IT IS A CURIOUS PARADOX OF AMERICAN LIFE THAT IN many municipalities bar patrons are not allowed to smoke, yet they can spend all night polluting the atmosphere with out-of-tune caterwauling to a karaoke machine and remain sadly beyond the reach of the law. Even the staunchest advocates of free trade might abandon their principles when faced with the threat from this particular Japanese import. Yet according to Karaoke Around the World: Global Technology, Local Singing , edited by Toro Mitsui and Shuhei Hosokawa and recently published by Routledge, the technology that led to today’s karaoke was an American invention generally regarded as ephemeral in its native country: eight-track tape.

As Mitsui explains, the key innovator was a musician named Daisuke Inoue who performed at bars in the town of Kobe. Following local tradition, he sometimes played requests for individual customers to sing along with. In 1971 he and some colleagues taped a few instrumental tracks for a businessman who “was going on a recreation trip with his employees and planned to entertain them at night with his own singing.” While the employees’ reactions are not known, the boss was so pleased that he ordered more tapes.

Inoue, who co-owned a music company, saw commercial possibilities. But while reel-to-reel had been good enough for the singing executive, it would not work in bars and clubs, since a mood-killing delay would be required while the operator found the proper tape, mounted it, and fastforwarded to a customer’s chosen number. Instead Inoue put his recordings on modified eight-track cartridges.

Regular eight-tracks contained four channels of stereo (two-track) sound side by side on a single loop of tape. The machine would cycle through the four channels in an endless series, shifting the playback head as needed. Inoue shortened the tape and made each channel contain exactly one song, with all four starting at the same place, so any could be accessed immediately. With a specially designed jukebox that held 10 such cartridges, a bar could have 40 separate songs available. This ability to play any song on demand, Mitsui says, was the key to karaoke’s popularity.

At first glance karaoke might seem to be another example of the homogenization of local cultures under the relentless onslaught of globalization. The word itself is the same in every country, though with varying approximations of its pronunciation, and virtually every piece of karaoke equipment in use anywhere in the world is still Japanese-made. (The sole exception is Korea, where a dislike for things Japanese has led to the invention of their own term, norae bang , and the development of Korean-made apparatus.) Yet other papers in the book show how local users have adapted this homogeneous technology to accommodate differing traditions and customs.

For example, karaoke turns out (unsurprisingly, perhaps) to be much more popular in Italy than in Sweden. And while in Taiwan it was first adopted by the middle-aged and elderly and then spread to the young, in Hong Kong the reverse happened. One pattern that seems to recur everywhere is that karaoke actually reinforces local culture. The opposite is true in the film industry, which Hollywood still dominates, and with English-language pop songs, which can be enjoyed by those who have little understanding of the language (indeed, the lyrics are often hard to make out even if you do speak English). But with rare exceptions, karaoke participants are not comfortable singing in any language but their own. As a result, the introduction of karaoke has boosted local music from Japan to Italy to Brazil—a welcome exception to the increasing globalization of the entertainment business.

Who Was Isaiah Jennings?

EDWARD SOREL’S DRAWING OF THE TWENTIETH CEN tury’s greatest innovators, which appeared in our Winter issue, attracted many letters. Most fell into two camps, with half calling Bill Gates the devil incarnate and the other half calling him the Antichrist. Men of Progress , the 1862 Christian Schussele painting that inspired Sorel’s drawing, elicited much less fervent commentary. Still, we did receive an inquiry about Isaiah Jennings, one of the more obscure innovators depicted. Our caption called Jennings an “inventor of friction matches,” yet a reader named A. Csaplar had researched the history of friction matches and found no mention of him. Were we mistaken?

Answering this question, or even finding some basic facts about Jennings’s life, proved to be difficult. He is one of two men in the Schussele painting not listed in the Dictionary of American Biography ; the other is the iron innovator Jordan L. Mott, who commissioned the painting, and whose life and activities are amply covered in other sources. A search of some two dozen biographical directories and histories of technology yielded no mention of Jennings. One book that reproduces the painting credits him with “dental equipment,” and to confuse things further, the last time we used the painting in Invention & Technology , we identified Jennings as a “thresher inventor.”

