Crocker, Betty (U.S.)

In 1921, the Washburn Crosby Company, a forerunner of General Mills, introduced the fictitious “Betty Crocker” as a signature for the advice and information produced by its Home Service Department. This idealized American housewife was the result of the thousands of baking and cooking inquiries that the company received after organizing a competition. “Betty” sounded friendly and homely, while “Crocker” was the surname of a recently retired company executive.

By 1940, Betty Crocker had become a household name, so it was not surprising that General Mills mechanical engineering division used the name when planning to diversify into domestic electrical goods in 1945. The Betty Crocker cake mixes followed in 1947. Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book was first published in 1950. Written for the growing number of suburban kitchens, it was the first cookbook to have photographs and became a best-seller.

General Mills produced the Tru-Heat electric iron, a toaster, a food mixer, an automatic fry-cooker, a waffle iron, a coffeemaker, and a steam ironer under the name Betty Crocker. Ironically this move to peacetime production was limited by the demands of the Korean War, and General Mills sold the business to McGraw Electric Company in 1954.

The Betty Crocker food brand remains strong, and the name is still used for recipe books and nutritional information. As for the fictional Betty, a series of models and actresses has ensured that her clothes and image keep up to date.

Compact Disc Players

Launched in 1983, the compact disc player (or CD player) is the digital recording equivalent of the gramophone (or record player). It is a device for playing back sound recorded on a small optical disc. The term “compact disc” was used because the first commercially produced optical discs were 30 cm (12 in) videodiscs, whereas audio optical discs, which had less information to record, were only 12 cm (4.75 in) in diameter.

Optical disc technology uses a laser both to embed the recording and to decode it for playback. During recording, a laser beam removes tiny dots from the etch-resistant chemical coating of the glass master disc. The dots vary in length according to the digital sound input and form a spiral track up 5 km (3.3 miles) long as the disc rotates. The master disc is then placed in a bath of hydrofluoric acid, which etches pits in the glass where no coating remains. In the mass production process, the master disc is replicated as plastic discs with a thin aluminum coating. The disc provides up to 100 minutes of sound. Inside the CD player, the disc rotates on a turntable and is scanned by a laser beam that detects reflection from the nonpitted surface and its absence from the pitted track. The laser transmits pulses of light to a photodiode, which converts the light to electrical pulses for transmission to an amplifier and loudspeakers.

The compact disc was developed through a joint venture between the Dutch company Philips, the pioneer of videodisc technology, and the Japanese company Sony. When the joint venture was agreed upon in 1979, both companies had reason to pool their resources rather than go ahead independently. Both had recently lost out to Matsushita, the world’s leading electronics producer, when the VHS format outsold their separate videocassette formats. Moreover, Philips was then involved in a costly videodisc rivalry with JVC (Japanese Victor Company) and the U.S. company RCA. By 1980, the two companies had agreed on the standard for audio CD and began to develop their products independently. In 1982, Sony launched the CDP-101 CD player in Japan. It was designed to fit in with existing hi-fi stacking systems.

The CD player became the fastest-selling machine, as of then, in the history of consumer electronics, although it has recently been surpassed by the digital versatile disk (DVD) player. In the United States, the sales of CD players grew from 35,000 in 1983 to 700,000 in 1985, while CD sales grew from 800,000 to 15 million. The introduction of portable CD players increased the popularity of the CD format. Sony launched its first portable CD player with headphones, the D-5, in 1984. The Sony D-88 Pocket Discman, a slimmer model based on the successful Walkman personal cassette player, arrived in 1988. CD players were also incorporated in ghetto blasters, or boom boxes. Two new variants of the audio compact disc format were introduced in 1999: the DVD-Audio format, developed by the Japanese company Matsushita, and the Super Audio Disc format, developed by Sony and Philips. Both offer enhanced sound quality through increasing the rate of digital sampling.

The CD player was marketed as a major advance in the quality of sound reproduction on several grounds: greater dynamic range (essentially loudness), the inherent superiority of the digital copying that permits the master recording to be exactly reproduced, and the absence of wear and surface noise compared to the gramophone (phonograph) or tape recorder. Other factors favoring the CD player include the convenience of operation by remote control and programmed track selection. While studies have shown that the majority of people, including trained musicians, cannot reliably distinguish between analogue recordings (LPs) and digital recordings (CDs), by 1988 CDs were outselling LPs. Today, the CD player has supplanted the record player in the majority of homes.

