Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (45 page)

The straight hairpin became the U-shaped bobby pin over a period of two centuries.

Wig fashion at the seventeenth-century French court necessitated that a person’s real hair be either clipped short or pinned tightly to the head. Thus “bobbed,” it facilitated slipping on a wig as well as maintaining a groomed appearance once the wig was removed. Both large straight pins and U-shaped hairpins were then called “bobbing pins.” In England, in the next century, the term became “bobby pin.” When small, two-pronged pins made of tempered steel wire and lacquered black began to be mass-produced in the nineteenth-century, they made straight hairpins virtually obsolete and monopolized the name bobby pin.

Hair Dryer: 1920, Wisconsin

The modern electric hair dryer was the offspring of two unrelated inventions, the vacuum cleaner and the blender. Its point of origin is well known: Racine, Wisconsin. And two of the first models—named the “Race” and the “Cyclone” —appeared in 1920, both manufactured by Wisconsin firms, the Racine Universal Motor Company and Hamilton Beach.

The idea of blow-drying hair originated in early vacuum cleaner advertisements.

In the first decade of this century, it was customary to promote several functions for a single appliance, especially an electrical appliance, since
electricity was being touted as history’s supreme workhorse. The stratagem increased sales; and people had come to expect multifunction gadgets.

The vacuum cleaner was no exception. An early advertisement for the so-called Pneumatic Cleaner illustrated a woman seated at her vanity, drying her hair with a hose connected to the vacuum’s exhaust. With a why-waste-hot-air philosophy, the caption assured readers that while the front end of the machine sucked up and safely trapped dirt, the back end generated a “current of pure, fresh air from the exhaust.” Although early vacuum cleaners sold moderately well, no one knows how many women or men got the most out of their appliance.

The idea of blow-drying hair had been hatched, though. What delayed development of a hand-held electric hair dryer was the absence of a small, efficient, low-powered motor, known technically among inventors as a “fractional horsepower motor.”

Enter the blender.

Racine, Wisconsin, is also the hometown of the first electric milk shake mixer and blender. (See page 111.) Although a blender would not be patented until 1922, efforts to perfect a fractional horsepower motor to run it had been under way for more than a decade, particularly by the Racine Universal Motor Company and Hamilton Beach.

Thus, in principle, the hot-air exhaust of the vacuum cleaner was married to the compact motor of the blender to produce the modern hair dryer, manufactured in Racine. Cumbersome, energy-inefficient, comparatively heavy, and frequently overheating, the early hand-held dryer was, nonetheless, more convenient for styling hair than the vacuum cleaner, and it set the trend for decades to come.

Improvements in the ’30s and ’40s involved variable temperature settings and speeds. The first significant variation in portable home dryers appeared in Sears, Roebuck’s 1951 fall—winter catalogue. The device, selling for $12.95, consisted of a hand-held dryer and a pink plastic bonnet that connected directly to the blower and fitted over the woman’s head.

Hair dryers were popular with women from the year they debuted. But it was only in the late 1960s, when men began to experience the difficulty of drying and styling long hair, that the market for dryers rapidly expanded.

Comb: Pre-4000
B.C
., Asia and Africa

The most primitive comb is thought to be the dried backbone of a large fish, which is still used by remote African tribes. And the comb’s characteristic design is apparent in the ancient Indo-European source of our word “comb,”
gombhos
, meaning “teeth.”

The earliest man-made combs were discovered in six-thousand-year-old Egyptian tombs, and many are of clever design. Some have single rows of straight teeth, some double rows; and others possess a first row thicker and longer than the second. A standard part of the Egyptian man’s and woman’s
vanity, the instrument served the dual function of combing hair and of pinning a particular style in place.

Archaeologists claim that virtually all early cultures independently developed and made frequent use of combs—all, that is, except the Britons.

Dwelling along the coastline of the British Isles, these early peoples wore their hair unkempt (even during occupation by the Romans, themselves skilled barbers). They are believed to have adopted the comb only after the Danish invasions, in 789. By the mid-800s, the Danes had settled throughout the kingdom, and it is they who are credited with teaching coastal Britons to comb their hair regularly.

In early Christian times, combing hair was also part of religious ceremonies, in a ritualistic manner similar to washing the feet. Careful directions exist for the proper way to comb a priest’s hair in the sacristy before vespers. Christian martyrs brought combs with them into the catacombs, where many implements of ivory and metal have been found. Religious historians suspect that the comb at one time had some special symbolic significance; they point to the mysterious fact that during the Middle Ages, many of the earliest stained-glass church windows contain unmistakable images of combs.

Magic, too, came to surround the comb. In the 1600s, in parts of Europe, it was widely accepted that graying hair could be restored to its original color by frequent strokes with a lead comb. Although it is conceivable that soft, low-grade, blackened lead might actually have been microscopically deposited on strands of hair, slightly darkening them, there is more evidence to suggest that the comber dyed his hair, then attributed the results to the instrument. The suspicion is supported by the fact that in the last few decades of the century, the term “lead comb” —as in “He uses a lead comb” —was the socially accepted euphemism for dyeing gray hair.

There were no real changes in comb design until 1960, when the first home electric styling comb originated in Switzerland.

Perfume: Pre-6000
B.C
., Middle and Far East

Perfume originated at ancient sacred shrines, where it was the concern of priests, not cosmeticians. And in the form of incense, its original function, it survives today in church services.

The word itself is compounded from
per
and
fumus
, Latin for “through the smoke.” And that precisely describes the manner in which the fragrant scents reached worshipers: carried in the smoke of the burning carcass of a sacrificial animal.

