antivibration devices, Richard James stumbled upon a fascinating toy.

One day in his home laboratory, James accidentally knocked an experimental
spring off a shelf. It did not fall summarily to the floor, but literally crawled, coil by coil, to a lower shelf, onto a stack of books, down to the tabletop, and finally came to rest, upright, on the floor. A quick experiment revealed that the spring was particularly adept at descending stairs. It was Richard James’s wife, Betty, who realized that her husband’s invention should be a toy. After two days of thumbing through a dictionary, she settled on what she felt was the best adjective in the English language to describe the spring’s snake-like motion: slinky.

Betty James still runs the company she founded with her husband in 1946 to market Slinkys. And in an unusual reversal of roles, Slinky the toy has been put to practical uses. Carried by communications soldiers in Vietnam, Slinky was tossed over a high tree branch as a makeshift radio antenna. Slinky was incorporated into a spring device used to pick pecans from trees. And Slinky has gone aloft in the space shuttle to test the effects of zero gravity on the physical laws that govern the mechanics of springs. In space, Slinky behaves like neither a spring nor a toy but as a continuously propagating wave.

Toys That Glow in the Dark: 1603, Italy

There are various toy amulets, as well as religious artifacts, made of a milky white plastic that, when exposed to light, then moved into darkness, glows a greenish white. That magical property was first produced, fittingly, by a seventeenth-century alchemist in a quest to transform base metals into gold.

Vincenzo Cascariolo was a cobbler in Bologna, Italy. Experimenting in the centuries-old tradition of alchemy, he sought the “philosopher’s stone” to transmute relatively worthless metals such as iron and copper into silver or gold. In 1603, Cascariolo combined barium sulfate with powdered coal, heated the mixture, spread it over an iron bar, and let the coating cool.

To his disappointment, the iron did not become gold. But when Cascariolo placed the coated bar on a darkened shelf for storage, he was astonished by its sudden glow. Though the light eventually faded, Cascariolo learned that repeated exposure to sun “reanimated” the bar. The alchemist believed that he had stumbled upon a means of capturing the sun’s golden rays; and his chemicals did briefly store a form of solar energy. He hailed his discovery as the first step in producing a philosopher’s stone.

Throughout Italy, his compound became known as
lapis solaris
, or “sun stone,” and it was a great novelty. Particularly with the clergy. Crucifixes, miniature icons of saints, and rosary beads were painted, varnished, and compounded with
lapis solaris
, to imbue them with eerie halos. The belief developed that prayers recited in the presence of a glowing amulet were more readily answered. And the market for objects that glowed in the dark expanded throughout Christian countries. The alchemist had not succeeded in transmuting iron to gold, but he had spawned a gold mine in religious
artifacts that would only lose their mysterious aura centuries later, when physicists explained how molecules absorb and radiate light through the process of chemiluminescence.

Roller Skates: 1759, Belgium

The first practical pair of roller skates, called
skaites
, was built by a Belgian musical instrument maker, Joseph Merlin, in 1759. Each skate had only two wheels, aligned along the center of the shoe, and Merlin constructed the skates in order to make a spectacular entrance at a costume party in the Belgian city of Huy. The crude design, which strapped to the feet, was based on the ice skates of Merlin’s day.

A master violinist, Merlin intended to roll into the party while playing his violin. Unfortunately, he had neglected to master the fine art of stopping on skates, and he crashed into a full-length mirror, breaking it and his violin; his entrance was indeed spectacular. Merlin’s accident underscored the technological drawback of all early “wheeled feet”: starting and stopping were not so much decisions of the skater as of the skates. The crude wheels, without ball bearings, resisted turning, then abruptly turned and resisted stopping, then jammed to a halt on their own.

When, in the 1850s, skate technology improved, roller skating began to compete in popularity with ice skating, though marginally at first. German composer Jakob Liebmann Beer, who achieved fame as Giacomo Meyerbeer, wrote a mid-1800s opera,
Le Prophète
, which contained an ice-skating scene that was performed on the improved roller skates. The opera was a great success in its own right, but many people attended to witness the much-publicized roller-skating scene. And an Italian ballet of the period,
Winter Pastimes; or, The Skaters
, choreographed and composed by Paul Taglioni, also became famous for its ice-skating episode executed on roller skates.

Interestingly, during these decades, roller skates were seldom depicted on stage as an entertainment themselves, but mimicked ice skating. Part of the reason was that until 1884, when ball-bearing wheels were introduced, roller skating was difficult, dangerous, and not a widely popular pastime.

Piggy Bank: 18th Century, England

Since dogs bury bones for a rainy day, and since they have been man’s best friend for fourteen thousand years, why not a dog-shaped bank for coins? Since horses were indispensable to the development of commerce and finance, why not a horse bank? On the other hand, squirrels are well-known hoarders, and we talk of “squirreling away” valuables; why not a bank in the shape of a squirrel?

Instead, for almost three hundred years, the predominant child’s bank has been a pig with a slot in its back. Pigs are not known for their parsimony. A proverb warns of the futility of attempting to make a silk purse from a
sow’s ear. And Scripture admonishes against throwing pearls to swine—as exemplified by dropping hard-earned cash into a piggy bank.

How did a pig come to symbolize the act of saving money? The answer is: by coincidence.

During the Middle Ages, mined metal was scarce, expensive, and thus rarely used in the manufacture of household utensils. More abundant and economical throughout Western Europe was a type of dense, orange clay known as
pygg
. It was used in making dishes, cups, pots, and jars, and the earthenware items were referred to as pygg.

Frugal people then as now saved cash in kitchen pots and jars. A “pygg jar” was not yet shaped like a pig. But the name persisted as the clay was forgotten. By the eighteenth century in England, pygg jar had become pig jar, or pig bank. Potters, not usually etymologists, simply cast the bank in the shape of its common, everyday name.

Firecrackers: 10th Century, China

Sparklers, flares, and full-fledged fireworks originated in tenth-century China, when a cook, toiling in a kitchen, mixed several ingredients and produced history’s first man-made explosion of sparks. It is often stated that the anonymous cook was attempting to produce a better gunpowder. But in fact, there was no such thing as gunpowder at that time. Moreover, it was the cook’s concoction—of sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter—that served as the Chinese origin of fireworks
and
gunpowder.

Historians have not determined what dish the cook was attempting to prepare. But the three above-mentioned ingredients, explosive when combined, were commonplace in a Chinese kitchen. Saltpeter, or potassium nitrate, served as preserving and pickling salt; sulfur was used to intensify the heat of a fire; and as fuel, charred firewood and coal provided an abundant source of charcoal.

The Chinese soon discovered that if the explosive ingredients were packed into hollowed-out bamboo, the confined explosion rocketed skyward, to spectacular effect. The accompanying light and bang proved perfect for ceremoniously frightening off evil spirits, and for celebrating weddings, victories, eclipses of the moon, and the New Year. The Chinese called their early fireworks “arrows of flying fire.”