Compasso d’Oro

The Golden Compass Awards (Il Compasso d’Oro) are a series of industrial design awards that originated in Italy in 1954 when Aldo Borletti of the Milan department store La Rinascente founded them as a one-off. It was an immediate success, attracting 5,700 entries. The Compasso d’Oro was important in promoting good design in everyday things at a time when Italian industry was reestablishing itself after World War II. It also encouraged Italian designers to consider such mundane objects as being worthy of their attention as well as encouraging manufacturers to invest in designers. The 1954 winners set the pattern for future competitions; they in cluded a sewing machine, an electric fan, a typewriter, and kitchen components.

The awards continued in 1955, 1956, 1957, and 1959. Due to organizational or economic reasons, the awards are not given every year. The panel of judges is small, usually consisting of around six people drawn from the relevant industries. Judges have included designers such as Marco Zanuso, Vico Magistretti, and Philippe Starck. Awards were given four times in the 1960s, only twice in the 1970s, and four times in the 1980s. Winners have included plastic buckets, sewing machines, lemon squeezers, collapsible dish-racks, washing machines, lamps, gas cookers (stoves), and telephones as well as cars and furniture.

Il Compasso d’Oro is now run by the Associazione Design Industriale (ADI), an association of 750 manufacturers, architects, and designers working in Italy.

Coffeemakers

The application of technology to assist the art of making a good cup of coffee began in the nineteenth century with the invention of the percolator by the American-born Count Rumford in Germany in 1806, with at least one aim being to discourage the heavy drinking of Munich workmen. His invention improved upon the traditional Turkish method of heating both ground beans and water in the same container. Water trickled down through a central cylinder that contained the coffee and filter and then up into the outer body of the vessel. The other long-favored method was the tinplate or enamel “drip-pot” that simply filtered the hot water from an upper vessel, through the ground coffee and into a lower one.

By the mid-1830s the first true coffee machines, large alcohol-heated drip machines, had been developed, primarily for cafés. Steam pressure was popular for smaller domestic models, especially in Italy. Simple steam-pressure machines featured a water container with a filter for the ground coffee. A metal tube dipped into the water, and as it heated, the pressure of the resulting steam forced the water through the coffee and out of the tube. Italian companies like Pavoni and Snider produced a variety of these models in the early twentieth century. Later models were electrically heated.

Coffee was a popular drink in Europe and America, and it was here that the major developments took place. The earliest electric appliances were percolators (the first introduced in 1908 by Landers, Frary & Clark under their Universal trade name) with a heating element attached to the base. Two types of vacuum coffeemakers were developed in Britain. The Siphon percolator of the 1850s used the principle of the vacuum siphon patented by Robert Napier in 1830. The apparatus consisted of two flasks linked by a pipe. Boiling water was poured onto ground coffee in a glass flask. The steam generated by hot water in another flask, usually of china, created a vacuum that drew the liquid coffee through. It was then served from a tap on the side. Another nonelectric solution was the Cona vacuum system developed by Alfred Cohn in London in 1910. It consisted of two glass vessels. The bottom one held the water and was connected to the top one, which held the ground coffee. Once heated the water rose into the top to infuse the coffee, while the cooling lower half created a partial vacuum, which drew the liquid coffee back down. The Cona remains popular today. The Danish Bodum company introduced their version, the Santos, designed by the architect Kaas Klaeson, in 1958 and it is also still in production.

The United States and Germany, both coffee-drinking nations, continued to develop electric models that were effectively percolators with electric heating elements in the base. AEG produced an electric siphon model during the 1920s. West Bend developed the Flavo-Drip coffeemaker that did not require a filter in 1922. Its popularity led to a stove-top percolator called the Flavo-Perk. The popular American Silex of the 1930s was a glass, two-bowl drip model that sat on a separate electric burner. Like kettles of the period, few were automatic. In 1937, S.W. Farber introduced the Coffee Robot that proclaimed to “do about everything but buy the coffee.” It was a vacuum type with an automatic shut-off and a thermostat to keep the coffee warm. Its success tempted other American appliance manufacturers into the market.

