Prometheus Unbound
[SEE COVER] The history of the United States is fundamentally a history of invention.
--Roger Burlingame
Businessmen, scientists and engineers from 27 nations gathered in Chicago last week to see a new breed of U.S.-produced machines, so wondrously gifted and versatile that they hold the promise of a new industrial revolution. In Chicago's huge, hot International Amphitheatre and Navy Pier, the visitors excitedly inspected 11,000 gleaming new engineering marvels in twin shows: the Machine Tool Exposition and the Production Engineering Show. The new breed--and the stars of the shows--were nearly 100 machine tools of a wholly new kind, the brilliant offspring of the marriage of the automated machine and the computer's electronic brain. They represented a giant stride toward the ultimate goal of man's industrial progress: machines able to run themselves.
The key to the new revolution is "numerical control." The new machine needs an operator to show it only once how to do an intricate job. In the process its computer brain jots down symbolic numerical notes, thereafter can work automatically from "memory"--or learn a new task just as quickly. In the machine and tool industry, where techniques change so slowly that an exposition is held only twice a decade, the numerical-control machines brought forth a babble of superlatives, such as "the sunburst of a new era," "a stupendous breakthrough." Where it now takes a day to "set up" a lathe or other machine before it can begin turning out parts, the new machines can be ready to work in minutes, switch easily from one job to another.
The Great Quest. The machines are but a small example of the flood of new products that are transforming industry and the American way of life, and hold the promise of a new industrial era in the 1960s. No facet of living--or of manufacturing--has escaped the restless minds of inventors trying to devise newer, cheaper, faster or better ways of doing things. Some are as simple and gadgety as the self-shaking mop; some are as complicated as the sealed-window, almost dust-free house. Some are as frivolous as a musical toothbrush that sounds a sour note when the teeth are not brushed correctly; some are as awe-inspiring as the purposeful arc of Echo threading its way through the stars. For the housewife, the worker on the production line, and the executive in his office, the outpouring of new inventions has provided more time to pursue dozens of new interests at leisure--and a choice of hundreds more new products to make leisure time more fun.
This year U.S. corporations plan to spend 10.7% more for development of new products and processes, according to an American Management Association survey. The legendary starving inventor, trying in vain to get a hearing for his brainchild, is no more; he can hardly get any inventing done today for all the eager customers beating a pathway to his door, or corporations trying to hire him. Last week in Los Angeles, as in many another U.S. city, a task force set up by the Chamber of Commerce was out hunting down new inventions, forearmed with a list of manufacturers anxious for new products. This week You and Your Big Ideas, a television show that invites little-known inventors to demonstrate their wares and provides a panel of experts to evaluate them, begins its new season.
The Rich Harvest. Many a little invention has launched a big industry; one out of eight U.S. businesses is a company that got its start with a single new product. Color film, invented by two New York musicians and first sold by Kodak in 1935, has grown into a $500 million annual business in the U.S. alone. As simple an idea as the aerosol can, first used to spray insecticides during World War II, has puffed itself into a 600 million-can-a-year trade, spraying everything from athlete's-foot powder to instant starch. Even as insignificant an item as the ballpoint pen, which was written off as a national joke when it came out 15 years ago ("It will write under water, but that's the only place"), now sells at the rate of 657 million pens annually worth $142 million.
For the U.S. consumer in 1960, the outpouring of new products and processes is a rich harvest that would have seemed incredible only a few years ago. Among the newest:
P: "Dial-an-appliance" household equipment. Developed by Westinghouse, it enables a housewife who is downtown shopping to start dinner before she starts home: she simply telephones her home, then by dialing additional digits turns on the oven, sets it to cooking the roast. Vacationers heading home after a two-week absence can telephone their air conditioners en route, find the house cool when they arrive.
P: Can opener-less cans. Now being test-marketed by Alcoa, the new aluminum orange juice cans have tabbed tops that peel away with a twist of the thumb.
P: A matchless cigarette. To be marketed in December by Continental Tobacco Co., it has a tasteless, odorless "flame tip," which ignites when scratched against the side of a pack.