Foraging man, preoccupied with the quest for food, believed the greatest offering to his gods was part of his most precious and essential possession, a slaughtered beast. Perfume thus originated as a deodorizer, sprinkled on a carcass to mask the stench of burning flesh. The Bible records that when Noah, having survived the Flood, burned animal sacrifices, “the Lord smelled the sweet odor” —not of flesh but of incense.

Incense, used to mask the stench of sacrificial burning flesh, evolved into perfume
.

In time, through symbolic substitution, the pungent, smoky fragrances themselves became offerings. Burning such resinous gums as frankincense, myrrh, cassia, and spikenard signified the deepest homage a mortal could pay to the gods. Perfume thus passed from a utilitarian deodorizer of foul smells to a highly prized commodity in its own right. No longer in need of heavy, masking scents, people adopted light, delicate fragrances of fruits and flowers.

This transition from incense to perfume, and from heavy scents to lighter ones, occurred in both the Far East and the Middle East some six thousand years ago. By 3000
B.C
., the Sumerians in Mesopotamia and the Egyptians along the Nile were literally bathing themselves in oils and alcohols of jasmine, iris, hyacinth, and honeysuckle.

Egyptian women applied a different scent to each part of the body. Cleopatra anointed her hands with
kyaphi
, an oil of roses, crocus, and violets; and she scented her feet with
aegyptium
, a lotion of almond oil, honey, cinnamon, orange blossoms, and tinting henna.

Although the men of ancient Greece eschewed the use of facial cosmetics, preferring a natural appearance, they copiously embraced perfumes—one scent for the hair, another for the skin, another for clothing, and still a different one to scent wine.

Greek writers around 400
B.C
. recommended mint for the arms, cinnamon or rose for the chest, almond oil for the hands and feet, and extract of marjoram for the hair and eyebrows. Fashionable young Greeks carried the use of perfumes to such extremes that Solon, the statesman who devised the democratic framework of Athens, promulgated a law (soon repealed) prohibiting the sale of fragrant oils to Athenian men.

From Greece, perfumes traveled to Rome, where a soldier was considered unfit to ride into battle unless duly anointed with perfumes. Fragrances of wisteria, lilac, carnation, and vanilla were introduced as the Roman Empire conquered other lands. From the Far and Middle East, they acquired a preference for cedar, pine, ginger, and mimosa. And from the Greeks, they learned to prepare the citric oils of tangerine, orange, and lemon.

Guilds of Roman perfumers arose, and they were kept busy supplying both men and women with the latest scents. Called
unguentarii
, perfumers occupied an entire street of shops in ancient Rome. Their name, meaning “men who anoint,” gave rise to our word “unguent.”

The
unguentarii
concocted three basic types of perfume: solid unguents, which were scents from only one source, such as pure almond, rose, or quince; liquids, compounded from squeezed or crushed flowers, spices, and gums in an oil base; and powdered perfumes, prepared from dried and pulverized flower petals and spices.

Like the Greeks, the Romans lavished perfume upon themselves, their clothes, and their home furnishings. And their theaters. The eighteenth-century British historian Edward Gibbon, writing on Roman customs, observed, “The air of the amphitheater was continually refreshed by the playing of fountains, and profusely impregnated by the grateful scents of aromatics.”

The emperor Nero, who set a fashion in the first century for rose water, spent four million sesterces—the equivalent of about $160,000 today—for rose oils, rose waters, and rose petals for himself and his guests for a single evening’s fete. And it was recorded that at the funeral in
A.D
. 65 of his wife, Poppaea, more perfume was doused, splashed, and sprayed than the entire country of Arabia could produce in a year. Even the processional mules were scented. (Perhaps especially the mules.)

Such fragrance excesses incensed the Church. Perfume became synonymous with decadence and debauchery, and in the second century, church fathers condemned the personal use of perfumes among Christians.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, perfume was manufactured primarily in the Middle and Far East. One of the costliest Eastern perfumes, reintroduced to Europe by the eleventh-century Crusaders, was “rose attar,” the essential oil from the petals of the damask rose. Two hundred pounds of feather-light rose petals produced a single ounce of attar.

It was the Crusaders, returning with exotic fragrances, who reawakened Europe’s interest in perfumes and perfume making. And at that point in perfume’s history, a new element entered the arena: animal oils. From the
East, pharmacists learned that small portions of four highly unlikely animal secretions cast intoxicating effects on humans. The oils were musk, ambergris, civet, and castor—the fundamental essences of modern perfumes.

These are unlikely ingredients for perfume because they are sexual and glandular secretions, which in themselves can be overpowering, unpleasant, and even nauseating. Their origins with respect to perfume are only partially known.

Musk
. Musk derives from a particular deer,
Moschus moschiferus
, a small, shy denizen of the rhododendron and birch thickets of western China. Fully grown males weigh only twenty-two pounds.

It is the male that carries, in the front of his abdomen, a sac that secretes a sexual signal, similar in function to the spray of a tomcat. Centuries ago, Eastern hunters, noticing a sweet, heavy fragrance throughout local forests, eventually isolated the source of the odor, and the diminutive deer have been hunted ever since. After the deer is killed, the sac is removed, dried, and sold to perfumers. Essential musk oil can be detected in amounts as small as 0.000,000,000,000,032 ounce. That is one meaning of “essential.”

Ambergris
. This highly odorous, waxy substance is cast off from the stomach of the sperm whale. It is the basis of the most expensive perfume extracts and, like musk, is worth the equivalent of gold.

The great mammal
Physeter catodon
lives on a diet of cuttlefish, a squid-like sea mollusk that contains a sharp bone, the cuttlebone, which is used in bird cages for sharpening the beaks of parakeets. Ambergris is secreted to protect the whale’s intestinal lining from this abrasive bone.