The postwar trend in the United States was for sleeker all in one, automatic electric coffeemakers. Glass was replaced by chrome bodies with Bakelite handles. Many had simple engraved patterns on their sides. Popular models included the Sunbeam vacuum Coffeemaster and the Universal Coffeematic percolator.

Meanwhile, Italy produced more important developments, both in 1933. Alfonso Bialetti designed and produced the Moka Express, a two-part machine that forced the heated water up through the coffee into the upper vessel. Made of cast aluminum, it is still popular today, and it still carries the distinctive trademark of the cartoon caricature of its inventor. If the Moka was uncomplicated, the cafetiere designed by fellow Italian Calimani was simplicity itself. Its now familiar form is that of a glass vessel with a plunge filter that is pushed down through the infusing coffee. It began to be used in French cafés after 1945 and became popular in the 1950s. The cafetiere is now ubiquitous on both sides of the Atlantic.

Italy was also the birthplace of espresso, a coffee produced through pressurized machines based on the 1901 patent of the Milanese engineer Luigi Bezzera. The main drawback of these machines was that the steam was forced through the coffee at a relatively slow rate, resulting in a bitter flavor. A Milanese man, Cremonesi, experimented with a piston mechanism to increase the pressure. He fitted it to the machine in Achille Gaggia’s bar in Milan. The piston method of forcing water through a bed of coffee at high pressure resulted in a fresher cup of coffee with a creamy head or crema. Cremonesi died during World War II, and Gaggia went on to develop the idea, with the Gaggia machine going into production in 1948. This machine was synonymous with the rise of coffee bars in Europe and America during the postwar period and stimulated the desire for authentic espresso at home. Gaggia produced the first domestic electric espresso machine in 1952. It was named Gilda, after the film that starred Rita Heyworth. A further improvement was the pump system developed by the Faema Company of Milan in the 1950s. A pump forced the water directly through the coffee at a constant temperature of 200°F. This method produced espresso very quickly and was adopted as the preferred method for domestic machines.

During the 1960s and 1970s these European methods began to make headway in the United States and Britain. Fresh filtered coffee was simple to make, and there was less chance of overheating it, which could happen with percolators. Manufacturers like Braun, Philips, and Rowenta produced well-designed automatic filter coffeemakers with plastic cases. The cafetiere was also successfully marketed by Bodum, which introduced their Bistro cafetiere in 1974, beginning their successful Presso line. Coffee was now one of the world’s favorite beverages, although it must be remembered that the majority of sales were for the instant granulated variety. Instant coffee was the result of eight years research by the Swiss Nestlé Company and was introduced in 1938. The coffee was freeze-dried to eliminate the water but leave the oils that gave the taste. By the mid-1990s, it accounted for 90 percent of all coffee drunk in the United Kingdom, over 70 million cups a day.

Nevertheless, the 1980s saw the manufacturers respond to an increasingly sophisticated market. The domestic espresso machine came of age with sleek matt black miniatures from the likes of Braun, Bosch, Gaggia, Krups, and Siemens, fully equipped with steam pipes to froth up milk for cappuccinos. Initially expensive, these models forced the water through the coffee with either an electric pump or a centrifugal system that spins the water at high speed. In the early 1990s Russell Hobbs, Tefal, and Krups produced combination machines featuring an espresso maker, milk frother, and filter coffeemaker.

As the kitchen had become both a stylish room and a workspace, the coffeemaker, like the kettle has not escaped the attentions of contemporary designers, especially those working for Alessi. Aldo Rossi produced an espresso maker and a cafetiere, Richard Sapper an espresso maker, and Michael Graves a cafetiere.

Coffee remains popular throughout the world and the public taste for distinctive coffee has been stimulated by the growth of specialist coffee shops and cafés. Such is the market that brands like Starbucks are becoming global. In this environment appliances that replicate the coffee shop taste remain in demand.

Carpet Sweepers

The carpet sweeper is manually operated. Its rotating brushes pick up dust, which is then deposited in the pan above. In the late 1850s, many patents for carpet sweepers were lodged in the United States. They were based on the same principles as the first street-sweeping machine patents granted to the British engineer Joseph Whitworth in 1840 and 1842. These early patents did not result in commercial production.