P: Paper clothes. High-style paper clothes that can be thrown away after a few wearings are being developed by American Cyanamid, which is also experimenting with high-fashion paper hats. Paper pup tents and sleeping bags are now on sale.
P: A pocket-size portable record player. Put on sale by Emerson, the Wondergram plays all sizes of LP records without turntable, is powered by four flashlight batteries, weighs less than 2 Ibs. Price: $68.
P:A hand-size shortwave transistor radio. Produced by Bulova Watch Co., it can pick up shortwave stations round the world. Price: $59.95.
P: A transistor radio the size of a sugar cube. Developed for the Army by RCA. it will make possible a wristwatch radio.
P: Transistor medical-recording devices. Soon to be available to doctors, they can be swallowed, will track down causes of a patient's stomach upset.
P: A facsimile-mail system. To be tried by the Post Office for the first time next month, it may revolutionize mail delivery. In a test between Washington, D.C., Chicago and Battle Creek, Mich., letters will be opened automatically, their contents electronically scanned and transmitted in less than a second. At the terminal points, the letters will be reproduced photographically, put back into envelopes and delivered by special messenger.
P: An electronic telephone exchange. Now being field-tested by Bell Labs in Morris, Ill., it handles calls 1,000 times faster than present equipment, commits to its electronic memory a list of numbers each customer frequently calls, provides private, two-digit numbers for each to save dialing time. Businessmen away from their offices can notify the electronic memory, and it will automatically switch all calls for them to their temporary numbers. P:A computer communications net. Called the SABRE System, it is being built by International Business Machines for American Airlines. The computer will keep in simultaneous automatic touch with American ticket offices everywhere, enable them to provide up-to-the-second information about seating available on flights all over the U.S.
P:A language-translating computer. Built by IBM, it translates Russian into English, has a vocabulary of 55,000 words. Its first assignment: translating each day's Pravda for the Air Force. It works at a rate of 1,800 words per minute, turns out rough but readable English.
P: A torpedo finder. Able to swim 2,000 ft. beneath the surface, it was built for the U.S. Navy by Vitro Laboratories, can be adapted for commercial use. The Solaris is an eerie, Jules Verne monster that probes the ocean floor with four 500-watt floodlights and a television eye. When it spots a lost torpedo or other wanted object, a giant crab's claw snaps out, hoists the catch back to the surface.
P: A "pickle picker." Made by Chisholm-Ryder, it can harvest and sort nearly an acre of cucumbers in an hour.
P: A tomato picker. Developed by the University of California and the Blackwelder Manufacturing Co., it enables one harvester and 13 other workers to do the work now done by 60 men. Like many another invention, it has already led to a further development: a new breed of tomatoes, with tougher skins to prevent damage from the machine and that ripen all at the same time. P:"Cookies" for cows. International Harvester's hay pelletizer makes wafers from hay as it is mowed in the field. The wafers cut a farmer's loading and storage costs, lend themselves easily to automatic feeding in barns.
P: A midget gas turbine engine for cars. Developed by the Williams Research Corp., the engine weighs only 50 Ibs., is a mere 10 in. thick and 19 in. long, yet produces 75 h.p. It will be field tested in Jeeps next month by the Army.
P: An electric stair-climbing cart. The "Stair Cat" was introduced by General Electric for moving appliances and heavy equipment, hefts a 500-lb. load up or down stairs at the rate of 18 ft. per min., automatically brakes when the motor turns off.
Patent to Product. Most new products, great and small, make their first appearance at the U.S. Patent Office. Though it is no easy jump from patent to product (only a fraction of the ideas patented are ever manufactured, only one in six of these turns a profit), last year 79,331 inventions were submitted to the Patent Office; patents were granted on 50,545 inventions. The rates Jor this year are running well ahead, and the Patent Office is buried under a backlog of nearly 200,000 patents pending.
Well over half of all patents are granted to corporations. Reason: U.S. corporations will spend about $5 billion this year on research and development, since nearly 75% of the U.S. growth in sales volume in the next three years will come from new products. To some critics the growth of corporate research is a mixed blessing; they argue that corporations so blanket a field that they freeze out the individual inventor. Yet individual inventors last year claimed 40% of new mechanical patents, 35% of those granted in electricity and electronics, 30% of new chemical patents.
