The whole thing was a risk the enemy had not calculated, so when the war was over I was paid off instead of being liquidated or sent to a slave camp, and Miles and I went into business together about the time the insurance companies started selling cold sleep.
We went to the Mojave Desert, set up a small factory in an Air Force surplus building, and started making Hired Girl, my engineering and Miles’ law and business experience. Yes, I invented Hired Girl and all her kinfolk—Window Willie and the rest—even though you won’t find my name on them. While I was in the service I had thought hard about what one engineer can do. Go to work for Standard, or du Pont, or General Motors? Thirty years later they give you a testimonial dinner and a pension. You haven’t missed any meals, you’ve had a lot of rides in company airplanes. But you are never your own boss. The other big market for engineers is civil service—good starting pay, good pensions, no worries, thirty days’ annual leave, liberal benefits. But I had just had a long government vacation and wanted to be my own boss.
What was there small enough for one engineer and not requiring six million man-hours before the first model was on the market? Bicycle-shop engineering with peanuts for capital, the way Ford and the Wright brothers had started—people said those days were gone forever; I didn’t believe it.
Automation was booming—chemical-engineering plants that required only two gauge-watchers and a guard, machines that printed tickets in one city and marked the space “sold” in six other cities, steel moles that mined coal while the UMW boys sat back and watched. So while I was on Uncle Sam’s payroll I soaked up all the electronics, linkages, and cybernetics that a “Q” clearance would permit.
What was the last thing to go automatic? Answer: any housewife’s house. I didn’t attempt to figure out a sensible scientific house; women didn’t want one; they simply wanted a better-upholstered cave. But housewives were still complaining about the Servant Problem long after servants had gone the way of the mastodon. I had rarely met a housewife who did not have a touch of slaveholder in her; they seemed to think there really ought to be strapping peasant girls grateful for a chance to scrub floors fourteen hours a day and eat table scraps at wages a plumber’s helper would scorn.
That’s why we called the monster Hired Girl—it brought back thoughts of the semi-slave immigrant girl whom Grandma used to bully. Basically it was just a better vacuum cleaner and we planned to market it at a price competitive with ordinary suck brooms.
What Hired Girl would do (the first model, not the semi-intelligent robot I developed it into) was to clean floors...any floor, all day long and without supervision. And there never was a floor that didn’t need cleaning.
It swept, or mopped, or vacuum-cleaned, or polished, consulting tapes in its idiot memory to decide which. Anything larger than a BB shot it picked up and placed in a tray on its upper surface, for someone brighter to decide whether to keep or throw away. It went quietly looking for dirt all day long, in search curves that could miss nothing, passing over clean floors in its endless search for dirty floors. It would get out of a room with people in it, like a well-trained maid, unless its mistress caught up with it and flipped a switch to tell the poor thing it was welcome. Around dinnertime it would go to its stall and soak up a quick charge—this was before we installed the everlasting power pack.
There was not too much difference between Hired Girl, Mark One, and a vacuum cleaner. But the difference—that it would clean without supervision—was enough; it sold.
I swiped the basic prowl pattern from the “Electric Turtles” that were written up in Scientific American in the late forties, lifted a memory circuit out of the brain of a guided missile (that’s the nice thing about top-secret gimmicks; they don’t get patented), and I took the cleaning devices and linkages out of a dozen things, including a floor polisher used in army hospitals, a soft-drink dispenser, and those “hands” they use in atomics plants to handle anything “hot.” There wasn’t anything really new in it; it was just the way I put it together. The “spark of genius” required by our laws lay in getting a good patent lawyer.
The real genius was in the production engineering; the whole thing could be built with standard parts ordered out of Sweet’s Catalogue, with the exception of two three-dimensional cams and one printed circuit. The circuit we subcontracted; the cams I made myself in the shed we called our “factory,” using war-surplus automated tools. At first Miles and I were the whole assembly line—bash to fit, file to hide, paint to cover. The pilot model cost $4,317.09; the first hundred cost just over $39 each—and we passed them on to a Los Angeles discount house at $60 and they sold them for $85. We had to let them go on consignment to unload them at all, since we could not afford sales promotion, and we darn near starved before receipts started coming in. Then Life ran a two-page on Hired Girl...and it was a case of having enough help to assemble the monster.