In 1876, Melville Reuben Bissell, of Grand Rapids, Michigan, patented an improved design of carpet sweeper. He began production and the Bissell carpet sweeper became the first commercially successful model. It consisted of a long pivoted handle, a wooden dust box on wheels and a set of rotating brushes. Bissell’s innovation was the central bearing brush, which allowed the sweeping brushes to self-adjust to suit different surfaces. By 1906, annual production of Bissell carpet sweepers had exceeded the one million mark. In Britain, similar carpet sweepers appeared in the 1880s. Carpet sweepers have become even more portable since being made of plastics and lightweight metals but their design has changed little, except for minor details such as the addition of corner brushes. They have retained a market niche because of their convenience for small cleaning jobs.

Computer Printers

Information stored on computer can be read off the screen, but many people find that reading from a computer screen is more physically wearing in terms of eye strain and postural fatigue than reading from the printed page. In the days of mainframe computers, printing was a batch job and required large, durable machines. The development of the first personal computers in the mid-1970s led to the corresponding development of desktop printers.

In the period 1976 to 1979, several types of printer became available. The best print quality was delivered by printers that used the same printing technology as contemporary typewriters. Indeed, some models were converted typewriters that retained the keyboard for dual-purpose use. The print head was a daisy wheel, a disk with spokes and raised characters around the circumference, and the printing medium was a carbon tape. Daisy-wheel printers were comparatively slow and noisy. An acoustic hood could be placed over the printer to deaden the noise, but this made the printer more bulky.

The alternatives to the daisy-wheel printer were cheaper, faster, and quieter, but delivered much lower print quality. In the late 1950s, dot-matrix printers were developed for use with mainframe computers. Dot-matrix printers use carbon tape, but the printer head consists of tiny pins that are selectively used, as instructed by the built-in microprocessor, to form characters. The print quality of desktop models improved somewhat in the early 1980s, when 24-pin heads superseded the original 9-pin heads. The cheapness of dot-matrix printers made them a popular choice where print quality was not the main consideration. Thermal and electro-sensitive printers were quieter still because they were nonimpact printers. Instead of a printer head, they used a stylus and the printing medium, carbon, was impregnated in the paper. The carbon was released in response to electric current flowing through the stylus. The print was fainter and less crisp than that produced by a daisy wheel. Low print quality together with the high cost of the special paper limited the sales of these printers. However, thermal printing is still used in many fax machines.

Two methods of nonimpact printing have proved very successful: the ink-jet printer and the laser printer. The ink-jet printer first appeared on the market in the early 1980s. The Japanese optical and electronics company Canon pioneered “bubble jet” ink printers in 1981. In 1984, the American electronics company Hewlett-Packard introduced the first of its ThinkJet series of ink-jet printers. Ink, supplied in cartridges, is sprayed through a matrix of perforations in the printer head. As with the dot-matrix printer, each character is a composite of dots. In the early days of ink-jet printers, there was a tendency for the ink to “bleed,” creating a fuzzy effect. Bleed-resistant papers were created but these, predictably, were more expensive than ordinary computer paper. By the late 1980s, improvements made to reduce the bleed problem and a steep drop in prices established the ink-jet printer as the favored budget purchase, in place of the dot-matrix printer. Ink-jet printers also have the advantage of compactness. When the notebook generation of portable computers emerged in the late 1980s, complementary portable models of ink-jet printers followed.

The only printer to match the daisy-wheel printer in terms of quality is the laser printer, which has more in common with the photocopier than the typewriter. The world’s first laser printer, the IBM 3800, was introduced by the U.S. office machine giant in 1976, but it took another ten years for the price to fall sufficiently for laser printers to become commercially competitive. Laser printers use powdered ink known as toner and contain a light-sensitive drum, a laser, and a rotating mirror. Where light from the laser beam falls on the electrostatically charged drum, the charge is dissipated; where no light falls, the charge remains and toner is attracted. The toner is transferred to paper and fused in place by heating. While characters and images are formed as patterns of dots, as with dot-matrix and ink-jet printers, the laser printer dots are so small and closely spaced that lines appear to be continuous.

