Joke of the Day (Pete Lee, on the Inventor of the Ceiling Fan)

“I feel bad for the guy who invented the ceiling fan, because you know the first time he saw a helicopter, he was like, ‘Oh man, I could have done that!’” —Comic Pete Lee quoted in “Joke of the Week,” TimeOut New York, April 24-30, 2014

This Day in Literary History (Twain’s Financial Folly)

January 5, 1889—Witnessing what he saw as an advance in movable type, Mark Twain became even more gripped by the irrational exuberance that so often overcame him in money matters. Healthy profits from his prolific writing and extensive lecturing were no longer enough for him; he needed more to sustain his lavish lifestyle. Within a half-dozen years, the master chronicler of what he called “The Gilded Age” would be pushed to the brink of financial ruin.

The author recorded the demonstration breathlessly in a notebook: “EUREKA! Saturday, January 5, 1889-12.20 P.M. At this moment I have seen a line of movable type spaced and justified by machinery! This is the first time in the history of the world that this amazing thing has ever been done. Present: J. W. Paige, the inventor; Charles Davis, Mathematical assistants Earll and mechanical Graham experts Bates, foreman, and S. L. Clemens. This record is made immediately after the prodigious event.”

Two days later he made another note about the “first proper name ever set by this new keyboard”: Shakespeare (which he owned up to misspelling, without one of the e's).

You can see the invention that bewitched and bankrupted the great satirist in the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut. Visiting the site several years ago, I saw on display the Paige compositor, intended to be the fastest printing machine ever made. Only two models of this 7,550-pound typesetting device were even made, since it failed in pre-production tests. With 18,000 moving parts, the machine is so complicated that it has never been taken apart, for fear it might never be put together again. By his own estimate, Twain sunk $150,000 into the invention over an 11-year period, and some biographers put his losses as high as $300,000. (In today’s currency, estimates run as high as $3 million.)

It was only natural that Twain’s financial folly took root in Hartford. Unlike the present-day capital of Connecticut, the city following the Civil War was bustling, featuring the largest subscription-publishing base in the U.S., as well as the insurance, banking and manufacturing industries. It immediately seized Twain’s affection as "the best built and handsomest town I have ever seen."

A close-knit group of local intellectuals known as Nook Farm centered around a tony suburb just beyond the western boundary of Hartford. Its members included Twain’s journalist friend, Charles Dudley Warner; John Hooker, a descendant of Connecticut's founder; and sisters Isabella and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Nook Farm provided Twain with the appreciation he couldn't find elsewhere on the East Coast. His flamboyant appearance (a matching sealskin coat and hat with the fur outside) and irreverent talk left the literary establishment cold in Boston. But Nook Farm quickly recognized his talent.

Entrance into the Nook Farm circle, however, came with a price. Nearly every member struggled to live up to the living standards of their upscale city. Twain’s house cost $125,000 to build (more than a million dollars in today's terms), soaking up his considerable earnings from books and lectures and his wife's inheritance. (After initial coldness, Twain’s father-in-law, a railroad entrepreneur, had ended up bankrolling their first home in Buffalo, all the way down to paying for uniforms for their butler and coachman. It gave the writer an unfortunate taste for easy living.)

Maintaining the Hartford house and entertaining guests (who regularly received champagne and fillets of beef) taxed Twain's resources. Even worse, technological get-rich-quick schemes were absorbing his earnings without any prospect of reward. (Twain was not enamored of every bit of technology. A closet in the house, for instance, contains a phone—an instrument that bedeviled him. In heights of exasperation, he referred to the operator as "the hello girl," and kept a report card on the wall in the closet to remind the phone company of its shortcomings.)

Twain was involved with one patent that made money, in 1874: a self-pasting scrapbook. Thereafter, he invested in profit-losing enterprise after another: one-handed grape shears, a historical game, a perpetual calendar, a “bed-clasp” for keeping babies’ blankets in place, even a hand grenade that could extinguish fires.

But the compositor got into his blood. Unlike these other products, it involved his passion for print, dating back to his years as a teenage printing apprentice back in Missouri. The invention by New England mechanic-inventor James Paige would have transformed the then-laborious process of preparing words for typing into something more automatic, closer to a typewriter. As an author and principal in a publishing company (one that had recently published Ulysses S. Grant’s acclaimed Personal Memoirs), he saw huge, ongoing value in this.