The Upstart Americans. The U.S. has no monopoly on invention, but the Yankee tinkerer has a long and prolific line of descendants--including Abraham Lincoln, who patented a buoyant chamber for small boats; Singer Lillian Russell, who designed a trunk that converted into a dresser; and Actress Hedy Lamarr and Composer George Antheil, who co-patented a "secret communication system" for wartime. To spur inventive talents, a patent law was one of the first laws passed by the new nation in 1790, and Weekend Inventor Thomas Jefferson was aptly named the patent office's first boss.
Between 1790 and 1838 only 11,098 patents were granted. But two were of incalculable value to the growing nation: Eli Whitney's cotton gin (1794) and Cyrus McCormick's reaper (1834). In the next two decades. U.S. inventive genius exploded: more than 20,000 patents were issued. When all Europe gathered at
Paris' International Exhibition in 1867, prepared to show off to the world its industrial triumphs, it was the upstart Americans who carried off the prizes. Mc-Cormick's reaper won the Grand Prize and a French Legion of Honor. Howe's sewing machine won a gold medal, as did a host of lesser U.S. inventions, including a pencil maker and a button holder. In all, one-half of the U.S. exhibits won prizes, and Europe's industrial pre-eminence was dealt a blow from which the U.S. never let it recover.
More surprises were in store at the first U.S. Centennial Exposition, held in Philadelphia in 1876. The Atlantic Monthly marveled at George H. Corliss' giant, 2,500 h.p. steam engine and 8,000 other U.S. machines--all powered by it--on exhibit: "Surely here, and not in literature, science or art. is the true evidence of man's creative powers. Here is Prometheus Unbound." The Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil was more astounded. Picking up a curiously shaped device invented by a man named Alexander Graham Bell, the Emperor exclaimed: "My God, it talks!"
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.
The transistor grew out of a "parlor trick" in Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1940. One of the scientists there "had a little chunk of black stuff with a couple of contacts on it," recalls Bell Physicist Walter H. Brattain, "and when he shone a flashlight on it, he got a voltage. I didn't believe it." But Brattain never forgot, and seven years later (a delay enforced by the war), using the same "black stuff"--silicon--in an electrolytic solution, he got the same effect: a current was produced ten times as great as that from any other photoelectric device. A few months later they achieved the "transistor effect," a greatly amplified signal, using only a sliver of germanium and three wires.
Bell pulled scientists out of other departments until a research team of some 40 men--physicists, chemists, metallurgists, engineers--was working at top speed on a project to find out just why the current was amplified. They did, and on June 30, 1948, Bell, with its usual modesty, issued the scientific understatement of the decade: "The Bell Telephone Laboratories wishes to demonstrate today a new device. Its essential simplicity indicates the possibility of widespread use." For finding out why, Brattain and two theoretical physicists, William Shockley and John Bardeen, won a Nobel Prize.
The miracle of the transistor is that it can do virtually everything the vacuum tubes--for nearly 40 years the mainstay of the communications industry--could do, and do it better. It is more reliable, sturdier, and only a fraction of the tube's size. Today a full third of Bell Labs' scientists are working on the transistor and the whole new family of "solid state" electronic devices it has spawned. The transistor not only made space exploration possible; it also ushered in the new technique of miniaturization, thus made hundreds of new products possible.
The Computer Is Born. It was the transistor, with its minuscule size and swiftness, which made possible the modern computer, perhaps the second greatest postwar new product. While shrinking in size, computers have vastly increased their speed and ability to handle problems. The fastest, IBM's $13.5 million STRETCH model, can add two 15-digit numbers in an incredible two-millionths of a second.
In fact, computer progress has outrun man's ability to prepare magnetic-tape instructions complex enough to keep the brains busy. The ideal computer would be one that operators can instruct verbally. Bell plans to build one able to hear and obey some 50 words.