Both ink-jet and laser printing technologies brought another advance—color printing. Canon introduced its first color ink-jet printer in 1982, only a year after its first monochrome model. It is now standard for ink-jet printers to operate as dual monochrome or color printers. Color printing is slightly more expensive because a tri-color ink cartridge has to be replaced more often than a black ink cartridge. Ink-jet models have a huge price advantage over color laser models. Hewlett-Packard, the company that has set the standards in laser printer technology since the launch of its first LaserJet printer in 1984, did not introduce a color model until 1994.

As printer technology changed, different manufacturers became involved. Makers of daisy-wheel printers included major typewriter manufacturers such as IBM and Olivetti as well as Xerox and Tandy/Radio Shack. Since then, Japanese companies have taken over the printer market. Epson became a leading maker of dot-matrix printers, and Canon, with a pedigree in the unrelated field of camera manufacture, is a leading maker of ink-jet printers. In the laser printer field, Japanese companies such as Canon and Panasonic dominate the lower end of the market, but Hewlett Packard of the United States is still a major supplier of top quality models.

Clothes Dryers

There are two types of mechanical aid to drying washed clothes: appliances for extracting water by pressure and appliances for producing evaporation through heat. In 1900, with the exception of very large households, the only equipment available for drying clothes was the mangle or wringer, where wet clothing was passed between heavy rollers to squeeze out water. The production of new electrical appliances for drying clothes began in the 1920s but only reached the mass market from the 1950s onward.

The first widespread improvement of the twentieth century was the fitting of powered wringers to electric washing machines. The wringer was connected to the electric motor at the base of the washing machine by a vertical driveshaft. The user still had to lift out the wet clothing and guide it through the rollers. Washing machines with wringers were the most common type of washer from just before World War I until the late 1950s.

Electric spin dryers were introduced in the 1920s but did not find an immediate market as domestic appliances, although larger models for public laundries were more commercially successful. The spin dryer is based on the principle of centrifugal force: wet clothing is placed in a perforated drum that rotates about a vertical axis, forcing the clothing against the walls and pressing out the water, which drains downward naturally or can be pumped out upward to a sink. In the late 1940s, the relaunch of the automatic washing machine with its integrated spin-drying function provided new impetus. By the mid-1950s, manufacturers had begun to exploit the domestic potential of the spin dryer both as a separate appliance and in combination with the washer. In Britain, where ownership of automatic washing machines with integral spin drying grew slowly, the first spin dryer aimed at the mass market was introduced by Creda in 1956. The spin dryer has changed little in essence except in being made lighter (by replacing steel casing with plastic) and more compact.

The drying of clothes by applying heat has evolved from the practice of placing damp clothes on racks in front of a fire or in airing cupboards near a hot water tank. Some versions of the lamp radiator type of electric room heater (circa 1905–1915) had rails at the top for hanging towels or clothes on. This was the only type of room heater that was safe for placing in direct proximity to damp clothes. Electric fans could also assist in the drying of clothes, but these were scarcer than room heaters. The next step was separate heated towel rails and drying cabinets, which appeared in the 1920s. The standard design

Ceramics

The use of ceramic vessels in the home is, of course, age-old, and most of the major developments in production techniques had been achieved before the twentieth century. Nevertheless, there were a number of processes that helped to further democratize the range and style of products available.

Photolithographic images for ceramics were developed during the late 1930s. This process allowed exact copies of original artwork to be reproduced on a piece via a transfer. It was first successfully exploited in the United States in the 1950s. A further improvement was the Murray-Curvex offset litho process that became available during the mid-1950s. This process transferred the still wet print onto the ceramic article via a gelatin pad or “bomb,” allowing the print to cover the sides of bowls and tureens, producing an “all-over” pattern.

These techniques were exploited by American and European designers and manufacturers and gave rise to a new wave of brightly patterned wares, often influenced by current artistic movements such as abstract expressionism. Some products were criticized as simply having new surface decoration applied to older shapes, but others were genuinely new combinations of exciting shapes and patterns, available at affordable prices.

The 1960s and 1970s saw less creativity in design, but technological development continued with tougher glazes able to withstand electric dishwashing.