It was not to be. Instead of providing him with the security that would make him see the novel on which he worked that year, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, as his literary "swan song," the project became a financial sinkhole, prompting the author and would-be venture capitalist to exclaim, “I have never been so desperate in my life, and for good reason, for I haven’t got a penny to my name.” (In the uncensored version of his autobiography, he also desired what he viewed as appropriate retribution for Paige: having his testicles put in a vise.)

The failure of the project forced Twain to sell his cherished 19-room red Hartford mansion—the home where he created Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn—and go on a lecture tour to recoup his fortune and, to his credit, repay other investors in the project. It also inaugurated the final, dark period of his life, as he faced continuing financial problems owing to expired copyrights for his books and the deaths of his beloved wife and two of his three daughters.

This Day in Presidential History (Lincoln Awarded Patent)

May 22, 1849—Patent #6469 was not just any technological scheme. It wasn’t every day, either then or now, that an ex-congressman is awarded this. It’s even rarer when the aspiring inventor is a future American President: Abraham Lincoln.

Jason Emerson’s article in the Winter 2009 issue of American Heritage of Invention and Technology spotlights in fascinating detail how Lincoln conceived the idea of a “device to buoy vessels over shoals,” a technological solution for a problem he had witnessed himself while traveling by steamboat along the Great Lakes from Buffalo to Chicago.

Amazingly, Lincoln was the first—and to this day, the only—U.S. President to be awarded a patent. The reason for this singular phenomenon is worth a short explanation.

If pressed to guess, I would have bet that Herbert Hoover, trained as an engineer, or Jimmy Carter, a longtime peanut farmer and onetime sailor on a nuclear sub who served under Admiral Hyman Rickover, might have tried their hand at this. But that evidently was not the case.

The most likely candidates before Lincoln, of course, were Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. But the Virginia grandees came from a culture in which a disinterested concern for the public weal—or, at least, pretensions to that—dominated. (In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin, retired from business and intent on carving out a public career, likewise placed philanthropy over profit.)

Emerson traces Lincoln’s interest in the invention to Honest Abe’s experience as a 22-year-old riverboat hand and captain in 1831, when a flatboat he was handling went aground just below New Salem, Ill. 

Though that experience gave him a personal sense of the difficulties of transporting goods and people, he had already demonstrated a vital interest in the subject the year before—when, in his first known potential speech—he advocated improving navigation on the Sangamon River.

I wonder, too, if his interest in technology might not have dated back even further, to childhood and adolescence. I’m talking here about his problematic relationship with his father, Thomas Lincoln.

As most schoolkids know (they used to, anyway), young Abe Lincoln read every chance he could get. This did not please his father, who didn’t see the point of it, especially when there were all manner of chores to be done.

Far from being lazy, Abe was just mentally disengaged from the menial tasks of life on the frontier, even though he excelled at many of them (his nickname “The Railsplitter” was not just campaign hype). 

I’ll bet any money that, as his mind wandered at night before he fell off to sleep, he wondered if there might not be something that could relieve him of his drudgery. This would, among other things:

* free up his time so he could pursue something potentially more lucrative than farming or riverboating, such as the law;
* earn him a considerable sum if the invention caught on; and
* improve the material prospects of his father, a rolling stone who exasperated his son with his inability to get economic traction in his life.

Lincoln’s failure to promote his invention mystifies Emerson. I don’t think this is difficult to imagine—many technical types are more fascinated by how to create a product than how to sell it. But if that is an insufficient explanation for Lincoln’s inaction, here are some other reasons that could account for it:

* The hope that the incoming Taylor administration, ingratitude for his tireless stumping on its behalf in the last Presidential election, would appoint this one-term Congressman as a commissioner of the General Land Office (it didn’t happen—he was tossed the bone of territorial governor of Oregon, which he refused);
* The need to re-establish his law practice in Springfield; or
* The two-month illness and eventual death of his three-year-old son Edward, which would have plunged the melancholic Lincoln into grief—and have an even more devastating effect on his wife.

Though he did not follow up on his own invention, Lincoln became vitally interested in technology, especially patent law, in the next decade. 

On a few occasions, he delivered a “Discoveries and Inventions” lecture in which he spoke of the importance of patents: “The patent system adds the fuel of interest to the fire of genius.” He would take on five different patent cases, including one involving Cyrus McCormick and his reaper.

History aficionados find in Lincolniana an inexhaustible mother lode of arcana about America’s second-greatest President (Washington, I think, ranks first). Honest Abe’s tinkering is just one other aspect of this.

