Weirdly attention-grabbing. What Witold Rybczynski did for the screwdriver, Owen does for the photocopier. (Photos and...
New Yorker staff writer Owen (The Making of the Masters, 1999, etc.) fluidly recounts the story of the “most successful product ever marketed in America.”
That’s according to Forbes, but Owen’s lapidary prose is far more pleasurable than that magazine’s breathless pages. Whether he’s explaining the rudiments of home improvement (The Walls Around Us, 1991) or the evolution of the copying machine, he makes the unlikeliest suspects into appealing tales. The action this time centers on Chester Carlson, son of grinding poverty and the visionary behind the photocopier, a nonintuitive idea if there ever was one. Though Owen makes it clear that there were a good handful of individuals who lent critical insights to the project, Carlson’s perseverance was particularly remarkable. Time and again, his invention was on the brink of oblivion, time and again he managed to secure funding or find a niche that the machine (ever in the process of refinement) could fill to sustain the work in progress. Along the way, Owen rolls out the evolution of the copying process, starting with Sumerian scribes, moving through monks and machines—intaglio, lithography, the hectograph, pantograph, and polygraph (Thomas Jefferson thought this last, an early copier, was indispensable to democracy)—to the critical discoveries of aniline dyes and a sort of proto-carbon paper that helped lead to the first xerographic copy in 1938. But no one wanted to join the young company as a partner in manufacturing, and RCA tried to make an end run around Xerox patents, though it got nowhere. The photocopying process is not a simple thing to understand; photoelectricity, a building block of the copier, is so arcane, for instance, that “Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize in 1921 for having explained it in 1905.” To Owen’s abiding credit, he makes it all intelligible in this rich business history.
Weirdly attention-grabbing. What Witold Rybczynski did for the screwdriver, Owen does for the photocopier. (Photos and illustrations)Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-5117-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
A scholar's lively account of how White Castle, now a largely overlooked but still profitable also-ran in the domestic restaurant trade, made the once-scorned hamburger a US institution and launched the fast-food industry. Drawing on a variety of sources, historian Hogan (Heidelberg Coll.) first reviews the ethnic and regional character of America's food preferences prior to the 1920s. He goes on to document the accomplishments of the two men who founded White Castle late in 1921 in Wichita, Kans.: Walt Anderson, inventor of the hamburger, and Billy Ingram, whose marketing genius helped make Anderson's creation a staple of American diets. On the strength of standardization, quality control, a commitment to cleanliness, and conservative financial practices, they soon had a lucrative national network of faux-citadel outlets vending tiny ground-meat patties served with an abundance of pungent onions on diminutive buns for a nickel apiece; enjoining customers to ``buy em by the sack,'' the partners also pioneered the take-out business. Although it survived the Great Depression in fine style, White Castle was hard hit by WW II's home-front price controls, shortages, and restrictions. Having staggered through the 1940s, however, the company retained its fanatically loyal clientele in the cities while formidable new rivals (Big Boy, Gino's, Hardee's, Howard Johnson, McDonald's, et al.) preempted fast-growing suburban markets. Although no longer a leader in the field of franchising giants it helped create, White Tower occupies a rewarding niche that, thanks to effective management practices, promises to provide worthwhile returns for years to come. Informed and engaging perspectives on an often ignored aspect of cultural and commercial Americana. The 20 illustrations include contemporary photos of White Castle outlets and the company's early advertisements.
Pub Date: Dec. 15, 1997
ISBN: 0-8147-3566-5
Page Count: 230
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
Ashworth (The Late, Great Lakes, 1986) makes a plausible if not wholly credible case for the offbeat proposition that ecology and economics, in concert, could provide the best response to both the escalating cost of living and a decline in the quality of life. Noting that the natural and social sciences share a Greek root (oikos, meaning household), the author offers a series of short essays designed to show that environmentalism and for-profit enterprise have much in common. Indeed, he argues, whatever harms or is good for the biosphere injures or benefits the marketplace- -and vice versa. Along similarly pragmatic lines, Ashworth suggests that ravaging the planet and its resources is a fiscally irresponsible act akin to eating one's seed corn—or dipping into capital. To persuade the friends of earth and the friends of industry that their differences are not irreconcilable, Ashworth gets back to genuine basics. Cases in point include short takes on Econ 101 fundamentals like carrying capacity, fund flows, and the forces of supply and demand, whose relevance to the rain forests may come as news to diehard preservationists. By the same token, his low-key briefings on renewable resources and monocultures could prove thought-provoking for those who believe that protection of endangered species and old-growth timber invariably costs society too much in terms of jobs and economic growth. As for why ecologic theory is more congruent with economic theory than antithetical to it, Ashworth's explanations are unexceptionable. But theory is one thing, practice another. In failing to detail how the paradigmatic synthesis could be made to work, the author lacks the courage of his arresting convictions. It's not easy being green, and Ashworth's accommodation agenda may remind some readers of the possibly apocryphal tale about the UN functionary who opined that Arabs and Jews should sit down and settle their differences like good Christians.
Pub Date: Jan. 9, 1995
ISBN: 0-395-65566-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
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