Casco Products Corporation

Casco Products, an industrial-products company, began producing domestic appliances in 1949 with a successful electric iron. Soon after the company was aquired by Standard Kollsman Industries in 1960 it introduced the Lady Casco range of appliances. Pots and pans had long been sold as matching sets that could also be displayed, especially if enameled or colored; the Lady Casco range took this concept one step further. It attempted to “theme” appliances to match the American “dream kitchen,” an inducement to replace existing appliances with a new set all by the same manufacturer. The line of ten matching appliances centered on the Chef Mate, a motor-driven base with a range of attachments, including a mixer and a blender. The rest of the Lady Casco set consisted of a toaster, coffeepot, iron, and frying pan.

If this approach was novel, so was the method of marketing the products. The line was to be offered to stores on a franchise arrangement with the added gimmick that each set carried an exclusive five-year guarantee backed by Lloyd’s of London! By the close of 1961 over 2,000 stores had signed up to the franchise deal and sales were encouraging. Then in 1962 the parent company decided to abandon the project and the Lady Casco program was discontinued. In 1963 the appliance section of the business was acquired by Hamilton Beach.

Most domestic appliances follow a “house style,” and smaller pieces such as toasters and kettles have been themed to complement each other, even if sold separately. A recent trend has been the marketing of “double” or “triple packs” of products by manufacturers like Hinari, Breville, and Morphy Richards. These usually consist of a toaster and a kettle, the third element being either a sandwich toaster or a coffeemaker.

Camcorders

The camcorder, or video camera, captures moving images and sound on videotape. Camcorders targeted at the amateur user came on the market in the 1980s within a few years of the first professional models. Although camcorders were initially a luxury item, reductions in their price and size boosted ownership, particularly in their birthplace, Japan.

The camcorder’s predecessor, the motion picture (cine) camera, was never found in more than a small minority of homes. In the late nineteenth century, Thomas Alva Edison in the United States and the Lumière brothers in France pioneered the development of equipment for recording and playing moving pictures for public entertainment. Early motion picture cameras were hand-cranked, which required skill and was therefore a deterrent for amateur users. To create the illusion of continuous motion, the cameras had to capture 24 images per second, each of which was shown twice (i.e., at 48 frames per second) when the film was projected for viewing. Any change in the rate of hand-cranking would ruin the illusion.

The motorization of the motion picture camera made it more user-friendly, so cheaper models designed for amateur use were marketed in the 1920s by makers such as Kodak and Pathé. Although 8 mm motion picture film was available from 1932, 16 mm remained the standard for amateur cine cameras until the 1950s when more compact 8 mm models appeared, mainly produced by Japanese companies such as Canon. Motion picture cameras still had distinct disadvantages for leisure use. One disadvantage was the need for a projector and screen to show the films, and another was the absence of sound. Although professional motion picture film incorporating a sound track was developed in the 1920s, the equipment was not economically feasible for the amateur market.

The camcorder followed in the wake of the videocassette recorder, which gave the television set a new role as a playback device rather than just a broadcast receiver. As a sophisticated piece of technology, the camcorder was initially expensive and designed as a portable tool to meet professional broadcast standards. The conventional television camera owed much of its bulk to the size and shape of the orthicon electron tube. The first generation of camcorders contained a vidicon tube, which was much shorter and slimmer than the orthicon tube. Inside the camcorder, light entering the lens strikes the faceplate of the vidicon tube. The faceplate’s photoconductive lead-oxide coating converts light to an electric charge, which is picked up by the scanning electron beam and delivered as an output signal to the video recording head. The video track is recorded diagonally across magnetic tape, whereas the sound track, recorded simultaneously through a microphone, is placed along one edge. A small screen allows the user to preview shots and to play back the recording.

