How often do you spare a thought for the people who gave us the labor saving things we take for granted today? We all like devices that make our lives simpler and a lot of them are down to Americans like Thomas Alva Edison whose inventive genius changed the world forever.
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He came up with batteries as we know them, the microphone, early cinema cameras and, even the electric light-bulb amongst other things. He built the first commercial power station in 1882, and his ‘speaking machine’ of 1878 was the forerunner of the juke-box, but he wasn’t the only clever American around.
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In 1895, King Camp Gillette came up with a new way of shaving for men. Steel Manufacturers wouldn’t make his ‘blades’ so in 1901, he patented the idea and by 1905, he’d sold 90,000 razors and nearly 12.5 million blades.
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In 1907 Murray Spangler, a store janitor, constructed a device from a tin can, a broomstick, a flour sack and an electric motor, which could suck up dirt from the floor. He sold the rights to a leather manufacturer called Hoover, and they produced the first commercial model in 1908. By 1912, they’d opened a factory in Canada, and were even exporting to Europe.
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Henry Ford introduced the Model T in 1908, and by 1914 had it in mass production, the same year that Edison came up with the electric safety lamp. Though it was in 1899 that Mrs Cochran of Indiana first invented the dishwasher, it wasn’t until 1914 that the electric version came on to the market, fully forty years before Europeans began to use them.
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Mechanic Charles Strite was the man who dreamed up the electric toaster, and it was marketed by McGraw international of Minnesota as early as 1926. Motorala introduced car radios to the USA in 1930, and George C Blaisdell patented his world famous ‘Zippo’ lighter in 1932. Could he have guessed that over 300 million would be sold worldwide?
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Hoover introduced the first reliable steam iron in 1949 – though versions had been around the States since 1926, and the Motorala company introduced the radio pager in 1956.. The Iron City brewery of Pittsburg became the first drinks maker to sell beer cans with ring pulls in 1962.
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Texas Instruments produced the T1-92 pocket calculator in 1967(having invented the microchip nine years earlier), and Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak launched the first personal computer with colour screen and separate keyboard – the Apple II – in 1977.
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It was in this time that the US defense department decided it wanted a system of communication that could survive nuclear attack, using computers. The required system was developed, and the ‘internet’ was born, though the public version was still some years away.
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The USA has seen a century of discoveries ‘made in America’ that all of us treat as everyday things now and the quest for ‘something better’ is never-ending. With the famous US pioneering spirit as strong as it ever was, who knows what the next 100 years might bring? People like me can’t wait to find out.
