Crazy About Invention
Some inventors are better left unsung, for example Fred H. Brown. He was the creator of the “vibrochord,” an impressive agglomeration of electrical wires, coils, and magnets that linked a musical instrument—a piano or perhaps a guitar or trombone—to a listener’s body. It flooded his system with “waves of harmony” and thereby cured “insomnia, hysteria, nervous prostration, rheumatism and numerous other ailments.” Or consider Ernesto Finelli, of New York City. He proposed to eliminate injuries to pedestrians wandering into the path of automobiles by equipping cars with a giant clamp that would snatch up potential victims and clasp them to the radiator. (Tests showed, he conceded, that they would still get something of a jolt.) And then there was the Philadelphia physician who devised an X-ray procedure to turn blacks into whites. “After the tenth treatment the complexion of a very black negro turned to a light chestnut color,” said an account of his work, “and by prolonging the treatment an olive tint was obtained.”
These offerings from the lunatic fringe of technology found their way into the pages of Popular Mechanics magazine in the early decades of this century. Together with the less harebrained schemes among which they were sprinkled, they constitute a chronicle of the enduring fondness of Americans for machines and gadgets. That affection may be fraying under the pressures of late-twentieth-century life—one can scarcely imagine the father of the vibrochord attending a recent symposium on “technology and pessimism”—but the magazine still harbors what John Linkletter, its current editor, calls our “eternal optimism that mechanical things will solve all problems.”
When Popular Mechanics first appeared, in 1902, it offered visions of wondrous machines hurtling across land and sky, cutaway views of submarines and ocean liners, elaborate instructions for making everything from a Morris chair to an airplane, and news of the latest devices for building muscles or doing the dishes. Seldom did it question whether the marvels that unfolded in its pages each month were for the good, and neither did its readers.
The magazine was the creation of a Midwestern trade journalist who yearned for broader horizons. Henry Haven Windsor, the son of a clergyman, was born in Iowa in 1859 (the present editor is also the son of an Iowa minister). A round-faced, earnest, ambitious sort, Windsor dabbled in printing and smalltown newspapering as a youth, attended Grinnell College, and eventually established himself in Chicago as the publisher and editor of three trade magazines— Street Railway Review, Brick, and Rural Free Delivery News . Windsor liked writing about such concrete, nuts-and-bolts subjects, but he craved livelier material and a wider audience. By the turn of the century he was making plans for a publication that would keep laymen abreast of all the amazing scientific and mechanical developments of the day. It would prosper, he was convinced, if it was written in straightforward, nontechnical language and was heavily illustrated.
If Popular Mechanics was not an overnight success, it came close. The first issue —sixteen pages with a picture of the interior of a submarine on the cover—went to five mail subscribers and sold a few hundred copies on news-stands. A year later circulation was twenty thousand and rising fast. By the end of the first decade of Popular Mechanics , almost half a million copies were being sold each month, and issues were fat with ads for Ingersoll dollar watches, waterproofed linen collars, motorcycles, and correspondence courses guaranteed to turn fifteen-dollar-a-week clerks into thirty-dollar-a-week tycoons. One of Windsor’s most successful circulation-building tactics was to offer a new mail wagon to any rural postman who enrolled a hundred new subscribers.
Popular Mechanics made Windsor a rich man. He had a palatial summer home in Maine, a winter home in Florida, and a ninety-foot yacht. But he edited Popular Mechanics until his death in 1924 and never lost touch with the interests of his readers—people who, as a later editor put it, had the “type of mind that likes to know what is under the hood of an automobile.”
Popular Mechanics caught the crest of a wave of technological advance. Telephones, phonographs, and movies were still becoming established in its early years. Automobiles, airplanes, the wireless, and electric appliances were in their infancy. X-rays were just coming into use, and radium was an intriguing novelty (it would look nice in jewelry, Popular Mechanics suggested in 1904).
False starts and dead ends accompanied the solid achievements. In a 1910 attempt to make movies talk, reported the magazine, actors shouted dialogue from behind the screen. The Navy built a submarine that ran along the ocean bottom on wheels, and a lawyer designed a vessel consisting of a huge cylinder that would roll across the ocean powered by locomotives running around the inner wall on endless rails. The “roller boat” never got beyond the model stage, but it was part of the rich lode of material that Popular Mechanics mined.
