IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2015 - 136

Market-Based Analyses

Market-Based Values
By David Alan Grier

lost before the conversation really
began. Art opened our discussions
with a sharp and pointed question.
"Why did you start on consumer
engineering with radio engineers? The
telephone was the first consumer electrical product." Art is an old-school
electrical engineer. He is equally comfortable with a motor controller, a
power substantiation, or a high-speed
logic circuit. In the past, he has tolerated my claims that all engineering is
now a form of software engineering,
but this time he clearly felt that I
missed some fundamental lessons about
how engineers interact with the public.
He quickly rejected my argument
that nothing before radio was really a
form of electronic engineering. "You
really need the vacuum tube," I weakly
claimed, "to be an electronics engineer."
"Michael Pupin" was his terse reply.
I thought that I was still technically
correct but I conceded the point. Pupin,
when he designed his induction coil to
improve the quality of signals over a
phone, was acting more as a signal processing engineering than as a true electronics engineer, but he was doing
things that we now associate more with
electronics engineering than with electrical engineering. In some circumst a nces, d ist i ng u ish i ng bet we en
electrical and electronics engineering is
not an easy thing to do.
At this point, I fell back upon my
last defense. "Flashlights," I said.
"Excuse me," Art replied.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2015.2463433
Date of publication: 29 October 2015

136 IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

"Flashlights," I repeated. "I didn't
want to deal with flashlights." Flashlights, like many of the early electrical
products, were generally not designed by
trained engineers. They are part of an
explosion of consumer products that
appeared in the 1890s. You can see this
explosion if you take at look back at the
catalog of the Sears, Roebuck, and Company. In the original 1894 Sears catalog,
you will not find a single electrical
device. You will find ads for bicycles,
sewing machines, and even windmills
but you will not find a single electrical
appliance. Twenty years later, the catalog

Flashlights, like many
of the early electrical
products, were generally
not designed by trained
engineers. They are part of
an explosion of consumer
products that appeared
in the 1890s.
had a full 20 pages of electrical goods:
stoves, irons, lamps, telegraph units,
medical vibrators, motors, power tools,
and flashlights. Most of these came from
small manufacturers and were designed
by shop stewards or individuals who had
read books on electricity. Few, if any,
were designed by engineers.
The flashlight is a good example of
these phenomena. The first patent for a
flashlight was awarded to David Missell

october 2015

of New York City, who seems to have little formal training in electricity. Missell
transferred the patent to the Eveready
Battery Company, which began marketing the device in 1903. At that point, the
flashlight became something like the
smartphone of its age. It sold quickly and
developed a large market. By 1917,
Eveready had sold hundreds of thousands
of flashlights and Sears & Roebuck
offered 36 different models. (You can see
the different models in an archive of the
electrical appliance section of the Sears
catalog: https://archive.org/details/
ElectricalGoodsCatalogue134.)
In spite of the fact that the market
for flashlights grew quickly, the American Institute for Electrical Engineers
took almost no notice of them. The digital library had few references to them
before 1923 and no articles that discussed flashlight design.
However, even though flashlights
were not designed by professional electrical engineers, they were not free
from engineering practice. Electrical
engineers influenced flashlights not
only though the design process but
also through the institutions that
developed to handle the problems of
risk. Electrical appliances posed a new
kind of risk to the home. Most generated heat, either directly or indirectly,
on purpose of through failure. Heat
could start a fire, and fire could
destroy homes and cities.
During the 19th century, the growth
of industrial cities also marked an
increase in fires that laid cities to
waste: St. Louis, 1849; Troy, New
York, 1862; Portland, Maine, 1866;

https://www.archive.org/details/

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2015