Man’s Best Friend

1. Man’s Best Friend In January 1925, a deadly diphtheria epidemic broke out among the children of Nome, Alaska. The nearest lifesaving serum was in Anchorage, some 700 miles away. The snow-covered landscape was almost impassable, and a ship would take too long. To make matters worse, the only two airplanes in the state were in storage for the long winter. The governor decided the serum would have to be “mushed” to Nome by a series of dogsled teams. Messages flew across telegraph lines to arrange the relay. The serum was rushed by rail to the town of Nenana. There it was handed to Wild Bill Shannon, whose dog team was the first of eighteen teams that would carry the serum 674 miles across the frozen tundra. The conditions were frightening. The temperature dipped as low as -40*. Gale-force winds and blinding snow hampered the drivers. The whole world was riveted by their dramatic race against time and the elements: the progress of the sleds muscled other stories off front pages everywhere. On the fifth day, all contact with the sled carrying the serum was lost, and many feared the worst. But at 5:30am on February 1– 127.5 hours after the dogsled marathon began– Gunnar Kaassen emerged from the darkness to deliver the serum to Nome, led by his soon to be famous lead dog, Balto. Today, the epic journey is commemorated annually in the great Anchorage to Nome dogsled race named after the trail on which much of it is run: the Iditarod.

2. Doctor of Death After the outbreak of the French Revolution, a doctor and member of the National Assembly beseeched his fellow revolutionaries to outlaw inhumane forms of execution. He described in detail gory executions of the past, and advocated a less painful method. He painted a vivid picture of what he had in mind: “The mechanism falls like lightening; the head flies off; the blood spurts; the man no longer exists.” Dr. Joseph Guillotin became an instant celebrity after championing this new means of execution, and although he neither invented nor designed the device that was subsequently built, his name was quickly attached to it. The guillotine soon took center stage in the Revolution, as fourteen thousand “enemies of the state” were brought before huge crowds to lie beneath its blade– including King Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette. After the doctor’s death, in 1814, his children changed their names– appalled that their once-proud family moniker was now synonymous with bloody decapitation and revolutionary terror.

3. QWERTY The modern typewriter was born in the back of Kleinsteuber’s Machine Shop in Milwaukee. That’s where Christopher Sholes took some piano wire and a telegraph key and built a crude typing device in 1868. It could only type one letter, a rather fuzzy-looking w, but it was still pretty amazing for its time. Sholes and his partners designed a more ambitious model with all the letters in the alphabet. The typewriter had a problem, though. Try to type quickly on it, and the type bars banged into one another and got stuck. The solution to that problem resulted in the keyboard we know today. Sholes consulted with an educator who helped him analyze the most common pairings of letters in the English language. He then split up those letters so that their type bars were farther apart and less likely to jam. That in turn dictated the layout of the keyboard– known as QWERTY, for the first five letters in the upper row. In a manner of speaking, he slowed down the typists to prevent jamming, and thus speed up the typing. In 1873, the Sholes & Glidden Type Writer became the first to be mass-produced, and its keyboard layout was soon standard on all typewriters. Other keyboard layouts have been created since, such as the Blickensderfer Scientific and the Dvorak, and some are demonstrably more efficient, but the original continues to thrive. It is a telling illustration of the power of inertia and the reward of being first.

4. Pin Money In the long history of invention, there is no tale of woe quite like that of Walter Hunt. He was an absolute genius at making things, but an abysmal failure at making money. In 1834, he invented the first sewing machine in the US. But there was a depression on, and no one was interested in a machine that would put more people out of work. So he didn’t bother to file a patent. Bad move. Elias Howe invented and patented a similar machine a few years later, and got rich beyond his wildest dreams. Hunt also patented the first fountain pen and the first repeating rifle, but failed to turn them into viable products. Others, who did so later, reaped amazing profits. But the most staggering part of the story was yet to come. One afternoon in 1849, he began playing with a piece of wire. In less than four hours he twisted it into a pin with a spring on one end and a clasp on the other end; the safety pin. A million-dollar idea if ever there was one, and Hunt was quick to patent it. So he became rich– right? Wrong. Desperate for some quick cash, he sold off the patent rights. For $100. Walter Hunt: innovative genius, financial pinhead.

5. The Ice Cream Cone Cometh It happened on a stifling summer’s day at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Ernest Hamwi, an immigrant from Syria, was having no luck selling hot Persian waffles to the sweltering crowds. But at the next booth, Arno Fornachau was dishing out ice cream that was selling like, well, hotcakes. Suddenly, Arnold ran out of plates. Sacre` bleu! What to do? Earnest had a flash of inspiration. He rolled a cone out of a waffle and offered it as a substitute. Voila`! The ice cream cone was born. Well, that’s the version backed by the International Ice Cream Association. But here’s where the story gets sticky. At least half a dozen vendors at the fair claimed they actually deserved the credit. Their descendants still carry on a spirited argument about it today. So what’s the real scoop? It’s safe to say that the World’s Fair Cornucopia, as it was first known, was born at the fair one day and quickly copied by dozens of others eager to get in on a good thing. When the fair was over people took the idea back home and it became a coast-to-coast hit. Today one-third of all ice cream is licked off cones. They are one of American’s favorite summer treats.