From the start, automobiles were an editorial passion. That the gasoline-powered auto would win out over electrics and steamers soon became clear, and in 1903 the newspaper columnist Arthur Brisbane contributed an article predicting that “in less than fifty years from now the working man, the mechanic and the laborer will go to their work from their cottages in the country in automobiles.” Beyond that, though, it was anyone’s guess what shape cars would take. Among the notions put forth over the years were cars with the steering wheel in the back seat and automobiles steered with pedals. There were also cars with papier-mâche bodies, cars with leather tires, cars that swept the road before them clear of nails, and cars that sucked up the dust they trailed behind. Each new use for the automobile was hailed —the “automobile fire car,” the “war automobile,” the “automobile house,” as a 1903 camper was called, and the combined “automobile funeral coach and chapel.”
Popular Mechanics was uncertain about the future of flight for some time, not knowing whether lighter- or heavier-than-air craft would prevail. One reason for this may have been that it wasn’t fully known why the heavier-than-air variety flew. An article that appeared in 1904, the year after the Wrights’ first powered flights, compared an airplane to a “stone which is flung into the air, and which, by means of its propellers, keeps propelling itself with a force equal to the initial throw.”
Airships, on the other hand, had gasbags, and people could see what kept them aloft. One of their leading American proponents around the turn of the century was “Professor” Carl E. Myers, who traveled the country demonstrating his “skycycles,” balloons shaped like elongated lemons that could be navigated after a fashion by a rudder plus a propeller turned by pedals or a small gasoline engine. Initially Popular Mechanics paid more attention to Myers than to the Wrights. Henry Windsor was among those awed as airships grew ever larger (they ultimately exceeded eight hundred feet in length). He described the sight of a German Zeppelin: “As it comes up through a valley with mountain peaks on either side it moves toward one with an approach like a cloud driven before a gale.” In 1912 a writer named Victor Lougheed, in an article titled “The Fallacy of the Dirigible,” insisted that further investment in airships was a waste because they could not buck strong winds. But Popular Mechanics , along with the public, was a long time in shaking its fascination with the majestic vessels.
Even Wilbur Wright had doubts about practical applications for the airplane, suggesting in 1909 that its only use might be as a scout or messenger in war. The next year a former naval officer serving in Congress told Popular Mechanics readers that just as “an eagle cannot fight a lion, neither can an aeroplane fight a battleship.” But also in 1909, Bleriot flew the Channel, and Popular Mechanics later carried his account: “I begin my flight, steady and sure, toward the coast of England. … The French torpedo boat has seen me.… She makes perhaps 26 miles an hour. What matters? I am making at least 421/2 miles. Rapidly, I overtake her.…”
The next year Popular Mechanics printed instructions for fashioning bamboo, silk, and piano wire into the Demoiselle, a tiny monoplane as delicate as a butterfly. “A good place to start would be the vertical rudder. … Having finished the steering arrangement it would be wise to take up construction of the wings.” A number of readers built and flew the Demoiselle. There is no record of how many broke their necks, but with heavier-than-air machines taking shape all over the country, the airplane was well on its way.
As electrical and chemical energy became freely available, Americans—and Popular Mechanics —sought new ways to burn it up. Someone tailored an electrically heated bathrobe, and one could buy a four-poster brass bed with an electric bulb atop each post. Electric appliances of all sorts appeared overnight: irons, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, sewing machines, fans, and an electrified, vibrating safety razor that—horrible to contemplate —cut whiskers by “blows, instead of the usual sliding stroke.” In 1914 Popular Mechanics published four pages of densely written instructions for making an electric toaster and then exulted, “To such extent have the labor-saving devices been developed, there is now scarcely anything to be done about the house which cannot be performed by turning a switch or touching a button.”
Now and then, however, the editors did inject a note of skepticism. When, in 1908, an inventor announced that he had devised an electrical apparatus that would generate artificial sea air, the magazine wryly hailed the “beneficial effects of a trip to the seashore without the necessity for the packing of trunks, a wearisome journey and a prolonged period of idleness.” But more often the editors’ enthusiasm was unrestrained, as in their report on an electrified shoeshining establishment in which patrons sat on stools that rotated from station to station. “The same agent that speeds trolley cars along our streets, that wings wireless words across the seas has put the bootblack out of business. The electric bootblack has come. It will shine a dozen pairs of shoes while the human bootblack is shining one.”
