IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Winter 2014 - 19

and back sprockets. The safety bike, in contrast to the
penny-farthing, proved so popular that newspapers
circa 1890 referred to the bicycle craze. Everyone,
including you, was buying a bike.
But, as a 55 year old, you have a problem. You must
to learn how to ride the damn thing. You are what Joseph
Corn, in his interesting book, calls an "early adopter."
When you, gentle reader, learned to ride a bike, your
parents, or an older sibling, or a kid down the street
showed you the way. Maybe you were helped with
learner wheels - a 20th century invention. But in the
late 1880s you would have no such comforts, everyone
is learning at the same time and, to increase your humiliation, children are picking up this skill faster than you.
If you crash, the consequences for you are more serious than for these kids. Even worse, once you learn to
ride you dare not go far from home without mastering
yet another skill - fixing a flat tire. Rubber balloon
tires were a recent invention and inclined to fail. Nearly
everyone carried a repair kit and a pump and you traveled far from home without one at some peril.
The difficulties faced by this late 19th century adult
trying to master a new invention can serve as a paradigm for the case histories of early adoption that make
up Corn's book - one that he was apparently inspired
to write as part of the first wave of users (around 1982)
of the home computer and its printer. The possibility
of a crash, feared by our hypothetical biker, resurfaced
a century later with the same language for the new
computer user, and was in some ways nearly as scary,
bringing with it not a trip to the hospital, but hours
spent first trying to decipher the "manual" that came
with the machine, and then, almost inevitably, hours
on the telephone seeking assistance from a "help"
line. Corn has a good memory, and brings back the
bad old days of early home computers, before one
used the graphical user interface, a mouse, and the
practice of "clicking on an icon." He reminds us of
what word processing was like before the Windows
and Macintosh eras. With the Microsoft DOS system:
"Users first moved their cursor (with arrow keys) to the block of text they wanted to
move, and then entered the three key command
Ctrl+K+B. Second they positioned their cursor
at the end of the block and entered Ctrl+K+K,
which highlighted whatever text was between
the points. Finally, users moved their cursor to
the so called insertion point..."
It is painful to read this, especially if it evokes some
memories. Dealing with the printer was also arduous
and raised the specter not only of incorrect commands
but paper jams.
Although the suffering of the early user of the
home computer is a major topic here, Corn's story
IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

WINTER 2014

reaches back to the first third of the 19th century and
such consumer technologies as the mass produced
mechanical clock and more notably the treadle operated sewing machine. The latter was a complicated
yet popular device; women learned to use them thanks
in large part to accompanying texts, generously illustrated, that could be as long as 50 pages. Some historians assert that these were the first owners' manuals.
Corn's major emphasis is on the first generation
of the mass produced automobile, an era from around
1905 to the mid-1930s. If we drive a car today it's
because we learned from a family member, friend, or
a driver education class in high school. A man buying
a Model T Ford, say in 1908, did not have the comforts of history. He was in the first generation of buyers. How did he learn to drive it? And, why should he
choose this car? In this era, steam, electric, and gasoline cars all competed for the consumer's attention.
Nearly 10% of cars sold in the U.S. in the first decade
of the 20th century were steam. These vehicles were
somewhat complicated to start but unlike the gasoline
car required no arduous hand cranking of the engine.
The steamer, once underway, was both quieter and
easier to control than the gasoline car but it did require
constant replenishing of water. Electric cars had their
own advantages and disadvantages. They were simple
to start compared to their two competitors but required
electricity for recharging - not always available in
rural environments - and were slower. In 1905, 5%
of cars sold were electrics - most going to women.
Having decided on what sort of propulsion was
best, one had to make a choice about steering: right
or left-handed. Whether it was best to have the wheel
on the right or left was an unsettled question in this
first decade of the new century. Right-hand drive had
an advantage on rural dirt roads: you could see how
close you were to the edge and were better prepared to
avoid rolling into the ditch.
If you sprang for a gasoline-powered car you might
also be confused by your choice of transmissions. The
Model T, which became enormously popular, had its
own kind of transmission. You selected the gear you
wanted by depressing a particular pedal. There was no
clutch pedal. For cars with a clutch, the shape of the
shifting pattern for the gear shift lever had not yet been
standardized. The familiar H pattern for three forward
gears, one reverse, hadn't come into widespread use.
The "test drive" that the dealer gave the prospective customer of this era was quite different from what
you'd expect today. The salesman did the driving
because the customer typically didn't know how. How
did he/she learn? Typically it was from the dealer,
after the car was purchased. This might involve as
little as an hour's instruction. The rest of learning was
the driver's trial and error period spent alone on the
road. Of course, driving schools sprang up as well,
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Winter 2014