The next step is machines that can do more than answer just yes or no; they would, in effect, reason by considering alternatives, reach "under the circumstances" conclusions. Bell has already reconstructed a neuron, the basic element of the human brain, electronically, will ..try linking several together in a "neural net" duplicating nerve tissue. Eventually they hope to devise a computer able to freely associate ideas. IBM and others are trying to control molecules to work as a new kind of transistor, make a computer whose components will "feel" each other's information, come to qualitative decisions.
Bubbles & Better X-Rays. Nearly all of these new products, like most of those coming out today, are as carefully plotted in advance as the building of an ocean liner. Many come at enormous cost. When Du Pont decided it wanted a "poor man's nylon," it experimented for twelve years, spent $50 million before it found Delrin, a formaldehyde plastic with many of the properties of nylon that can be made at considerably less cost. Put on the market about a year ago, Delrin has already started to take a big bite out of the metal industry. In 1961 Chrysler Valiant will sport a Delrin instrument panel, the biggest single automotive use of unreinforced plastic. Several oil companies have bought Delrin pipes for oilfield use. It has already been incorporated in some 270 products, from aerosol bottles to zippers. Manufacturers' requests for its use are pouring in at the rate of one a day, and Du Pont is rapidly expanding production.
Sometimes inventors draw a bead on one target, score a bull's eye on another. Sacramento's Aerojet-General Corp., prime contractor for the Polaris missile's propellant, found that when the solid fuel was molded, bubbles tended to form, caused trouble in firing. To find the bubbles, the company had to haul the finished rocket motor to a giant X-ray laboratory, spend two to three weeks taking pictures. Aerojet's radiation experts went to work, found they could do the job in hours by slipping in a radioactive cobalt pill, using photon-counters to measure the rate of radiation. If it was steady, no bubbles. They kept improving their photon-detection equipment, now have a device that promises X-ray pictures with %o the radiation exposure of the most modern X-ray equipment.
Many a new product spawns other new products as it jolts older competitors into fresh efforts to improve their lines. When the textile industry threatened to turn to the new synthetic fibers, the cottonmakers developed resin treatments to make cotton wash-and-wear. Polypropylene, one of the newest and cheapest of the petroleum plastics, is now putting the pressure on more expensive cellophane. Produced as a fiber, it promises to make the best no-ironing blend of cloth. Laverne's "invisible" chairs are made of the plastic, make any room look bigger, less cluttered. Esso is experimenting with colored highways made from a blend of asphalt and tinted polypropylene. With the routes of a cloverleaf indicated by color and with highway signs to match, U.S. motorists would lave less trouble finding their way through superhighway mazes. Hercules Powder Co., pioneer producer of polypropylene, has developed a new glass-and-plastic material for a third-stage shell for the Minuteman missile. It is trans lucent, as light as magnesium and stronger than steel.
Guns Galore. A shower of new products and processes is augmenting man's age-old efforts to get in out of the rain. Minnesota's Schjeldahl Co.'s polyester plastic balloon structures can be built in half a day, need only an ordinary building fan to keep them inflated, will last five to ten years. Quonset-shaped, the Schjel-dome will work in the arctic or the tropics, can be used for garages and greenhouses, swimming pool covers and grain warehouses, is repaired with a hot iron.
To speed conventional construction projects, there are new guns galore: Flint-kote's "Sealzit" spray guns spray roofing on flat or free-form surfaces, may well make the shingle obsolete. Atlanta's Lenox Square shopping center was constructed with the True Gun. developed by Tulsa's Max True, which sprays concrete. A wire-tying gun enables workmen simply to aim at the joint where steel reinforcing rods need to be lashed, pull the trigger, and the job is done. For do-it-yourself fans, Chicago's Wonder Building Corp. has brought out fallout-bomb-shelter kits: backyard model for $1,200, smaller basement shelter for $295.
Pet's Milk. The new products of 1960 have something for every member of the family. Westinghouse has a new thermoelectric baby-bottle minder that keeps the milk cold until feeding time, then automatically warms it. When it is ready, it sounds an alarm to wake up mother. To make sure baby goes back to sleep, the Evenflo-Lullaby bottle plays Brahms's Lullaby. For the household pets, the new est drinks are Dog Nog and Cat Lap--canned milk for animals, develooed by onetime New York Advertising Man Arthur D. Talbott. While conducting market research on milk use, Talbott discovered that 25% of evaporated milk was bought to feed animals, realized that there was a rich market for a special pet milk. It is cheaper than regular canned milk and better for an animal's nutrient needs.
