An ordinary umbrella wasn’t enough for Elizur E. Clarke — in 1864 he suggested adding a skirt, to render it “a more perfect protector from storms.”
The man gets a little loophole to look out of. His companion will just have to trust him.
Technology
Batter Up!
The first pitching machine was powered by gunpowder. Princeton mathematician Charles Hinton designed it for the school baseball team in 1897, hoping to spare human pitchers whose arms were giving out under the incessant demands of batting practice. At first he planned a catapult, but he found this too inaccurate. Then “it occurred to me that practically whenever men wished to impel a ball with velocity and precision, they drove it out of a tube with powder.”
The result, which he wrote up in Harper’s Weekly on March 20, was a shoulder-mounted cannon whose 4-foot barrel could send a ball across the home plate at 70 mph. With a fingerlike attachment it could even throw a curveball. That summer it pitched three innings in a game between two Princeton social clubs, allowing four hits, striking out eight batters, walking one, and throwing only one wild pitch.
The Washington Post predicted the end of the world (“There would be the base-burning, high-pressure, anti-friction catcher, and the shortstop made of aluminium and rivets and filled with cogs, cams, valves, shafts, and belting”), but Hinton praised the gun’s handiness: “It can be used so as to deliver ball after ball at the same speed in the same curve, or it can be varied from shot to shot, according to the wish or skill of the manipulator.” He took it with him to the University of Minnesota, where he worked until 1900.
Progress
Frightened villagers “killed” the first hydrogen balloon, launched in Paris by Jacques Charles and the Robert brothers Anne-Jean and Nicolas-Louis on Aug. 27, 1783. Allen Andrews, in Back to the Drawing Board: The Evolution of Flying Machines, quotes a contemporary account:
It is presumed that it was carried to a height of more than 20,000 feet, when it burst by the reaction of the Inflammable Gas upon the Atmospheric Air. It fell at three quarters past five near Gonesse, ten miles [actually, 15 miles] from the Field of Mars. The affrightened inhabitants ran together, appalled by the Hellish stench of sulphur, and two monks having assured them it was the skin of a Monstrous Animal, they attacked it with stones, pitchforks and flails. The Curate of the village was obliged to attend in order to sprinkle it with holy water and remove the fears of his astonished parishioners. At last they tied to the tail of a horse the first Instrument that was ever made for an Experiment in Natural Philosophy, and trained it across the field more than 6000 feet.
Perhaps forewarned, the first man to undertake a balloon flight in North America carried a pass from George Washington.
The Bird Cage
In the 1870s baseball catchers played bare-faced, routinely suffering broken noses and teeth; to protect themselves they stood two dozen feet behind the batter, which prevented the pitcher from throwing his best pitches. Finally Fred Winthrop Thayer, captain of Harvard’s team, invented a “Safety-Mask for Base-Ball Players” to minimize the damage.
“It is not an unfrequent occurrence in the game of base-ball for a player to be severely injured in the face by a ball thrown against it,” he wrote in the patent application. “With my face-guard such an accident cannot happen.”
When catcher Jim Tyng first wore Thayer’s mask on April 12, 1877, it was roundly derided. Spectators yelled “Mad dog!” and “Muzzle ’em!”, and opposing players greeted Tyng with “good natured though somewhat derisive pity.” The Portland, Maine, Sunday Telegram wrote, “There is a great deal of beastly humbug in contrivances to protect men from things which do not happen. There is about as much sense in putting a lightning rod on a catcher as there is a mask.”
Catchers finally submitted when sportwriter Henry Chadwick faulted their “moral courage.” “Plucky enough to face the dangerous fire of balls from the swift pitcher,” he wrote, “they tremble before the remarks of the small boys of the crowd of spectators, and prefer to run the risk of broken cheek bones, dislocated jaws, a smashed nose or blackened eyes, than stand the chaff of the fools in the assemblage.”
