A Design So Good, It’s Scary

Svengoolie

One of my guilty pleasures is watching old horror / monster / sci-fi movies. And I mean really old: anything newer than the 1970s need not apply. Watching these films is a very conscious exercise in nostalgia. For a couple of hours I return to childhood, a time of carefree sleepovers when my friends and I stayed up long after our parents had gone to bed. When I was a kid I didn’t know just how bad most of these movies are, and now that I’m an adult I choose not to care. The feelings they reproduce are so seductive that I happily suppress any real criticism.

Movies of this sort used to come to me from UHF broadcast channels. Despite modern technology that makes them available at any time and in many formats, I still get my fix over the air. The Movies! network (Channel 63.3 in Milwaukee) has a classic horror / monster / sci-fi lineup on Fridays, and on Saturday nights I try never to miss Svengoolie on the MeTV network (Channel 58.2 in Milwaukee).

Last Saturday, Svengoolie showed “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man” from 1943. It’s very weird to think that this movie was only about 30 years old when I saw it for the first time. It seemed ancient. For contrast, “Ghostbusters” was released 38 years ago but it feels like yesterday. Anyway, last Saturday I noticed something in “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man” that didn’t make any impression on me when I was a kid:

The policeman on the right is using a floor pump to inflate the rear tire of his bicycle. It’s a curious detail, one with no bearing on the plot of the movie. The policeman on the left is reading a newspaper, so perhaps this little scene was intended to show an unremarkable moment before the police station and the community it served were disturbed by the supernatural.

What made the scene remarkable to me was the unchanged nature of pumping up a bike tire. Here’s a pump from the 1940s alongside a new model:

Tiny CO₂ inflators have mostly replaced frame pumps when we’re on the go, but no one has “built a better mousetrap” to challenge the floor pump in the garage. Modern pumps are lighter than the brass-and-wood pumps of yesteryear and they have convenient built-in pressure gauges. The heart of the design, though, is the same.

No one seems to know exactly when the tire pump was invented or by whom. The best guess is that its invention must have coincided with the invention of the pneumatic tire in the late 1880s. The tire pump appeared just a few years after Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone. Now, imagine Bell magically reappearing in 2022 and trying to understand a modern telephone: tiny, wireless, feature-rich … capable of so much more than he could have envisioned. Things would be otherwise with the inventor of the tire pump. More than 100 years on, the inventor would immediately and fully understand a new model. Amazing.