Fascination with motors has led to all sorts of dubious uses for them. Motorized roller skates are reinvented periodically even though most are about as practical as the 1913 model that required the skater to carry a power source the size of an auto battery in each hand while tooling down the sidewalk. Hybrid vehicles have always been especially popular—autos that float or fly and, most of all, autos that glide over the snow. In one form or another, the snowmobile, or, as it was called earlier, the “auto-sleigh” or “motor sleigh,” has appeared often from the magazine’s first days. The 1907 model had the body of an open touring car and was propelled by a spiked wheel: “The motor sleigh is making slow progress, but will some day become a very popular form of sport.”
In the years following World War I, Popular Mechanics showed readers how to make an umbrella stand out of a trench helmet and how to build a breakfast nook. Automobiles stopped looking like buggies, airlines started carrying a few passengers, and after Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris in 1927, interest surged in the whole field of aviation. But for Popular Mechanics and much of the American public, the twenties were the decade of radio.
Commercial broadcasting began in 1920, and Popular Mechanics soon was devoting several articles in every number to radio. The reader could build radios ranging from crystal sets with earphones to such massive receivers as 1925’s Superheterodyne Eight, whose seven control knobs and big horn helped make it the “closest approach to perfection yet attained.”
The magazine duly reported each breakthrough in broadcasting—the first wedding on radio, play-by-play baseball, snake charming by radio— and while some of the uses to which the new medium was put seemed trivial, Windsor saw in it the power to weld isolated individuals into a community. Traveling through the West, he noted the many radio aerials sprouting from prairie shacks and recalled the terrible monotony that had always afflicted such places—“no movies, no lectures, no public libraries, no theaters.” “Such was the life of thousands until radio appeared, bringing far-off voices with song; news of what has happened in the last few hours in all parts of the world; the mirth-provoking tale; the price of grain and cattle in the world’s marts; suggestions for a better home life; sermons; lectures; even bedtime stories for the little ones. It was as if the windows of the little adobe hut had opened into the halls of night, with music and dancing and an endless variety of instruction and amusement.”
But almost immediately thoughts turned also to television—“seeing by radio”— which was demonstrated successfully in 1925. In 1926 Lee De Forest, inventor of the radio tube, told Popular Mechanics that, “commercially and financially,” television was “impractical.” But in April 1928 the magazine was reporting on General Electric’s test broadcasts in Schenectady (operating a television set “is as simple as learning to drive an automobile,” said a GE scientist). And later that year Frank L. Brittin, the Popular Mechanics radio editor, provided complete instructions for making a television set with a one-and-a-half-inch-square screen on which it was possible to “recognize the person televised, see him turn his head, roll his eyes and open his mouth.”
In 1932, as the Depression neared its worst, Popular Mechanics felt obliged to take note of growing skepticism about the beneficent effects of technology: “Machines, which owe their existence to their power to serve human wants, are now accused of turning the tables on man. They are held responsible for … all the ills which today afflict the world.” A manufacturer of electric shoeshining stands informed the magazine that it had stopped production because of a “vast amount of 5cent competition from unemployed men.”
With the here and now so dreary, attention turned toward the future, and streamlined trains and autos began to show up frequently. Futurism reached its peak at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York —specifically at the City of Tomorrow, in the Perisphere. Henry Dreyfus, the industrial designer who created the exhibit, described the City of Tomorrow for Popular Mechanics : We were to live in clean, green satellite communities surrounding a gleaming central town where cultural activities would thrive. We would walk to work at factories near our homes and speed into the center for plays and concerts over highways where traffic would always flow freely. Crime would be negligible because “everybody is so happy.”