As Japanese companies had become dominant in the motion-picture-camera market in the 1950s, predictably they have also dominated camcorder production. In 1982, Sony released the Betacam professional camcorder, which used half-inch tape. Sony recognized that the Betacam format, which had already been overtaken by VHS in the videocassette recorder market, was too large to be successful for consumer camcorders. In 1982, a group of electronics manufacturers, including Sony and the Dutch company Philips, agreed to work on developing a standard miniature format, Video8, based on an 8-mm tape cassette. The Japanese company JVC (Japanese Victor Company), developer of the VHS format, soon pulled out of the Video8 consortium to concentrate on a compact version of VHS. In 1984, JVC launched the world’s first compact VHS camcorder, the GR-C1. The CompactVHS cassette (VHS-C) had a running time of one hour and was only a third of the size of a standard VHS cassette, but could be placed in a special adaptor shell for playback on VHS videocassette recorders. The Video8 specification was agreed in 1983, and the first Video8 camcorders appeared in 1985. In the United States, Kodak launched the KodaVision 8 mm camcorder, which was manufactured for Kodak by Panasonic, a subsidiary of the Japanese company Matsushita. Sony’s Handycam solid-state camcorder was more compact, weighing only 1 kg (2.2 lb), and the running time of the 8 mm cassettes was ninety minutes. In the case of camcorders, absolute standardization of tape format proved to be less critical than it had been in the case of videocassette recorders, largely because there was no prerecording issue and no need to use a videocassette recorder for playback.

Camcorders had far greater inherent consumer appeal than motion picture cameras, partly because of the convenience of playback via the television set. Other advantages were that videotape entails no external processing costs and is reusable. Recordings can be viewed immediately and then shot again if the results are not satisfactory. Since the mid-1980s, camcorders have evolved rapidly. In 1989, Sony brought out Hi8, a higher resolution 8 mm tape. The replacement of the vidicon tube with solid-state imaging devices not only reduced the size and weight of camcorders, but also improved the video quality and reduced power consumption. There are two types of solid-state video pickups—the metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS) and the more popular charge-coupled device (CCD). Both consist of an array of tiny photodiodes that convert light to electrical energy, but CCDs employ a scanning method that produces a higher output signal. The CCD was invented at American Telephone and Telegraph’s Bell Laboratories in 1969 by George Smith and Willard Boyce. It was first used in Sony’s Handycam camcorder.

Calculators

The term “calculator” may be applied to any device that assists the process of calculation. However, in practice it has become shorthand for one such device, the electronic calculator, which was the first to achieve widespread ownership beyond the workplace.

The ancestors of the electronic calculator were the desktop mechanical calculating machines developed in the late nineteenth century. These were based on principles established in the seventeenth century by the French mathematical philosopher Blaise Pascal and the German Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and were commonly known as adding machines. By 1900, two main types had emerged: machines operated by setting levers; machines with numerical keyboards, of which the first was the Comptometer of 1886, invented by the American Dorr E. Felt. The American inventor William S. Burroughs developed an adding and listing machine in 1892, with a built-in printing facility for producing a paper record. Adding machines soon became a standard piece of office equipment.

The purely mechanical adding machine evolved into the more compact, electrically powered version, which became typical in the 1950s. The first commercial electronic calculator was a transistorized desktop model introduced by the American Bell Punch Company in 1963. Texas Instruments produced a hand-held electronic calculator in 1967. Early American and Japanese hand-held calculators were still large by today’s standards. Home ownership remained low because people’s needs outside the workplace could be met more cheaply and conveniently by the use of “ready reckoner” tables and slide rules, or simply by mental effort.

The image and role of the calculator changed only when the advent of microelectronics enabled the production of small, cheap calculators. The world’s first true pocket calculator was the Sinclair Executive calculator, designed by the British inventor Clive Sinclair and launched in 1972. It featured an LED (light-emitting diode) display. In the same year, Hewlett-Packard pocket calculators became available in the United States. In 1973, the Japanese company Sharp introduced the first electronic calculator with a liquid crystal display. Within five years, the price of pocket calculators had fallen dramatically. In 1979, the pocket calculator became the card-size calculator when Sharp developed a super-thin model.

The pocket calculator is an example of a product that created demand where it did not previously exist. Today, the sophistication of the pocket calculator has reached such a level that even cheap models incorporate a range of scientific functions well beyond the needs of the average user. More expensive models have larger displays so that results can be presented graphically. The leading manufacturers are Japanese companies such as Casio and Sharp. In environmental terms, the pocket calculator has another distinction: it is the only commonplace device available in a solar-powered form. The solar unit in a calculator is a semiconducting photoelectric cell, which converts light energy into electric energy, thus removing the need for batteries. Pocket calculators may be wholly solar-powered or dual-powered, with back-up battery power to compensate for low light levels.