AMERICA 250
My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.
In the latter years of the 19th century, a huge number of machines, devices, tools, implements, and other objects that made human life a tad easier, incrementally, were invented. Americans either by birth or immigration like Tesla, Edison, Bell, Deere, and Westinghouse are recognizable to this day. And then there were anonymous innovators like Wisconsin farmer Peter Houston who invented the roll-film camera and housewife Josephine Cochrane, an imaginative and brilliant tinkerer who invented the first automatic dishwasher.
Josephine Cochrane
Cochrane was married to a fellow who made bushels of money as a dry goods merchant. They lived in a big Chicago mansion. One day, she threw a dinner party and, after it was over, her kitchen staff washed the dishes. In the process, they chipped a bunch of her heirloom china pieces. She thought there had to be a better way so she sat down with pen and paper and got to drawing machines that would use boiling water to clean dinnerware.
Her eventual automatic dishwasher became so successful that she formed a corporation to produce it and other gadgets she came up with. Her company eventually became known as KitchenAid.
A later Cochrane dishwasher design
Such was life in post-Civil War America. Entrepreneurs, scientists, and just plain folks — brilliant all — could invent things that would change the world…, or at least some small part of it.
Perhaps the two longest-lasting identifiable American brand names were made possible by inventions in 1873 and 1886. The first was a minuscule hunk of copper. The second, a patent medicine and alcohol alternative sold in a Georgia drugstore.
Levi Strauss was a San Francisco dry goods merchant specializing in work clothes for miners and factory workers. He wanted to design pants that would be both comfortable and durable, previously incompatible clothing characteristics. Strauss and his denim fabric vendor in 1872 realized simple stitching would not hold good work trousers together well so he invented “An Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings,” copper rivets, that would make his soon-to-be named Levi Strauss blue jeans arguably the second most important and successful attire innovation in human history. Only the loom, I’d argue, made articles of clothing more accessible, affordable, and universal. Strauss gained US Patent No. 139,121 on May 20, 1873 for his rivet.
Blue jeans are worn in every continent and in every country. They are as American as Coca-Cola.
A Georgia pharmacist named John Pemberton, who became a Confederate lieutenant colonel during the Civil War, suffered a saber wound in his chest during a battle in Georgia. He became addicted to morphine to cope with the pain. Having studied medicial chemistry in the 1840s, Pemberton experimented with different concoctions, hoping to wean himself off dope. He wasn’t the only southerner suffering in the post-bellum years. Drug addiction, alcoholism, and pathological depression were rampant among the defeated population. Pemberton tried substances like the poisonous buttonwood plant, hoping to extract a painkiller and overall sedative that would help him and others.
Pemberton distilled a compound made of coca leaves and kola nuts that was actually a type of wine at first. Then, with the temperance movement beginning to rage across the nation, he had to find a way to make his concoction alcohol-free. He and another pharamcist friend experimented with different recipes for his coca and kola mixture. One day, Pemberton accidentally spilled carbonated water into his latest mix. Voila.
Coca-Cola bottles through the years
I can’t provide any more detailed information on how Pemberton and his friend came up with Coca-Cola as it is, literally, a more closely-guarded secret than the instructions for making a primitive atom bomb. We do know, though, that Pemberton chose to market his compound under its now-ubiquitous brand name for no better reason than it sounded just right. It was alliterative and punchy and memorable.
Coca-Cola is drunk on every continent and in every country. It is as American as blue jeans.
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