Historians often speak of “contingency”, by which they mean something like “things could have been otherwise”. But is this even true? It can be hard to show. After all, there is no (obvious) way to go back, make a few changes, and run history a second time. Much science fiction explores exactly such scenarios, of course, and the popularity of this conceit can be understood as a symptom of a collective anxiety: what if our future is as determinate as our past? Addressing exactly that specter, the French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote, memorably: “There are times in life when the question of whether one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one perceives, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.” Perhaps this is why historians love the idea of contingency. In the playful piece that follows, the architect and historian Anthony Acciavatti uses a real (but mostly forgotten) patent to conjure a world that could have been. If we look around us, and squint, can we see it?
— D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor
We often forget that Thomas Alva Edison was responsible for patenting the light bulb and phonograph. While these were two of his 1,093 patented inventions, today we primarily remember “the Wizard” of New Jersey as the inventor of the single pour concrete house. Casting an entire home — from cellar to the roof, through the mantels and bathtubs, to the optional piano and refrigerator — in one go, Edison's invention proved decisive in pivoting the mass production of U.S. home construction from wood to concrete. Prior to the patent's approval in 1917, most people in the United States, and indeed large swaths of the world, dwelled in buildings made from an assemblage of wood, stone, or brick. Not only were these structures prone to rotting, chipping, and disintegrating, but bathtubs and sinks, as well as their countertops, were all separately manufactured and replaced at great cost. In contrast, a home made from concrete is easy to scrub with soap and water, never requires replacing siding or shingles, and is simple to paint. Unless we visit a house preserved from the period preceding the ubiquity of concrete buildings, we struggle to imagine such levels of domestic insalubrity.
But we do well to remember that the global success of Edison's concrete house was anything but a foregone conclusion. Filed on August 13, 1908, it took nearly nine years for approval from the U.S. Patent Office. It appears a disgruntled former employee of Edison's, Walter Milcom, submitted a nearly identical patent. While waiting for the authorship of the patent to be adjudicated, two of Edison's longtime associates and fellow patentees, Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin, published Edison: His Life and Inventions. A nine-hundred-page hagiography of Edison's achievements in art and industry, chapters 20 and 29 of Edison celebrated his ongoing experiments with concrete. Whereas all of the other inventions profiled in the book either founded new forms of arts and industry or significantly added to existing fields, the nascent single pour concrete house was “on the threshold of an entirely new and undeveloped art of such boundless possibilities that its ultimate extent can only be a matter of conjecture.” What was once conjecture is now our concrete reality.