A Cornish manufacturer of coiled springs is connected to the Shang dynasty through labor demographics, electrification, and The Sun King, which together brought about Hooke’s Room-Ring System.

The Carthew family of Cornwall had worked the copper mines since Roman times, perhaps even in the Bronze Age. By the time young Thomas entered the family business, the Hooke-Carthew Company had come to specialize in the manufacture of staff call bells, that matrix of alarms on springs (downstairs) summoned by a network of wires and pulls (upstairs.) In the 1870s, Hooke-Carthew saw that household electrification was at hand, and foresaw how the company’s wires and springs would need to be repurposed. A lesser mind might have anticipated the replacement of the mechanical bell with the electric buzzer, but Thomas had other ideas.

Between the lofty ideals of the Utopians, and the practical socialism of the trade unionists, Hooke-Carthew astutely predicted that domestic workers would seek employment elsewhere. He’d be proven correct, and many of the grand estates that had long depended on Hooke-Carthew Bells would find their numbers reduced to but a cook and a butler. Thomas advanced the idea of an intramural communications system that could adapt to both technological and sociological changes: a two-way system, it would allow replies to be sent back upstairs, and its elevated styling would look at home among the most elegant consumer goods of the time. He designed his machines to coordinate with the celadon porcelain that was prized by the Neoclassicists, which in turn imitated the tastes of Louis XIV, and which had originated in China nearly 3,500 years before. Alas, Hooke-Carthew’s machines would be cut short by the arrival of the microphone and speaker in the decade ahead, which would install the intercom as the de facto standard for communications at home. But Hooke-Carthew’s vision of how technical contrivances could be integrated into an entire system of accessories would forever inform industrial design, albeit never again with so much turquoise.

Published December 30, 2022. Copyright © 2022 Jonathan Hoefler.