Business: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 2

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WonderDesign

The Valentine was a portable typewriter launched by the Italian firm Olivetti in 1969. Its glossy red plastic body slid into a matching case with a handle. Designed by Ettore Sottsass with Perry King, it turned a piece of office equipment into a colourful personal object.

Olivetti presented the Valentine on Valentine's Day 1969. Inside was the proven mechanism of the company's Lettera 32 portable; what was new was the body of tough, coloured ABS plastic and a case that became part of the design rather than just a box. At a time when most typewriters were black, grey or beige, it was meant to feel like a personal belonging, not office furniture. Olivetti hoped to sell millions, but sales reached only a few tens of thousands. Even so, it became a design classic, held today by MoMA in New York and the V&A and Design Museum in London. Sottsass, who later founded the Memphis group of designers, came to resent being remembered mainly for this one red machine.

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WonderDesign

Thonet's No. 14, launched in 1859, is the classic bentwood café chair. It was built from six pieces of steam-bent beech, ten screws and two nuts, with a cane seat, so it could be mass-produced, shipped in pieces and assembled where it was sold.

Michael Thonet, a German-born cabinetmaker who settled in Vienna, spent years learning to bend solid wood with steam into strong curves that could be repeated exactly. That removed most of the carving and joints that made chairs slow to build, and let his company, Gebrüder Thonet, make identical parts in large numbers in factories in Moravia, in today's Czech Republic. The chair was cheap, light and tough enough for busy cafés, and Thonet's firm sold about 50 million of them between 1859 and 1930, making it the best-selling chair of its time. Because the parts could be packed tightly, chairs travelled by rail and ship to customers around the world. Versions of it are still made today.

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DriveDesign

A plug that fits only one way cannot be put in wrongly. Designing products and processes so that mistakes are impossible, or noticed at once, is called poka-yoke, Japanese for “mistake-proofing”.

The Japanese engineer Shigeo Shingo, who advised Toyota, developed the idea in the 1960s. In one factory, workers assembling a small switch sometimes forgot to fit one of its two springs. Shingo had them first put both springs in a small dish, then fit them from the dish; if a spring was left over, the mistake was obvious at once. He first called the method baka-yoke, “fool-proofing”, but changed it to poka-yoke, from poka, an inadvertent mistake, and yokeru, to avoid, because the old word seemed insulting to workers. Everyday examples include a memory card that goes in only one way and a microwave that stops when its door opens. Shingo argued that preventing a defect costs far less than finding it later.

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WonderTechnology

The Linotype was a typesetting machine that cast whole lines of text in molten metal as an operator typed at a keyboard. Invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler and first used by the New York Tribune in 1886, it set newspapers for nearly a century.

Before the Linotype, compositors picked individual metal letters from a case by hand and set them one by one, so assembling a newspaper page took hours. Mergenthaler, a German-born watchmaker's apprentice who emigrated to the United States and worked in Baltimore, built a machine in which each keystroke released a small brass mould of a letter. When a line was complete, the machine filled the row of moulds with molten metal, producing a solid bar called a slug, then returned the moulds to their places for reuse. The name comes from “line o' type”. The keys were arranged by how often letters are used, so an operator who botched a line ran a finger down the first columns, producing “etaoin shrdlu”, which sometimes slipped into print by mistake. Phototypesetting replaced it in the 1970s.

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WonderTrade

Medieval England's royal treasury kept accounts on tally sticks: notches cut into a piece of wood recorded a sum, then the stick was split lengthwise. Each side kept one half, and because only the true pair fitted perfectly, the two halves proved the debt.

The larger the notch, the larger the sum. Because wood never splits the same way twice, a forged half would not match, so the stick served as both receipt and proof. The English royal treasury, the Exchequer, used tallies from the twelfth century until they were abolished in 1826. In October 1834 workers burned the old sticks in the stoves beneath the House of Lords; the flues overheated and the fire that followed destroyed most of the medieval Palace of Westminster. The building that stands there today, with the clock tower that holds Big Ben, was built to replace it. Notched sticks for keeping count were also used in many other places, from village shops to farms.

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DriveTrade

A bill of exchange was a written order telling someone in another city to pay a set sum, often in another currency. Developed by Italian merchants in the Middle Ages, it let them trade across Europe without carrying heavy coins that were easy to steal.

A merchant in Florence, for example, could pay a local banker, who wrote a bill ordering his partner in Bruges to pay the merchant's agent there in local money. Only paper travelled. The instrument took on its main features in Italy between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, building on earlier ideas: Tang China used “flying money” in the eighth century, and merchants in the Islamic world used a similar note called the suftaja. Later, in France, endorsement became common: the holder could sign the bill over to someone else, so one bill might settle several debts before it was finally paid. Bills of exchange financed European trade for centuries, and today's cheque is a form of bill of exchange drawn on a bank.

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DriveBusiness

Double-entry bookkeeping records every transaction in two accounts at once: as a debit in one and a credit in the other. Because the two sides must always add up to the same total, a mismatch shows that something was recorded wrongly.

Say a shop buys stock for 100 florins in cash: the stock account goes up by 100 and the cash account goes down by 100, and the books still balance. The method grew out of the practice of Italian merchants in the late Middle Ages; the earliest surviving complete example is the 1299–1300 ledger kept by Amatino Manucci for a Florentine firm. In 1494 the Franciscan friar and mathematician Luca Pacioli, a friend of Leonardo da Vinci, described it in detail in a printed textbook published in Venice. That is why he is often called the father of accounting, although he did not invent it. Balanced books do not prove honesty, but they make many errors easy to spot, and the same logic still underlies company accounts today.

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WonderTrade

Jingdezhen, in China's Jiangxi province, has been one of the world's great porcelain centres for centuries. Song Yingxing's 1637 encyclopaedia says a single piece passed through “seventy-two hands” before it was finished, and that even this left out the finer details.

Kaolin, the white clay that porcelain needs, is named after Gaoling, a village near Jingdezhen where it was dug for the city's kilns. The town took its present name in 1004 from the Jingde reign of a Song emperor, and from 1369 the Ming court ran imperial kilns there. Song Yingxing's Tiangong Kaiwu, often translated as The Exploitation of the Works of Nature, described the farming and crafts of his day. His “seventy-two hands” reflects how finely the work was divided among specialists who prepared the clay, shaped, painted, glazed and fired each piece. Blue-and-white ware from Jingdezhen was exported across Asia and to Europe, and inspired Iznik tiles and Delft pottery. Topkapı Palace in Istanbul holds more than ten thousand pieces of Chinese porcelain, many of them from Jingdezhen.

Song Yingxing, Tiangong Kaiwu (1637)Read card

DriveBiography

In 1935 American chemist Percy Julian and his colleague Josef Pikl became the first to make the glaucoma drug physostigmine from simple chemicals. Julian later found ways to extract sterols, the raw material for many hormones, from soybeans on a factory scale, making drugs such as progesterone and cortisone far cheaper.

Physostigmine came from the Calabar bean of West Africa and was scarce. Julian's synthesis at DePauw University in Indiana also showed that a rival synthesis by the eminent British chemist Robert Robinson had gone wrong. Despite this, DePauw refused him a professorship because he was Black, and in 1936 he moved to industry as director of research at the Glidden paint company in Chicago. There, water once leaked into a tank of purified soybean oil and turned it into a solid mass. Julian recognised that it was rich in sterols, plant compounds with the same basic structure as human hormones, and turned the accident into a factory process. It made progesterone and later cortisone much cheaper. Julian held more than 130 patents, and in 1973 he became the first African-American chemist elected to the US National Academy of Sciences.

Percy Lavon JulianRead card