Belle Darkin joined us soon after that. Miles and I had been pecking out letters on a 1908 Underwood; we hired her as a typewriter jockey and bookkeeper and rented an electric machine with executive type face and carbon ribbon and I designed a letterhead. We were ploughing it all back into the business and Pete and I were sleeping in the shop while Miles and Ricky had a nearby shack. We incorporated in self-defense. It takes three to incorporate; we gave Belle a share of stock and designated her secretary-treasurer. Miles was president and general manager; I was chief engineer and chairman of the board . . . with 51 per cent of the stock.
I want to make clear why I kept control. I wasn’t a hog; I simply wanted to be my own boss. Miles worked like a trouper, I give him credit. But better than 60 per cent of the savings that got us started were mine and 100 per cent of the inventiveness and engineering were mine. Miles could not possibly have built Hired Girl, whereas I could have built it with any of a dozen partners, or possibly without one-although I might have flopped in trying to make money out of it; Miles was a businessman while I am not.
But I wanted to be certain that I retained control of the shop, and I granted Miles equal freedom in the business end . . . too much freedom, it turned out.
Hired Girl, Mark One, was selling like beer at a ball game and I was kept busy for a while improving it and setting up a real assembly line and putting a shop master in charge, then I happily turned to thinking up more household gadgets. Amazingly little real thought had been given to housework, even though it is at least 50 per cent of all work in the world. The women’s magazines talked about “labor saving in the home” and “functional kitchens,” but it was just prattle; their pretty pictures showed living-working arrangements essentially no better than those in Shakespeare’s day; the horse-to-jet-plane revolution had not reached the home.
I stuck to my conviction that housewives were reactionaries. No “machines for living”; just gadgets to replace the extinct domestic servant, that is, for cleaning and cooking and baby tending.
I got to thinking about dirty windows and that ring around the bathtub that is so hard to scrub, as you have to bend double to get at it. It turned Out that an electrostatic device could make dirt go spung! off any polished silica surface, window glass, bathtubs, toilet bowls-anything of that sort. That was Window Willie and it’s a wonder that somebody hadn’t thought of him sooner. I held him back until I had him down to a price that people could not refuse. Do you know what window washing used to cost by the hour?
I held Willie out of production much longer than suited Miles. He wanted to sell it as soon as it was cheap enough, but I insisted on one more thing: Willie had to be easy to repair. The great shortcoming of most household gadgets was that the better they were and the more they did, the more certain they were to get out of order when you needed them most-and then require an expert at five dollars an hour to make them move again. Then the same thing will happen the following week, if not to the dishwasher, then to the air conditioner . . . usually late Saturday night during a snowstorm.
I wanted my gadgets to work and keep on working and not to cause ulcers in their owners.
But gadgets do get out of order, even mine. Until that great day when all gadgets are designed with no moving parts, machinery will continue to go sour. If you stuff a house with gadgets some of them will always be out of order.
But military research does get results and the military had licked this problem years earlier. You simply can’t lose a battle, lose thousands or millions of lives, maybe the war itself, just because some gadget the size of your thumb breaks down. For military purposes they used a lot of dodges: “fail safe,” stand-by circuits, “tell me three times,” and so forth. But one they used that made sense for household equipment was the plug-in component principle.