Genealogical records show that Jennings was born on December 13, 1782, married Hannah Burr on May 6, 1804, and died in Fairfield, Connecticut, on July 2, 1863. Some digging turned up an undated, anonymous pamphlet that accompanied a nineteenth-century engraving of the Schussele painting. Since Jennings gets so little mention elsewhere, his biography is worth quoting in its entirety:

“Was born in Frankford, Connecticut, 1782; began work at an early age as a blacksmith, in making by hand, thimbles for sailors, used in sails and rigging; invented a machine for making thimbles and eyelet holes, requiring much time to perfect it. Went to Liverpool in 1808 and started the business; war breaking out, his plans were thus frustrated, and he returned to the United States; having made some money in England, he commenced business in Southport, Connecticut, taking a partner, but the partner took his money and broke him up. Invented his cigar boat consisting of two hollow air-tight tubes with a space of six feet between, the work framed on sleepers and worked by hand. It ran in opposition to the Brooklyn horse ferry, crossing in less than half the time. In 1810 he invented a threshing machine, the first that did not destroy the straw, the first one put in operation in Dutchess County, New York. In 1812 invented a steam boiler to stand the pressure of 500 pounds, it was approved by Oliver Evans. During the war he worked at Leggert’s foundry on cannon. Made an important improvement in cotton machinery. Next invented a new pump and sent it to Washington. A Mr. Perkins, of London, copied it and took out a patent; Mr. Jennings was too poor to prosecute him, and the government refused to protect him. In 1822 made a repeating gun with twelve charges, one barrel, sliding stock. 1823 invented a steam engine on the same principle as locomotive boilers now in use. Built this engine before Stevenson started his manufactory; both he and Perkins took their ideas from Mr. Jennings’ invention. In 1823 and ’24 invented instantaneous matches, called afterwards ‘Loco Foco’; sold out three-fourths of his right to Bernan, of New York, and the receipt [i.e., recipe] to Jones, of London, for $1,000, realizing in all some $11,000. Next a patent for fluid for lamps. The Mechanics’ Institute, in 1837, awarded Mr. Jennings a medal for the best carburetted alcohol and burner for producing light. And in 1848 Mr. Jennings received two medals for portable liquid gas lamps. He died in 1862.”

His association with friction matches turns out to be something of a mirage. In the 1820s, in Britain, Samuel Jones marketed what he called “Promethean matches,” which were ignited not by friction but by percussion. Each match contained a tiny glass vial of sulfuric acid enclosed in potassium chlorate. When the match was hit sharply, squeezed with pliers, or even bitten, the vial would break and the chemicals would ignite.

In 1827 John Walker, an apothecary in Stockton-onTees, began selling the world’s first true friction matches, which he had developed independently. When he declined to patent his invention, Jones copied Walker’s matches and sold them under the name Lucifer. They were marketed in America as Locofocos. Thus Jennings, who had probably come up with a percussion match, had nothing to do with Locofocos or the friction matches of today. Instead his fleeting fame came from his invention of lighting fluids and lamps. One history of lighting points out that “until the early decades of the nineteenth century, illumination in America remained nearly as primitive as it had been in ancient Rome or Greece.” The candles and oil lamps then in use created a “guttering, smoky, uneven flame; unpleasant odors; and the incessant chore of wick trimming.” Then in 1830 Jennings showed how to eliminate all these problems with his burning fluid, a volatile combination of alcohol and turpentine (distilled to remove the smoky resin) that could be burned with or without a wick.

Rival inventors devised fluids and lamps of their own until kerosene swept them all away in the oil boom of the early 1860s. But Jennings’s patent introduced the concept of synthetic burning oil, which the same book calls “the first major advance toward more lamplight for the common man.” Moreover, it was the first illuminant to be distilled, paving the way for modern petroleum refining. Burning fluids had problems of their own, notably a tendency to explode, so the wealthy often preferred sperm-whale oil. For most people, though, the “brilliant white flame” with “remarkable intensity and high lighting power” created by burning fluid was worth the risk. Jennings’s achievement may shine less brilliantly today, but by enlightening America over three decades, his fluid and lamps fully justified his inclusion alongside Morse, Goodyear, and Colt as a nineteenth-century Man of Progress.