HOUSEHOLD GADGETS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 22 April 1938, Page 5

HOUSEHOLD GADGETS

NEW LABOUR SAVING DEVICES. Invisible forces that shell peas, wash clothes, beat eggs, mow lawns, mince meat, wash-up dishes and shave, comb and hair-cut you or get your bath ready—or even read your paper aloud, slice off your cooked egg's top, stir your teacup, or smoke for you when household gadgets "go electric” inventors acknowledge no limit. The household gadget is as old as Eve, or, to be up-to-date, as old as Egypt, “Mespot” or the cave-woman. The inventor of the lip for pouring liquid from clay jars, or the bold spirit who first put a safety ledge around metal trays, was probably a male. Men inventors still devise most of the household gadgets which lure housewives like moths to a lamp today.

A glance round a show like the Electrical and Radio Exhibition provides some strange conclusions. Labour-saving gadgets begin as manual devices. You see them in the big city chain stores in their earliest stages; improvements in compactness and efficiency soon follow. Then—presto, the gadget becomes popular, sells in thousands, and emerges from the chrysalis to become an electric device.

That happened first with the eggbeater. The household fork was once used by millions of housewives for beating-up eggs to an accompaniment of perspiration and mild swearing. Then the familiar handle-turning eggbeater appeared like a good fairy, and became a mechanical best-seller overnight. Result—the electrical mixer that does the “beating” job, actually an emulsifier, of kitchens and milkbars today.

Looking at it another way, laboursavers came first. Beating eggs can be mildly strenuous at times; but other household jobs call for actual muscle and slavery. Sweeping and dusting rooms, polishing floors, clothes wringing, of the “everlasting washingup.”

The first hand-pushed carpetsweeper earned its inventors a fortune. Then the electric cleaner stepped in. Expense barred it at first, but with competition, prices fell, T.P. and other ways of circumventing first cost took a hand, and it is the commonplace of the average wage-earn-er’s house today.

Today one can also have electric clothes-washers that do the washing, wringing and drying-off in one, but these are still in the “luxury” stage. Thousands of women will sigh enviously at sight of such gadgets, and go back to the home hand-wringer and washboard. First cost is high; but higher still is the cost of current in ordinary household bills. The “all-electric” house should be within reach of all. As it happens, it is—in lucky countries that have cheap electricity, like Scandinavia and some parts of the U.S.A. But in Australia, the household world awaits some cheap form of generating current, cheaper even than hydro-electric schemes, before electricity, as they say in the advertisements, “runs every home.” Meanwhile the smaller gadgets—the time-savers—are within the reach of most pockets, and electrical exhibitions display a tempting range. Peashellers, tin-openers, bean-slicers, onion-peelers, mincers, graters, toasters, re-cookers, shredders—they 1 are all there, ready for the patience-vex-ing jobs that have worried the housewife for centuries. And here invention has outrun practicality in some cases- —or should one rather say, appeals to the "born tired” spirit of modern life, with results that are often absurd. If the flood of “gadget” inventions patented is studied this becomes clear. Believe it or not, there is an electrical pipe which not only vaporises the smoke continually, but forces and sucks the smoke in or out of the mouth of those too lazy to draw their own breath! And electrical razors. You can buy efficient gadgets in Sydney which shave and apply lather in one. But there is also a weird electric robot which shaves and brushes teeth at the same time, for the lazy man who gets up too late as a habit. Most of these lazy jobs never go on the market, but remain provisional patents for all time. But some appeal to the lazy streak in mankind. There is the egg-top slicer. Serve the boiled egg in egg-cup clamp silver, switch current, and it cuts off the egg-top if you are too tired to swing a knife. Or the electric tea-stirrer; it whips round the fluid in a teapot or a cup, if you are too fagged to make play with a spoon.