Last week the U.S. Agriculture Department announced a way to end the bane of a dog's life--fleas. By adding certain chemicals to dog food, it found that fleas that bit the dogs died.
So marvelous is U.S. technology today that practically any good idea can be turned into a product. The Army needed a giant ditchdigger. Barber-Greene Co. built one: a voracious behemoth that can dig a continuous trench 2-ft. wide and 6-ft. deep through any surface, including rock and coral, is now available to commercial purchasers. Le Tourneau Inc. of Texas built a mobile island crane that can be towed out to an offshore construction site, its legs sunk and anchored while it does its job. The job finished, the legs can be retracted, and the island crane towed to another site. Not all products are so complex--or necessary: a harassed doctor invented a candy-coated tongue depressor for examining children.
Second Martini Ideas. The number of new products, or what often turn out to be merely new trimmings on an old product, has become so great that many a businessman has begun to wonder whether gadgets may get the upper hand. Said one Westinghouse vice president: "Frivolous features on appliances that were nothing more than second-martini ideas have claimed unnecessarily hundreds of thou sands of dollars in research money." If the money wasted by industry on meaningless model changes were plowed into basic research, the genuinely new products would blossom that much faster.
Critics also argue with some truth that U.S. business, in its competitive haste to get new products to market, spends too little on basic or pure research to find new breakthroughs, too much on applied research to convert new discoveries into goods and services. Vice President Richard Nixon last week recommended that business join with states and the Federal Government to supply funds for a number of basic research institutes at universities, which would engage in the indispensable exploration of the unknown by "the basic research man . . . who will make the breakthroughs upon which all the rest of our science and technology depends."
Some of the U.S. firms that have been doing research longest realize the importance of basic research, give their scientists considerable free rein to explore new fields. The Martin Co.'s Research Institute for Advanced Studies, on an old estate in Baltimore, allows some 100 scientists to roam about freely on the frontiers of advanced mathematics, solid-state physics and gravity.
Looking Ahead. With more emphasis on basic research, the new products that lie just ahead promise marvels eclipsing even what the U.S. has accomplished since World War II. Within a year or two, electronic ovens may be available for every home. They will cook a steak in two minutes, a baked potato in four seconds, greaselessly so that the oven never needs cleaning. An ultrasonic breakthrough in the use of sound waves for cleaning promises dishwashing in minutes without water. Shoes and clothes may be whisked spotless ultrasonically as the wearer enters the house.
Thermoelectrics--the use of electricity in metal to produce heat and cold with no moving parts--will make possible a combined refrigerator and cooking element. The union of thermoelectrics and electroluminescence promises wall panels that automatically heat or cool, change colors and brightness to suit the mood and weather of the day. Windows will automatically close at the first drop of rain, reopen when the sun comes out. Throw-away plastic dishes will be made in every kitchen at the touch of a button.
Fuel Cells & Rocket Belts. The next major U.S. inventive breakthrough comparable to the transistor may well be the fuel cell--a cheap, efficient, reliable way of converting fuel to electricity with no moving parts. Some 50 U.S. companies are working on the problem; when it is solved, it will provide a compact, noiseless power source for propulsion, lighting, heating, may even bring back the electric auto. The ancient dream of man, individual flight, perhaps with a scuba-like rocket belt, is under serious development. The U.S. Army has awarded Bell Aero-systems a $60,000 research contract for a rocket belt, and Bell believes it can build one in less than two years.
In the first year of the decade of the '60s, the U.S. economy has paused for breath, seems to be going nowhere in particular. Some economists are once again talking about a mature economy, worry that there are no new breakthroughs in sight to give the nation a great forward push such as the auto and electronics did. But the past shows that such worries about the future are groundless. The pace of research is such that man's next great discovery may come next month, next week--or tomorrow.
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