(5 of 9)
Barbed Wire & Waffles. While some inventors, like Thomas Edison, who patented the light bulb, the phonograph and more than 1,500 other ideas, became legendary figures, others went unsung, though their inventions became household necessities. One of the most prolific and original inventive thinkers of the 19th century was a Quaker tinkerer named Walter Hunt. He put his ideas to work only when he needed to get out of debt. In 1849 ne sat down with a piece of wire and a pair of tweezers, in three hours devised the safety pin. He sold it for $400. He also invented a velocipede and a sewing machine. When his 15-year-old daughter said that the machine would put thousands of seamstresses out of business —a cry that has echoed, usually falsely, after many a new invention—the kind-hearted Hunt junked his project. (He lived to see Elias Howe patent essentially the same machine years later.) A De Kalb, 111. farmer, Joseph Farwell Glidden, did more than anyone to help farmers settle the West; he invented barbed wire, a cheap and easy way to keep cattle off freshly tilled land. An ice-cream vendor ran out of plates at the St. Louis World's Fair, asked Syrian Wafflemaker Ernest Hawmi in the booth next door to help him out. Hawmi twirled a waffle into the first cone to hold ice cream.
The flood tide of 19th century inventiveness was so great that as early as 1843 a patent commissioner, Henry L. Ellsworth, in his annual report cried: "The advancement of the arts taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end." When the Depression came in the '305, the pessimists echoed the words, talked about the "mature economy," the end of the era of "economic development," the beginning of the era of "economic maintenance."
Swords & Plowshares. Then World War II, mobilizing the nation's resources, produced a shower of new products. Many of them carried over into the civilian economy, from DDT and high-octane gasoline (which made possible the high-compression engine) to a vegetable tanning agent that took the combat-dangerous squeak out of shoes. In an age of increasingly technical warfare, the U.S. military has become godfather for many a new product that later finds its way into civilian life.
When the war ended, the economists, who almost to a man had predicted a depression, were confounded again. They thought that the world's mightiest industrial machine, built up to fight the war, would rust away from too little to do in a peacetime economy. What they failed to foresee was that all of U.S. industry, not just the foresighted few as in the past, would embrace the idea of new products as a way to grow. Research became a magic word, the research scientist a wanted man, the laboratory search for new products a conscious program and "planned obsolescence" the magic new policy for growth. The breakthroughs since World War II's end cut across the whole scope of U.S. industry.
The Mustard Seed. What was the greatest postwar industrial breakthrough of all? Plastics? Nuclear energy? Most experts agree that it was neither of these, but the transistor, a speck of silicon or germanium with spider-wire legs, no bigger than the Biblical mustard seed, from which has sprouted the great tree of the electronics industry.