Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 24, 1993 TAG: 9301210114
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JULES LOH ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
CENTURY OF IDEAS
DOES any artifact of 20th-century America better reflect the nation's daily conveniences and irritations than the parking ticket? And how come everybody remembers Henry Ford but nobody knows H.C. North? Or Carl Magee?The questions arise because the calendar has just crept another notch closer to the dream number, 2000. The turn of the century sits out there like a gift-wrapped package, tantalizing. Chroniclers and analysts can't wait to tear into it. The chance comes but once in a lifetime.
Routine "year-enders," the trade name for those summations of the previous year that appear every January, will become . . . century-enders! One hundred years to review, to analyze, to poke around in heavy stuff like the impact of the automobile from the Model-T Ford to the interstate highway system.
So who's Carl Magee?
He was an Oklahoma City newspaper editor, but that was not much of a distinction. Carl Magee invented the parking meter. The first ones sprouted in his hometown in 1935.
And H.C. North?
He was a clergyman of the same city, and you guessed it: He got the first ticket. But he talked his way out of it. He told the judge he had gone to get change, was on his way back . . . yeah, yeah, the oldest excuse on the books. Literally.
Any number of less-than-earthshaking events of the 20th century have shaped American life. Small things. Some may bring merely a smile of recognition or, as in the case of North, a wince. Call them curious incidentals that might not, alas, find their way into the weighty summaries.
The summaries, for example, certainly will include the atomic bomb, but maybe not its more benevolent fallout, the bikini, named for the Pacific atoll where A-bomb tests were conducted.
On July 5, 1946, four days after the test, a French designer of bathing suits unveiled, as it were, the first bikini at a poolside fashion show in Paris. It caused shock waves of its own. It was banned at some French resorts and wasn't seen on U.S. beaches until well into the '60s.
Webster's Third New International Dictionary, which came out in 1961, explained dourly that the suit derived its name "from the comparison of the effects wrought by a scantily clad woman to the effects of an atomic bomb." You could look it up.
Matter of fact, the bra itself was a 20th-century creation. A New York debutante, Mary Phelps Jacob, whipped up the prototype in 1913 out of a pair of handkerchiefs.
When elastic came along the following year, Jacob improved her design and sold a patent for $1,500 to Warner Brothers. Not the movie makers but Bridgeport, Conn., corset makers. The patent turned out to be worth about $15 million. Warner, keeping abreast of demand, began cup-sizing in 1939.
Historians will record that World War II ended in the Pacific in 1945. But not for Japanese Lt. Hiroo Onoda.
Onoda hid out in the mountains of Lubang Island in the Philippines, living off the land, deaf to all imprecations to give up. Finally, in 1974, Onoda's aging commanding officer journeyed from Tokyo to Lubang Island and found the 53-year-old holdout.
"Hiroo," he whispered, "the war's over."
Onoda returned to a hero's welcome in Japan, sold his memoirs and retired to a ranch. In Brazil.
They called one of America's most celebrated heroes of the 20th century Lucky Lindy, but it wasn't luck that saw Charles Lindbergh across the Atlantic in 1927. The luckiest American of the century almost certainly was Roger Woodward.
Roger, 7, and his 17-year-old sister, Deanne, were paddling on the upper Niagara River on July 9, 1960, when their boat capsized. Deanne made it to shore. Little Roger, who weighed only 55 pounds, was wearing a kiddie-size life jacket. He bobbed in the water like a cork, out of reach, and the current caught him.
The river coursed swifter and swifter toward the falls. Over Roger went. The tourist boat Maid of the Mist plucked him safely from the churning water below.
A dozen adventurers encased in barrels, padded balls and other such armor have dared Niagara Falls' 173-foot plunge, all during the 20th century. Nine survived. The first to survive in a barrel was Annie Edson Taylor, who made the trip on Oct. 24, 1901.
Does the name Harry Williams ring a bell? Or buzz a buzzer? In 1929, Williams, in the killjoy spirit of Carl Magee, added the "tilt" mechanism to pinball machines.
Critics of 20th-century art will surely celebrate the major American contributors. Will their list include Edwin Binney of Easton, Pa.?
At the beginning of the century, in 1902, Binney mixed paraffin, stearic acid, oil and pigments until, lo and behold, Crayola crayons. At the end of the century, a mixture to successfully remove the resulting art from wallpaper awaits discovery.
From the San Francisco earthquake in 1906 to Hurricane Andrew last year, the century has had its share of disasters. One of the weirdest had to be the one in Boston on Jan. 15, 1919. It was no laughing matter; 21 died. But, still . . .
What happened was, a storage tank ruptured and deluged the North End with molasses.
The tank was enormous, five stories high, 90 feet across. Molasses, intended for rum, filled it almost to the brim, 2.3 million gallons. A rivet popped, then another and another. Suddenly, a 30-foot wall of goo began moving slowly (as molasses does in January) and knocking down everything in the way, buildings, people, horses, the elevated railroad. It left an odoriferous, glorious mess, 3 feet deep in places, that took months to clean up.
Some results of 20th-century technological know-how - like, oh, the electric carving knife, for one, or the wind-chill factor - seem to have slipped into American life capriciously, and remained. Somebody, apparently, has found a use for them.
The non-dairy creamer is another. That classic oxymoron appeared in 1961 and has not yet gone away. Instant coffee, which arrived in 1901, may in part explain why. The first pink molded plastic flamingos took root in American lawns in 1957, and have lingered. The first miniature golf layout was contrived in 1926 upon the rooftop of a New York skyscraper. It descended, however, and spread. Father's Day has been around since 1910. Come to think of it, that would help explain the electric carving knife.
Other developments, though, happily evolved into more than their original purpose.
The makers of household refrigerators, which finally became cheap enough to buy during the '30s (but the Depression hit and nobody could afford them) never envisioned that one day the fridge also would become the household bulletin board, snapshot album and recipe file, opening up a vast new market in magnets shaped like strawberries and ladybugs.
In 1907 the Hurley Machine Co. of Chicago introduced the first electric washing machine. When dust storms smothered the Southwest in 1934, an enterprising Texan, J.F. Cantrell of Fort Worth, opened what he called a Washeteria. It was the nation's first, a four-machine operation and a Dust Bowl bonanza.
In truth, so many 20th-century developments have become fixtures of ordinary life it makes you wonder how previous generations did without them:
The paper clip (1900), Teddy Bear (1902), safety razor (1903), paper cup (1908), Kewpie doll (1909), soap pad (1913), Band-Aid (1920), Drano (1921), Kleenex (1924), zipper (1926), adhesive tape (1928), Scotch tape (1937), Barbie (1959), quartz watch (1962), pantyhose (1969), pocket calculator (1974) . . .
And of course the airplane.
On the first scheduled airmail flight, May 15, 1918, Washington to New York, with President Woodrow Wilson on hand for the takeoff, three occurrences made the event all the more memorable.
One, the pilot, George Boyle, kept shouting "Contact!" without effect until he discovered he had forgotten to gas up.
The tank filled, he took off and, two, headed south instead of north. "Compass got mixed up," he muttered.
Three, he crashed. He phoned his boss to say his plane was upside down in a Maryland cornfield and would someone please come fetch him and three sacks of mail. His boss, Benjamin Lipsner, sent a car.
Speaking of which, why is it not surprising that the first two automobiles to arrive in Kansas City, Mo., collided?