Popular Mechanics swallowed a strong dose of realism after World War II. Spiffy little “personal helicopters” parked in suburban driveways could still make an occasional cover—along with monorail transit and Channel tunnels, “flying autos” are one of those perennial ideas whose time never seems to come—but attention focused mainly on more down-to-earth matters. It seemed Americans were not drawn to the plastic-and-glass dwellings with push-button control centers that Popular Mechanics had been depicting. They wanted houses that looked like those they were used to, and Popular Mechanics obliged, offering plans for ranches, colonials, and splitlevels and doing its bit to fuel the American dream of the single-family home on its own plot of ground.
As Americans prospered, their homes became fancier, and they added recreation rooms, family rooms, saunas, and swimming pools. Except during the moon-landing of the late 1960s, there seems to have been relatively little interest in technology for its own sake—in the development of the transistor and the computer, for example. For much of the postwar period, the pages of Popular Mechanics tell the story of middle-class America on a shopping spree—cars, boats, campers, hi-fi’s, snowblowers, and, of course, snowmobiles.
Starting in the 1960s, new concerns intruded into the world of Popular Mechanics , which was by then part of the Hearst Corporation and based in New York City. There was the environmental movement, which dates largely from the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. In 1914 the naturalist Roy Chapman Andrews, of all people, had written enthusiastically in Popular Mechanics about a marvelous new explosive harpoon that promised to swell the annual whale kill, and in 1950 the magazine had described a new timbercutting method that enabled two men to scythe “as much as 100 acres of virgin forest” in a morning. Such marvels were now deplored.
The biggest upheaval in the world of Popular Mechanics came with the energy squeeze that began with the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74. Glimmers of concern about energy supplies had appeared in the magazine from its first years. “Whence come the great volumes of oil issuing from the many gushers of the California oil fields… ?” asked a 1910 article. “How long will they continue to flow?… Nobody knows.” And a few years earlier a professor who apparently had stumbled across methane gas as a potential energy source proposed converting the odor from the stockyards of Chicago into illumination for the entire city.
But until the seventies the dominant thrust of American life, as reflected in Popular Mechanics , had been to consume energy as if there were no tomorrow. “Monster-power engines!” trumpeted the cover heralding the new 1966 automobiles. When Americans had worried about energy, there had always been the lulling reassurance irom Popular Mechanics and many other quarters that nuclear power would take over before resources ran short. As far back as 1932, a free-lance journalist wrote in Popular Mechanics that a pound of water contained enough potential nuclear energy to drive a thousand-horsepower engine for a year.
In the seventies Popular Mechanics and its readers accommodated themselves to a new world of limits. The magazine began to carry articles on solar power and solar heating, wind-driven generators, insulation, and ways to improve auto mileage. With the ebbing of the energy crisis, however, the magazine has renewed its traditional interest in elaborate, fuel-burning machinery. Energy conservation is still the theme in articles on backyard generators and insulating the home, but recent issues have offered less restrained fare: fast cars that get terrible mileage but go from zero to sixty in no time; a huge, new two-car garage; fifteen lightweight planes one can build from a kit and fly (some more expensively than others) without a license.
The magazine, which today has a circulation of 1,650,000, also has reflected developments in computer and household technology. A regular column keeps readers up to date on software. New phone equipment is rated and displayed, often with instructions for building home communications centers. “Self-diagnosing” appliances—such as refrigerators that can tell when their contents are spoiling— have been duly noted.
For today’s do-it-yourselfer, Popular Mechanics offers challenging projects under such headings as “The Smartest Homebuilt Robots.” Those who work in wood can learn how to build anything from a reproduction Shaker room to a rolltop computer desk.
As for fantasies of the future, projected technologies continue to enliven the pages. A recent article described a 15,000-mph airliner that should become commonplace in the next century. Another piece outlined a scheme for man-made islands supporting farms, power plants, offices, and apartment complexes in the twenty-first century. In general, however, the magazine carries less technological fantasy now than in the past. John Linkletter, the editor, suggests that present-day technology is so astounding that there is simply less interest in wild speculation.
Yet the fondness of Popular Mechanics for outlandish vehicles has never waned. The magazine has reported on snowmobiles for 1985 that offer bucket seats, seat belts, roll bars, and automobiletype steering. And it would still seem a safe bet that a sure way to make the cover of Popular Mechanics would be to come up with a snowmobile that could float, fly, and do fifty-five on the highway. Not quite true, says Linkletter: “It would have to run submerged too.”
