Inventions that Didn't Change the World Read online

  Pseudo-scientific names were often attached to the names of objects, presumably to impart a sense of gravitas. Examples include the ‘Epanalepsian Advertizing Vehicle’, the ‘Pedo-manu-motive’ (for grinding mills), and the ‘Amphitrepolax Boot’. Objects are often described as ‘improved’ (the ‘Improved Pickle Fork’, the ‘Improved Sausage Machine’), ‘economic’ (an ‘Improved Economic Button for Ladies Wear’) or ‘portable’ – all considered selling points. A look at the designs described as ‘portable’ tells us the word then had a different connotation, as clearly items such as the ‘Portable Economic Fire proof Building’, the ‘Portable Sheep House’ and the ‘Portable Smelting Apparatus’ could not be picked up and carried. The term can refer to objects that could be taken apart and reassembled elsewhere, or to equipment that could be towed to different sites of work. Portable forges, kilns and similar equipment could be used in the building of railways, in quarrying and mining, and on the battlefield, where military blacksmiths and farriers were employed to shoe horses and repair equipment.

  “THRIFT IS THE BASIS OF SELF-HELP, AND THE FOUNDATION OF MUCH THAT IS EXCELLENT IN CHARACTER.”

  SAMUEL SMILES, THRIFT, 1875

  Many inventors attempted to find solutions to small everyday problems, many of which have long ceased to be an issue. Top hats, worn by most men throughout the nineteenth century, posed various problems, notably related to over-heated heads and storage. The ‘Design for a boot or shoe warmer’, and the lethal-looking ‘Portable Bed Warmer’ remind us of the problems of keeping cosy in unheated Victorian homes. The ‘Spring Bible and Prayer Case’, which ‘obviates the necessity of a ribbon’ for removing the book from the case, suggests the need for urgent moral guidance of a kind few of us turn to today.

  Other items that at first sound pointless make more sense when the proprietor’s occupation is known. The ‘Combined Knife and Fork’, which sounds like an attempt to improve on an already perfectly good system, was registered by surgical instrument makers, and was presumably intended to help amputees. Whereas now inventions are the province of specially trained engineers, in the nineteenth century they were often thought up by people who would have used them within their own professions. The ‘Mechanical Poultry Feeder’, for example, was designed by a cook, and the ‘Pneumatic Inhaler’ by a surgeon. Items with a combination of functions seem to have been particularly popular, reflecting a fondness for small, ingenious objects – the ‘Cigar-Holding Pencil Case Knife’ is just one example.

  In the nineteenth century anyone who had an idea that might solve a problem or speed up a task could come up with a technical solution. Inventors were ingenious, imaginative, sometimes misguided, but, in the unexpected world of Victorian inventions, ever hopeful.

  Note to reader: All titles for illustrations marked with an asterisk (*) denote provisional registration only.

  1 Michael Snodin and John Styles, Design & the Decorative Arts: Victorian Britain 1837–1902, London: V&A Publications, 2004, p. 122.

  2 Herbert Sussman, Victorian Technology: Invention, Innovation and the Rise of the Machine, Oxford: Praeger, 2009, p. 74.

  3 Sessional Papers of the House of Lords, XVI, 1851, pp. 456–58, quoted in H. I. Dutton, The Patent System and Inventive Activity During the Industrial Revolution 1750–1852, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984, p. 34.

  4 H. I. Dutton, The Patent System and Inventive Activity During the Industrial Revolution 1750–1852, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984, p. 35.

  5 J. Halls, ‘Questions of attribution: registered designs at The National Archives’, Journal of Design History 26(4), p. 417.

  6 T. Turner, On Copyright in Design in Art and Manufactures, London: F. Elsworth, 1851, p. 24.

  7 J. Farey, 1829 Select Committee on Patents, 141, quoted in Brad Sherman and Lionel Bently, The Making of Modern Intellectual Property Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 88.

  8 Brad Sherman and Lionel Bently, The Making of Modern Intellectual Property Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 92.

  9 Turner, op. cit., p. 45.

  10 Dutton, op. cit., pp. 86–88.

  DESIGN FOR A SOMAPANTIC BATH

  1848

  The shape of the bath means that much less water is required to cover the body when in a recumbent position than when an ordinary bath is used.

  The word ‘gadget’ originated in the nineteenth century, and nowhere was the Victorian love of gadgets more apparent than in the home. As large-scale industrial inventions changed work and society beyond recognition, a host of less eminent inventors were inspired to produce ingenious domestic objects. Some of these have stood the test of time better than others – who now, for example, soaks in a ‘Somapantic Bath’ or uses a ‘“Jack” for putting on and pulling off Boots’?

  The spread of industry meant that factories were now mass-producing objects for the home more quickly and cheaply than ever before. Commodities previously available only to the rich were now much more widely affordable. At the same time social changes, especially the rise of the middle classes, led to a huge increase in consumerism. Britain had become the wealthiest nation in the world, thanks to its industrial dominance and the income generated by the colonies. The middle classes in particular benefited from this wealth. Not surprisingly, the poorer classes spent a lot of their income on housing and food, but even in the poorest households status was marked by the ability to possess goods.

