Americans were fascinated with new technology a century ago just as they are today. The telephone, the wireless, the electric light bulb and most certainly the gasoline-powered engine and its progeny were among the modern marvels of the moment. Here are a few items from Bangor’s two daily newspapers documenting our grandparents’ high-tech interests when they weren’t tending the horses or stoking the wood stove.
This was an era of homespun inventors like Freeman L. Lander of Bangor. Sometimes the work of these local wizards was on the cutting edge of social change — in Lander’s case, the quest for a better automobile.
Lander had patented a float gauge for gasoline tanks in autos, motorboats and the like. Everyone knows what a gas gauge is today. What is astonishing to the modern reader is how inconvenient it was to check the level of gas in the fuel tank a century ago.
“By the old method of ascertaining the amount of oil in the tanks it was necessary in the case of an automobile to take the seat cushions up, unscrew the cap to the filling aperture and run a stick down into the tank … This gauge does away with all of this bother and shows the exact amount of oil in the tank at all times,” reported the Bangor Daily News on Jan. 28, 1911.
Lander gave a demonstration of his invention at the garage of the Eastern Automobile Company on Columbia Street to universal approbation. The newspaper did not explain whether this was the first or only invention of its kind. Nor have I discovered whether Lander benefited from its success.
Maine inventors also searched for ways to make logging — still one of the area’s chief economic pursuits — more efficient. One of the most famous results was Alvin Lombard’s steam-driven log haulers, which could tow tons of wood on sled trains across snow and ice. The key was the use of a flexible tread or “endless track,” later adapted for use in farm tractors and for tanks in World War I.
A few years later, Lombard began experimenting with gasoline-powered log haulers. In a piece on March 8, 1913, the Bangor Daily News described how one of these gas-powered “wood trains” was being tested by Sargent Lumber Company to haul logs on a seven-mile stretch between Brewer Lake and the Eastern Manufacturing Company, which made pulp and paper and lumber in South Brewer.
Other newspaper stories were more about selling new technology than inventing it.
Ford automobiles had become so popular that one Bangor dealer couldn’t keep them in stock. So Eugene H. Dakin, president of the S.L. Crosby Company, made a trip to Boston to negotiate with the heads of the assembly plant there for a guaranteed supply of the latest Ford models.
“Bangor people therefore won’t have to wait any longer for their Fords,” readers were assured in a Bangor Daily News puff piece labeled advertising on Sept. 4, 1914.
Meanwhile, advertisements were appearing for the first outboard motors — advertised as Evinrude “detachable rowboat motors.” The first advertisement I noticed appeared in the Bangor Daily News on July 31, 1912. DON’T ROW, commanded the ad in bold letters. Underneath was a drawing of two women in Victorian garb in a small skiff, one of them steering an outboard.
The message was simple: “Avoid the toil and after effects of tiresome rowing. Instead take an Evinrude Motor to the river, lake or ocean with you. Clamp it on the back of any rowboat and glide across the water in real motorboat fashion. It is a sturdy little 1.5 H.P. engine, weighs 50 pounds, is carried like a traveling bag …”
Ole Evinrude’s motor was the first practical and reliable outboard. Within a few weeks, another ad in the Bangor papers made similar promises to fishermen and duck hunters.
Some recent technological wonders were becoming more accessible to working people. The price of residential telephone service, for example, was going down as more people had them installed in their homes and barns. The price of an exclusive one-party line was being reduced from $36 to $30 a year, while a similar reduction was scheduled for two-party lines, according to a press release from the Bangor Exchange of the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company.
Single and two-party lines were too expensive for many people’s tastes, so a four-party line and a six-party line would be added to the array of choices. Meanwhile, the 10-party line, which had cost $18 per annum, was being discontinued, the Bangor Daily News announced on Sept. 1, 1914. That would be the price of the new residential six-party line.
The price of light bulbs was also dropping by a third thanks to the retirement of the carbon filament incandescent lamp and the introduction of the Mazda Lamp “with its filament of drawn wire tungsten.” The cost of a 60-watt bulb would be dropping from 35 cents to 25 cents, announced the Bangor Railway and Electric Company, which would become Bangor Hydro in a few years.
In the area of public health, Morse & Co., Bangor’s well-known manufacturer of household furnishings out on Valley Avenue, was selling “made-to-measure Fly Screens.” It’s hard to believe today, but most people didn’t have screens in their windows back then. Flies had only recently been identified as a major spreader of serious diseases.
A “unique spring-backed strip at one side makes each screen fit snugly, yet permits raising and lowering on neat guide mouldings.” No screws, nails or other fastenings were required, claimed a large newspaper advertisement.
Occasionally, when reporters covered technology, they lapsed into science fiction. Such was the case on Dec. 24, 1912, after a Bangor Daily Commercial scribe paid a visit to the West Side Garage, where he interviewed a tobacco-chewing mechanic trying unsuccessfully to assemble a “shiny, black enameled touring car.”
“I’ll be glad when all gasoline cars are sent to the scrap heap and we have nothing to fool with save electrics. And that day is coming — not so far away,” said the frustrated mechanic, who had just dropped his monkey wrench, narrowly missing his toe.
Electric autos were already commonly used in cities with “asphalt streets … and a few charging stations.” The trouble in Bangor and other places like it was the steep hills that drained the batteries quickly. “You’d use more power in going up over State Street hill, for instance, than you would in running to Orono and back on a level road,” said the mechanic.
“But when you think of the submarine telephones and aeroplanes and wireless, it doesn’t take too great a chunk of imagination to be able to believe that the day is coming when they will have worked out the wireless transmission of power,” he continued. “And, when they do work it out — when it becomes commercially practical — you won’t see any more gasoline motor cars.
“Every garage will have a wireless power transmission station … and all you will have to do when you find your juice is running low, will be to turn a plug in your machine … and sit there for a minute or two while your storage batteries refill themselves automatically,” the mechanic fantasized.
That certainly would have been easier than removing the seat cushion to fill the gas tank.
Wayne E. Reilly’s column on Bangor a century ago appears in the newspaper every other Monday. His latest book, “Hidden History of Bangor: From Lumbering Days to the Progressive Era,” is available where books are sold. Comments can be sent to him at wreilly.bdn@gmail.com.