Today Thayer’s Harvard mask is in the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Leisure Travel
H.M. Small found it difficult to sleep in railway seats in 1889 — so he invented a hammock.
It’s actually possible to sleep at full length if the seat in front is pushed forward — but that might be going too far.
Rain, Rain
Torontonian John Maguire wasn’t satisfied with the standard raincoat in 1883, so he added a gutter:
The object of the invention is to provide a water-proof coat which can be worn in rainy weather without the wearer’s leg being made wet from water dripping off the skirt of the coat; and it consists of a water-proof coat having the bottom edge of its skirt turned up, forming a trough or channel to receive the water flowing on the surface of the coat, suitable provision being made to carry off the water away from the legs of the wearer of the garment.
“Although the coat is specially designed for gentlemen’s use, it will of course be understood that ladies’ coats may be similarly made.”
Escape Suspenders
In 1885 George C. Hale had the bright idea of weaving a zigzag cord into a pair of suspenders. Now if the wearer is trapped in a burning building, he can free the cord, lower it from a window to receive a rope, and escape to safety.
Hale’s patent application says, “I have found by experimenting that from fifty to one hundred feet, or even more, of the cord can be secured to the suspender in the manner heretofore described.”
The application was granted. I wonder if he ever went into business with this.
Bright Idea
Robert Heath thought we should all wear luminous hats. Confronted with the resounding question Why?, he offered this poetic paragraph:
Among the advantages of the invention are, the facility of seeing and finding the hat, &c., in closets and dark rooms and places, the presentation of a hat, &c., of different shades during day and night, the beautiful appearance of the article when worn at night, and the provision of distinguishing or indicating the localities of those who may wear the hats, &c., whose occupations are dangerous, such as miners, mariners, &c. For persons who are exposed to weather, sea, &c., the head-wear will be suitably waterproofed, so that the self-luminous nature thereof will not be injured by water.
Simple enough. His patent was granted on Feb. 27, 1883.
Green Activism
There must be a story behind this one: In 1900 Ludwig Ederer patented an “alarm bed” to wake an attendant when a greenhouse grows too cold.
If the steam pressure in the boiler drops, the bed suddenly tilts upright, “so that the sleeper will slide or roll off, thus reminding him that the steam within the pipe system is below a certain point, endangering the life of the plants within the greenhouse.”
After he’s stoked the fire the attendant can go back to bed and dream about getting a better job.
Tipu’s Tiger
When British forces plundered the palace of Indian prince Tipu Sultan in May 1799, they found an infuriating trophy:
In a room appropriated for musical instruments was found an article which merits particular notice, as another proof of the deep hate, and extreme loathing of Tippoo Saib towards the English. This piece of mechanism represents a royal Tyger in the act of devouring a prostrate European. There are some barrels in imitation of an Organ, within the body of the Tyger. The sounds produced by the Organ are intended to resemble the cries of a person in distress intermixed with the roar of a Tyger. The machinery is so contrived that while the Organ is playing, the hand of the European is often lifted up, to express his helpless and deplorable condition.
Tipu had allied himself with France against the encroaching East India Company, and the Fourth Mysore War brought his downfall. The tiger, it appears, had symbolized his defiance of British colonialism. The instrument was removed to London, where it became a centerpiece in the Company’s Leadenhall Street gallery; John Keats saw it there and immortalized it in The Cap and Bells, his satirical verse of 1819:
Replied the Page: “that little buzzing noise,
Whate’er your palmistry may make of it,
Comes from a play-thing of the Emperor’s choice,
From a Man-Tiger-Organ, prettiest of his toys.”
“Indeed, the horrific image of a wild beast attacking a helpless fellow Briton must have stirred strong reactions in the British audience so few years after the brutal Mysore campaigns,” write Jane Kromm and Susan Benforado Bakewell in A History of Visual Culture (2010). “Contained within one wondrous work of art was an illustration of the intensity of resentment toward European imperialism, the ferocious power of the enemy prince, and the moral justification for colonization.”