  People were anxious that their homes should reflect their social status, and this meant conspicuous consumption and ostentatious display – the acquisition of ‘things’. Wealth began to be measured by the possession of material goods, as the machine had made commodities inexpensive and more widely available.1 Ever-changing fashions and a demand for novelty added to the huge numbers of items being manufactured for the home.

  The range of objects with which the house could be decorated and equipped meant that the question of taste became a matter of intense discussion and debate. Correct etiquette, immensely important, was also a source of great anxiety, especially among the upwardly mobile. To assuage – or perhaps feed – these anxieties, advice books and journals proliferated, aimed at readers at different social levels and with a range of incomes. What to choose became a fraught area – living up to your station was as important as not being thought pretentious. The influential lifestyle writer Mary Stickney Ellis thought it: ‘Scarcely necessary…to point out…the loss of character and influence occasioned by living below our station’.2 Small things mattered: for example, another writer of advice books, Jane Ellen Panton, felt that if well decorated, the hallway would ‘disclose immediately to the eyes of the caller that here is the abode of people who care for their home, and who wish it to be pretty, and who thus denote that they are worth cultivating, for no doubt they will turn out to be desirable friends’.3 People were socially categorized, and the items that they owned helped to signal their place in the hierarchy.4

  Design for a Knife and Fork Cleaner, 1846

  The gallery of manufactures at the Great Exhibition of 1851 showcased the rise of consumerism in the machine age. In the ‘metallic, vitreous and ceramic’ section, for example, the subdivision of ‘cutlery and edge tools’ displayed the metal knives and tableware of Sheffield; other cities specialized in different products, as specialist suppliers and skilled labour congregated together. The cutlery section contained a multitude of utensils used by middle-class Victorian diners – fish knives and fish forks, fish carvers, game carvers, dessert knives and dessert forks.5

  This plethora of dining accoutrements helped to make dinner parties, always an opportunity to display taste and propriety, even more of a minefield. They were the most popular middle-class social event, with consequences for the host’s reputation.6 According to advice writer Mrs Loftie, there was heated debate over ‘the knife and fork question’. On forks, she writes, ‘the “three-prongians” hold their own against the “four-prongians”, except in the matter of y
oung peas’.7 The designs for extendable dinner tables also reflected the desire to entertain on a certain scale even within a smaller home.

  Design for an Extending Table, 1853

  “THERE IS A SERIOUS QUESTION ANXIOUSLY DEBATED AT MANY DINNER PARTIES AS TO THE SUPERIORITY OF THREE PRONGS TO FOUR.”

  MRS LOFTIE, ART AT HOME, 1876

  Design for Bar of Soap, 1865

  This increase in the number of objects meant that there were many more things to keep clean. Other factors also made housekeeping difficult. Coal stoves and fireplaces meant that soot and black dust within the house were a constant problem. To avoid airborne infections and dirt brought in from outside, doctors recommended that curtains be replaced with blinds that could be wiped down. Many houses had both curtains and blinds: the blinds had the added advantage of preventing carpets and curtains from fading.8

  Although a challenge, keeping a clean, ordered house was considered a sign of moral rectitude. Since a respectable wife could not be seen to do too much around the house, servants were needed. Not everyone could afford servants who were properly trained, or even full-time, but many employed a workhouse child, or a charwoman, to come in from time to time. The wife of an assistant surgeon in 1859 said: ‘I must not do our household work, or carry my baby out: or I should lose caste. We must keep a servant’. It is estimated that in London between 1851 and 1871 around 60 per cent of the population had at least one servant.9 The plethora of new objects created not only a need for servants but also a market for labour-saving devices: the registered designs include early attempts to save on washing up in the form of knife and fork cleaners – which appear more labour intensive than the conventional method.

  The nineteenth century saw other major developments within the home, some of which had effects far beyond questions of social status. The most important of these was improved sanitation. By the 1840s people were becoming aware of the link between poor sanitation and contagious disease, although the mechanism for this was not understood (see chapter V).

  The increasing popularity of flush lavatories (the word was used by the Victorians to mean the place where they washed – the object itself was known as a water closet) exacerbated the problem of polluted drinking water and the consequent spread of waterborne diseases such as cholera. By the 1840s water closets were commonly built in wealthy districts; the contents went into the drainage system, which discharged into the rivers – a major source of the population’s drinking water. Many rivers in urban districts became, in effect, open sewers. This famously culminated in what became known as the Great Stink of 1858, when the smell from the Thames was so atrocious that members of the House of Commons considered relocating upstream to Hampton Court. Curtains coated in chloride of lime were hung to try to counteract the problem.