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 typeface and carbon ribbon and I designed a letterhead. We were plowing 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 percent 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 percent of the savings that got us started were mine and 100 percent 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 percent 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 ulc
ers 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.
It is a moronically simple idea: don’t repair, replace. I wanted to make every part of Window Willie which could go wrong a plug-in unit, then include a set of replacements with each Willie. Some components would be thrown away, some would be sent out for repair, but Willie himself would never break down longer than necessary to plug in the replacement part.
Miles and I had our first row. I said the decision as to when to go from pilot model to production was an engineering one; he claimed that it was a business decision. If I hadn’t retained control Willie would have gone on the market just as maddeningly subject to acute appendicitis as all other sickly, half-engineered “labor-saving” gadgets.
Belle Darkin smoothed over the row. If she had turned on the pressure I might have let Miles start selling Willie before I thought it was ready, for I was as goofed up about Belle as is possible for a man to be.
Belle was not only a perfect secretary and office manager, she also had personal specs which would have delighted Praxiteles and a fragrance which affected me the way catnip does Pete. With top-notch office girls as scarce as they were, when one of the best turns out to be willing to work for a shoestring company at a below-standard salary, one really ought to ask “why?”—but we didn’t even ask where she had worked last, so happy were we to have her dig us out of the flood of paperwork that marketing Hired Girl had caused.
Later on I would have indignantly rejected any suggestion that we should have checked on Belle, for by then her bust measurement had seriously warped my judgment. She let me explain how lonely my life had been until she came along and she answered gently that she would have to know me better but that she was inclined to feel the same way.
Shortly after she smoothed out the quarrel between Miles and myself she agreed to share my fortunes. “Dan darling, you have it in you to be a great man...and I have hopes that I am the sort of woman who can help you.”
“You certainly are!”
“Shush, darling. But I am not going to marry you right now and burden you with kids and worry you to death. I’m going to work with you and build up the business first. Then we’ll get married.”
I objected, but she was firm. “No, darling. We are going a long way, you and I. Hired Girl will be as great a name as General Electric. But when we marry I want to forget business and just devote myself to making you happy. But first I must devote myself to your welfare and your future. Trust me, dear.”
So I did. She wouldn’t let me buy her the expensive engagement ring I wanted to buy; instead I signed over to her some of my stock as a betrothal present. I went on voting it, of course. Thinking back, I’m not sure who thought of that present.
I worked harder than ever after that, thinking about wastebaskets that would empty themselves and a linkage to put dishes away after the dishwasher was through. Everybody was happy...everybody but Pete and Ricky, that is. Pete ignored Belle, as he did anything he disapproved of but could not change, but Ricky was really unhappy.
My fault. Ricky had been “my girl” since she was a six-year-old at Sandia, with hair ribbons and big solemn dark eyes. I was “going to marry her” when she grew up and we would both take care of Pete. I thought it was a game we were playing, and perhaps it was, with little Ricky serious only to the extent that it offered her eventual full custody of our cat. But how can you tell what goes on in a child’s mind?
I am not sentimental about kids. Little monsters, most of them, who don’t civilize until they are grown and sometimes not then. But little Frederica reminded me of my own sister at that age, and besides, she liked Pete and treated him properly. I think she liked me because I never talked down (I had resented that myself as a child) and took her Brownie activities seriously. Ricky was okay; she had quiet dignity and was not a banger, not a squealer, not a lap climber. We were friends, sharing the responsibility for Pete, and, so far as I knew, her being “my girl” was just a sophisticated game we were playing.
