The 19th century was an explosive time for invention, and the Victorians characterised their age of ingenuity as being rooted in certain moral traits: industry, self-reliance, persistence. For evidence that hard work and innovation were both improving and rewarding you only had to look at the new products that came on the market every day, which made life better for both the inventor and the consumer.
Were one to check the records, however, one could find plenty more evidence that inventing was mostly a complete waste of time, and often a reliable route to failure, frustration, obscurity and bankruptcy. For every great innovation there were a hundred stupid ideas, not to mention the many perfectly reasonable little innovations that no one cared about.
A new book, Inventions That Didn’t Change the World, catalogues some of the wholly uncalled for inventions registered with the British government in the 19th century. Author Julie Halls, a designs specialist at the National Archives in London, has unearthed a treasure trove of self-ventilating hats, boot warmers, hairbrushing machines and improved pickle forks, all taken from the leather-bound volumes of the Design Registry.
In the first half of the century, the patent system provided an effective bureaucratic brake on the proliferation of gadgetry. The process for obtaining a patent was labyrinthine, costly and subject to delays. It seemed expressly designed to discourage, rather than reward, ingenuity. In 1850 Charles Dickens was moved to ask: “Is it reasonable to make a man feel as if, in inventing an ingenious improvement meant to do good, he had done something wrong?”
The Design Registrations Act of 1839 was intended to provide protection for ornamental designs (textile prints, decorative metalwork, etc), but many inventors took advantage of the far simpler system to register their work – inappropriately, as far as the registrar was concerned. The 1843 Utility Designs Act was introduced to address this problem: it offered copyright protection for three years to “any new or original design for any article of manufacture having reference to some purpose of utility”.
In principle, inventors of significant improvements were still supposed to apply for a patent, but in practice it was up to the inventor to choose the most suitable form of protection. With a patent costing up to £400, and the price of registering a design set at £10, the choice for the creators of the Duplex Hat (a top hat that converts into a bowler, thanks to hidden springs) was obvious.
Inventors wanting to register a design needed to provide two drawings of it, explanatory text and a title for the device. In many cases, the wonderfully precise illustrations (usually supplied by a registration agent), provide the only proof that such an idea ever entered anyone’s head, although many of the inventions give hints to the particular obsessions of the age. “The Victorians seem to have been preoccupied by personal safety,” writes Halls, “judging by the number of items designed to protect life and limb.” We may be no less safety conscious today, but products such as the Anti-Garotting Cravat (1862) exploit largely bygone fears.
Occasionally, one glimpses something familiar in these old drawings. The Baby Jumper (1847) is strikingly similar to the version widely available today, even if the original has enough straps, fastenings and hooks to make it seem more trouble than it’s worth. The Sawing Instrument (1850) appears to be a primitive, hand-cranked chainsaw awaiting the invention of the combustion engine, although it’s described in the register as being “for surgical and other purposes”.
Often mundane advances in consumer durables were given shamelessly pseudo-scientific names to make them sound like technological marvels. The Amphitrepolax Boot (1868) boasted a cylindrical, rotary heel that could be spun a full revolution, “hence always ensuring a perfectly Flat and Even-worn Heel”.
One also sees a pattern in the fashion for combining several common articles into one extremely fiddly gadget, for no good reason other than it being possible. The Pen and Pencil Case-Calendar and Tape Measure (1871) is more or less exactly what it claims to be. In presenting itself as a pocket-sized solution to virtually all of life’s challenges, it’s basically a smartphone, albeit one invented five years before there was such a thing as a phone.
In many cases, these new innovations were at the forefront of medical advances, but sometimes they were decidedly behind the times. Bloodletting was still commonly used to treat a wide variety of ailments (not terribly effectively in most cases), leading to a shortage of leeches. The race was on to be the first inventor to perfect the artificial leech. Several designs were registered in mid-century, none of which represented a marked improvement on the leech.
It’s easy to be dismissive of some of the less inspiring designs, but they were created in a world without market research, when you couldn’t know for certain that the world didn’t want a parasol with peepholes in it (1844) or a cane you could smoke like a pipe (1852) until you manufactured one yourself and tried to sell it. All of these must have seemed like a good idea at the time.
Although none of these inventions ended up changing the world, they provided a unique insight into the world that spawned them. And they were all aimed at making the world a better place, none less so than the so-called Improvement in Diving Dresses (1870), invented by Samson Barnett. It consists of an ordinary diving suit with the small but essential modification of a bath plug on a chain at crotch level, which can be opened “for the purpose of allowing the Diver to urinate without taking off his entire Dress”. Of course you’re not supposed to do it when you’re underwater. Let’s hope there was some kind of warning in the instructions.
• Inventions That Didn’t Change the World is published by Thames & Hudson on 13 October.
