THE MEN WHO “GOT IT”

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 154, 27 March 1937, Page VI (Supplement)

THE MEN WHO “GOT IT”

Origins Of Famous Inventions

The wife of a travelling salesman one day toward the close of the last century received a telegram from him. It ran: “I have got it. Our fortune is made,” said Gwyn Lewis in the -‘Sunday Express.” He had invented the safety razor. He is said to have made £400,000 from his discovery in a single year. The company he formed to put his blades on the market has a capital of approximately £40.000,000. The same concern recently opened a new factory at Isleworth, Middlesex, where it will be possible to manufacture 1,500,000 razor blades a day. About this number of people dailyuse Loudon’s 137 escalators at the Underground stations. Now, -whose brainwave was the escalator?

At about the time an excited salesman was wiring his wife that he ‘‘had got it,” a student named Sieberger had also ‘‘got it.” That is to say, he was conducting preposterous experiments with an assortment of boxes which he made move up and down a trestle ladder. Fellow-students tapped their heads significantly, but Sieberger had wearied of the daily climb upstairs to the various lecture rooms at Yale University, U.S.A. He was determined to evolve the moving stairway. A lift company sent an engineer to watch Sieberger’s contraption. The escalator had begun its never-ending journey.

Not less preposterous than Sieberger’s experiments with boxes and ladders was the origin of the plastics industry. In this case it was a chemist who '•had got it.” He was troubled with mice in his laboratory and set a trap baited with cheese.

He upset a bottle of formaldehyde. The acid flowed over the ehese, which turned into a hard substance, now known as casein.

It turned that cheese into an industry that to-day employs upwards of 120,000 people in the making of telephone instruments, inkwells, ashtrays, wireless components.

Builders of bridges and ships and houses live in poverty and die in obscurity' compared with the giants who invented the tin opener, the penny-in-the-slot weighing, machine, the sewing machine or even chewing gum. A man named Singer was hard put to it raising a loan with which to perfect his sewing machine. He left £3.000,000. Kemember your childhood, when you tried to extract the glass marble from the lemonade bottle, and wondered how it got there. The man who put it there made a million from his invention.

Then there was a man named Paintre who amassed as much as Mr. Singer from a wire stopper. Things that cost but a few pence to

buy have made millions tor their inventors, such things as safety pins, the hook and eye, the apple corer, the potato peeler, the egg whisker, and rhe snap fastener.

And they have all been the resuk of a sudden idea ... "1 have got it! <>ne Seth Hunt “had got it" when he invented the humble pin. Joseph Chamberlain came into "big money’ when he evolved the modern screw.

Joseph Hudson literally whistled his way to fortune.

It seems incredible that there was ever a time when a policeman did\not have his whistle. Hudson was the inventor. Tlie Government heard its shrill blast and commissioned him to make 21,000 whistles.

Barbed wire. Miles of it stretching across no man’s land for four years. Miles of it to-day enclosing England’s pastures. Barbed wire brought £250,000 to its inventor, Joseph Gidden. Edouard Benedictus was incredulous when he saw an empty bottle fall, but not break. He picked it up and threw it down violently, but it refused to break. Benedictus remembered that years ago the bottle had contained a mixture of chemicals.

The liquid had evaporated, leaving behind a transparent skin of great tensile strength. He set to work and produced safety glass.

One expects inventions from chemists, but it was a grocer who put sleeping ears on the railways, and a carpenter who invented the chronometer.

An ironmonger brought out metal windows after his mother had strained her back trying to close a wooden window that had jammed. The rubber heel has as strange an origin as any of our everyday inventions.

O’Sullivan found that vibration in the factory where he worked upset his stomach. Pie minimised it by standing on a rubber mat. It was stolen. He bought another mat. That was stolen. The exasperated Irishman nailed a piece of rubber on the heels of his boots, patented the idea, and became a millionaire.

Sir Henry Wellcome coated pills with sugar and left £2,135,000. Wealth came to a rag-and-bone man when he found a way of making imitation pearls from sea shells.

Frederick Walton mused on the way a skin formed over a pot of paint when exposed to the air, and gave the world linoleum.

Thomas Blanket, a weaver, feeling cold as he lay in bed, added a length of unfinished cloth to the bedclothes, and blankets came into being. That was in 1340.

Henry Ford said once, “What’s going to alter our lives is probably happening this minute in a backyard workshop, where some crank is thinking by himself.”