I quit playing it after my sister and mother got it the day they bombed us. No conscious decision—I just didn’t feel like joking and never went back to it. Ricky was seven then; she was ten by the time Belle joined us and possibly eleven when Belle and I became engaged. She hated Belle with an intensity that I think only I was aware of, since it was expressed only by reluctance to talk to her—Belle called it “shyness” and I think Miles thought it was too.
But I knew better and tried to talk Ricky out of it. Did you ever try to discuss with a subadolescent something the child does not want to talk about? You’ll get more satisfaction shouting in Echo Canyon. I told myself it would wear off as Ricky learned how very lovable Belle was.
Pete was another matter, and if I had not been in love I would have seen it as a clear sign that Belle and I would never understand each other. Belle “liked” my cat—oh, sure, sure! She adored cats and she loved my incipient bald spot and admired my choice in restaurants and she liked everything about me.
But liking cats is hard to fake to a cat person. There are cat people and there are others, more than a majority probably, who “cannot abide a harmless, necessary cat.” If they try to pretend, out of politeness or any reason, it shows, because they don’t understand how to treat cats—and cat protocol is more rigid than that of diplomacy.
It is based on self-respect and mutual respect and it has the same flavor as the dignidad de hombre of Latin America which you may offend only at risk to your life.
Cats have no sense of humor, they have terribly inflated egos, and they are very touchy. If somebody asked me why it was worth anyone’s time to cater to them I would be forced to answer that there is no logical reason. I would rather explain to someone who detests sharp cheeses why he “ought to like” Limburger. Nevertheless, I fully sympathize with the mandarin who cut off a priceless embroidered sleeve because a kitten was sleeping on it.
Belle tried to show that she “liked” Pete by treating him like a dog... so she got scratched. Then, being a sensible cat, he got out in a hurry and stayed out a long time—which was well, as I would have smacked him, and Pete has never been smacked, not by me. Hitting a cat is worse than useless; a cat can be disciplined only by patience, never by blows.
So I put iodine on Belle’s scratches, then tried to explain what she had done wrong. “I’m sorry it happened—I’m terribly sorry! But it will happen again if you do that again.”
“But I was just petting him!”
“Uh, yes...but you weren’t cat-petting him; you were dog-petting him. You must never pat a cat, you stroke it. You must never make sudden movements in range of its claws. You must never touch it without giving it a chance to see that you are about to...and you must always watch to see that it likes it. If it doesn’t want to be petted, it will put up with a little out of politeness—cats are very polite—but you can tell if it is merely enduring it and stop before its patience is exhausted.” I hesitated. “You don’t like cats, do you?”
“What? Why, how silly! Of course I like cats.” But she added, “I haven’t been around them much, I suppose. She’s pretty touchy, isn’t she?”
“ ‘He.’ Pete is a he-male cat. No, actually he’s not touchy, since he’s always been well treated. But you do have to learn how to behave with cats. Uh, you must never laugh at them.”
“What? Forevermore, why?”
; “Not because they aren’t funny; they’re extremely comical. But they have no sense of humor and it offends them. Oh, a cat won’t scratch you for laughing; he’ll simply stalk off and you’ll have trouble making friends with him. But it’s not too important. Knowing how to pick up a cat is much more important. When Pete comes back in I’ll show you how.”
But Pete didn’t come back in, not then, and I never showed her. Belle didn’t touch him after that. She spoke to him and acted as if she liked him, but she kept her distance and he kept his. I put it out of my mind; I couldn’t let so trivial a thing make me doubt the woman who was more to me than anything in life.
But the subject of Pete almost reached a crisis later. Belle and I were discussing where we were going to live. She still wouldn’t set the date, but we spent a lot of time on such details. I wanted a ranchette near the plant; she favored a flat in town until we could afford a Bel-Air estate.
I said, “Darling, it’s not practical; I’ve got to be near the plant. Besides, did you ever try to take care of a tomcat in a city apartment?”
“Oh, that! Look, darling, I’m glad you mentioned it. I’ve been studying up on cats, I really have. We’ll have him altered. Then he’ll be much gentler and perfectly happy in a flat.”