He may not have pursued his dream of technological success, but in the end he came up with a far more important invention: a Second American Republic, free of slavery and open to anyone able to earn whatever he wants by the sweat of his brow, especially young people like himself who dream in the dark about a better life for themselves.

This Day in Invention History (Zip-Pid-Dee-Doo-Dah for the “Clasp Locker”)

August 29, 1893—More often than not, a major element of modern life takes a while to evolve—and seldom more so than in the case of the humble but necessary zipper, which on this date took a step forward with the patenting of a “clasp locker.”

Millions put pants on every day without a clue how the essential mechanism that holds it together came into being. Oh, sure, we know that back in the Stone Age, some hirsute Neanderthals went around in furs that would never have made it onto anyone’s best-dressed list, sort of like the not-yet-evolved man-apes running around at the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey. But aside from that, we guys assume that this apparatus was always there. I mean, really—after George Washington had quenched his thirst with a mug of rum (his favorite drinks: rum-laced eggnog and rum punch), how was he supposed to take care of his bodily functions?

The first step toward the zipper as we know it occurred in 1851, when Elias Howe patented an “Automatic, Continuous Clothing Closure.”

A-Triple C. I love the sound of that! With a talent for snappy abbreviations, Howe might have made a great sports-page editor, conjuring up an athlete’s major qualities in pungent initials, or maybe he’d be even better as a Washington bureaucrat during the New Deal, when alphabet-soup agencies were all the rage (AAA, CCC, NRA, TVA, FCC, CWA, ad infinitum).

But instead he was a 19th-century Yankee, grimly focused on rescuing women like his wife, who had taken on sewing work in a desperate attempt to pay the family’s bills when he had become sick. He couldn’t think about the next invention when he was busy battling predators who disregarded his patent on his one for the sewing machine. So the A-Triple C would have to wait.

Fast forward 42 years. There was a guy with a back so balky that it wouldn’t let him tie his shoes. Only this guy had a Chicago buddy, Whitcomb L. Judson, who was really handy, with a dozen patents—and not just little stuff, but things like motors and railroad braking systems. If he could do so much for so many people, Judson surely realized, why couldn’t he help a pal?

So he set to work on an alternative to those lengthy, godawful shoelaces in men’s and women’s boots of the time. The result: a “clasp locker.”

“Did it work?” you ask. Well, to paraphrase a guy in the news again this week: It depends on what your definition of “work” is.

Okay, so the device—a complicated hook-and-eye fastener—jammed sometimes. I suppose, under certain circumstances, that could be considered a problem, like if you wanted to get somewhere in a hurry. Maybe that accounted for why, when Judson displayed the item at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago that year, people were curious, but not really agog. But come on—it did work well enough that Judson and his business associate, Col. Lewis Walker, sewed it into their own booths.

Still, the firm that Judson and Walker formed, Universal Fastener, didn’t really run to the races in the 16 years between the patent and Judson’s death. It took another Universal Fastener employee, a Swedish-born inventor named Gideon Sundback, to come up with a refinement.

It came about like this: The death of Sundback’s wife plunged him into a deep depression. Now, if his story had been filmed by Ingmar Bergman, the picture would have grown progressively more somber and grayer until, in the last reel, if you were still awake or not yet committed to a year’s worth of psychoanalysis, you would have noticed the light had completely gone out of the frame.

But this was the early 20th century, which took many of its precepts from American President Theodore Roosevelt, himself once a grief-stricken young widower who had gone off to the Dakotas after his wife and mother had died within 24 hours of each other.

In other words, Sundback got busy.

By 1913, he had come up with a “hookless fastener.” The device, featuring interlocking “teeth,” is pretty much the one we know today, but for a few refinements.

Which refinements? Well, like the word “zipper” itself. It came about by accident, when an executive at B.F. Goodrich, which decided to make galoshes with Sundback’s fasteners, slid the fastener up and down the boot saying, “zip ‘er up,” imitating the sound he heard—and giving birth to what was, for a time, a trademark. It wasn’t until the 1930s that the term began to be used for other kinds of apparel, spearheaded by French fashion designers acclaiming its use in men’s trousers.

At one point in the “Battle of the Fly” between the zipper and the button, Esquire Magazine even went so far as to claim that with the zipper, men would not have to experience “The Possibility of Unintentional and Embarrassing Disarray.” This, of course, was before the concept of a male wardrobe disaster had sunk into the collective consciousness.