  Many people experienced a flush water closet for the first time at the Great Exhibition. They were a source of great interest, so much so that Parliamentary Papers concluded that they ‘strongly impressed all concerned in the management with the necessity of making similar provisions for the public wherever large numbers are congregated, and with the sufferings which must be endured by all, but more especially by females, on account of the want of them’.10

  In the early days water closets were malodorous and unhygienic, and for that reason they were often positioned in extensions at the back of the house.11 As the designs shown here suggest, these problems taxed many engineers. One of the best known of these was Thomas Crapper, who introduced a very successful improved flushing system in 1861 (‘a certain flush with every pull’).

  For much of the first half of the nineteenth century most houses either had a well with a pump in the scullery, or more often a water tank or barrel kept full from a neighbourhood pump or standpipe. Middle-class homes in urban and suburban areas had a cistern that was regularly filled by a waterman with a horse-drawn water cart. By the middle of the century most middle-class homes would have had access to running water, although the system was intermittent, with water often only provided for two hours a day and, until 1872, never on Sundays.12

  Until the 1870s, the middle and upper classes would wash in their bedroom or dressing room, at a washstand on which stood a basin and ewer. Water would be brought up from the kitchen, bucket by bucket. From the 1840s more expensive properties began to pipe hot water upstairs, and by the 1870s hot-water pipes began to appear in middle-class homes. However, soaking in hot water was viewed as morally suspect: baths of a similar shape to our own were used for vague therapeutic purposes, with bathers being referred to as ‘patients’.

  Design for a Self-Acting Water Closet, 1849

  Many commentators recommended daily cold baths.13 Separate bathrooms and water closets increased in popularity as the century progressed, and by the 1880s they were installed in many homes. There was some distaste for sharing the bathroom, and it was often used by everyone but the lady of the house, who continued to use the washstand in her bedroom.14 By the end of the century, gas geysers were often used to heat water in bathrooms. Like early kitchen ranges, they were dangerous and prone to explode.

  Although the shower, or shower-bath, did not arrive in middle-class homes until the 1890s, there are some very early examples of the shower concept among the registered designs. They used cold water contained in a tank – a cord was pulled to release a rush of water onto the user’s head. Even at the end of the century it seems there was still some way to go before showering became an enjoyable experience. In her memoir of childhood, the engraver Gwen Raverat described the family bathroom, which ‘had a sort of grotto containing a shower-bath at one end; this was lined with as many different stops as the organ in King’s Chapel. And it was as difficult to control as it would be for an amateur to play that organ.’15

  Omnidirective Shower Bath, 1843

  “PIERCING JETS OF BOILING, OR ICE-COLD, WATER CAME ROARING AT ONE FROM THE MOST UNEXPECTED ANGLES, AND HIT ONE IN THE TENDEREST SPOTS.”

  GWEN RAVERAT, PERIOD PIECE, 1952

  Changes in lighting, too, had an impact on home life. At the beginning of the century candles were the main source of illumination, until oil for lamps became more affordable. Oil lamps remained popular throughout the century, although their smoke created yet more soot inside the house. Gas lighting was used as early as 1798 in factories, and it was commonly used in cities for street lighting and in public places by the middle of the century. It began to be used in middle-class homes around the 1840s, and had many advantages – for example, evening parlour games became very popular. However, it was also dirty, emitting fumes which could damage household items, as well as depleting oxygen, causing problems such as headaches and fainting. Gas explosions were a common cause of household accidents. The aspidistra famously became popular at this period because it was one of the few plants that could survive gas in the atmosphere. Paraffin was discovered in the United States in 1859. It was safe, clean and gave a good light, and paraffin lamps became very popular. Electric lighting was introduced in the 1880s, but was rarely used until the invention of the modern tungsten filament bulb in 1907.16

  Design for a Hot Water Circulator suitable for Horticultural Domestic and other purposes, 1844

  As well as having a greater disposable income, the Victorians began to separate their world into the public sphere of work and trade, and a private sphere of home life and domesticity. More and more, work was moving outside the home; for example, piecework, which was produced at home, changed to factory work, and professionals such as doctors and lawyers worked in offices rather than from home.17 Those who could afford it moved to the suburbs to escape the disease, pollution and overcrowding of the city.

  Although city homes had gardens – the lifestyle guru Mrs Haweis wrote a book called Rus in Urbe: or Flowers that thrive in London Gardens and Smoky Towns18 – it was with the advent of suburban life that gardening became a popular middle-class recreation. There was general agreement that gardening was a virtuous, and even Christian, activity, the seasona
l growth of plants being the work of God. The middle classes encouraged gardening among the working classes, believing it would keep them out of the pubs, reduce political unrest and improve their morals. Allotment societies were promoted and horticultural societies set up: by the end of the century a garden was considered an essential part of life.19 This gave scope for ingenious outdoor inventions, including gadgets for picking hard-to-reach fruit and flowers, tools for pruning, new ways to water the plants, and a device for killing insects on trees that looks as if only a gymnast could successfully put it in place.

  Improvements in lighting, sanitation and the move towards suburban living transformed the character of many homes over the course of the nineteenth century. From candlelight, cesspools and a relatively restricted number of household objects at the beginning of the century, to electricity, indoor bathrooms and a host of labour-saving devices, the home became the focal point of family life – and the showcase for new inventions, large and small.