EMILY KWONG, HOST:
So listen, when I was a kid, I loved going to the grocery store, and it was entirely to ride around on the back of a shopping cart. But the modern shopping cart as we know it didn't always exist, which meant it had to be invented. "How Curious" is a podcast from KGOU out of Norman, Oklahoma, that explores the state's legend - legends, tall tales and other stories. So when listener and Oklahoma patent attorney, Martin Ozinga asked - was the shopping cart invented in Oklahoma? - host Rachel Hopkin decided to investigate. And the story starts with businessman Sylvan Goldman, the man usually credited with the shopping cart's invention.
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CHARLES KURALT: You thought there'd always been a shopping cart, didn't you? Not until Sylvan N. Goldman invented it, there wasn't.
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RACHEL HOPKIN, BYLINE: CBS reporter Charles Kuralt interviewed Sylvan Goldman back in 1977.
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SYLVAN GOLDMAN: Well, I thought that Adam and Eve had a shopping cart. They've always been in use.
HOPKIN: Not at all. And for a long while, there was no need for one, since before cars, people could only buy what they were able to carry home. Alyson Atchison is the director of galleries and collections at Science Museum Oklahoma, which has quite a few items in its collection relating to Sylvan Goldman.
ALYSON ATCHISON: He was born in 1898 in Indian territory. It later became Ardmore. And he served in World War I, came back. He and his brother went off to California. They ran into the first supermarkets over in California. They came back and started to develop supermarkets in the Tulsa area.
HOPKIN: Later on, they moved their focus to Oklahoma City and environs. This was during the Great Depression, and Sylvan was constantly looking for ways to increase profits.
ATCHISON: He would watch people shop, and he noticed they stopped shopping when they couldn't carry anything more. So he went up to his office one evening and was really thinking about it, and he grabbed a chair and worked with Fred Young, a mechanic in the shop, and they came up with a prototype.
HOPKIN: Alyson brought out an example of that very first cart, and it didn't look very much like the carts we're used to using today.
ATCHISON: I can actually describe what he did. It was a folding chair. He put wheels on the four feet and then a basket on the seat, and then he put a platform on the things that kept the legs together. And that held another basket, too. So it was a two layer of baskets.
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KURALT: The walls of Sylvan N. Goldman's office are bright with cartoon tributes to his invention. Tributes to him, really.
HOPKIN: Charles Kuralt again, who evidently was not one to stint on blandishments.
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KURALT: The Newton of the A&P, the Edison of the Kmart. The original genius who made possible life as we know it today.
I noticed this. It says, shoppers came and saw and said it's a wow. Is that really what happened?
GOLDMAN: No, no. That's a big lie.
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HOPKIN: It was. Although Sylvan Goldman was delighted with his invention, customers proved less than enthusiastic.
ATCHISON: No one wanted them. Women said, once my baby's out of the stroller, I don't want to push a cart around anymore. I'm done. Men thought that they were effeminate. Well, Sylvan - he hired models to walk around his stores with the carts, so good-looking people.
HOPKIN: Men and women?
ATCHISON: Men and women.
HOPKIN: OK.
ANDREW WARNES: The book is how the shopping cart explains global consumerism.
HOPKIN: Its author is American studies professor Andrew Warnes, who's based at the University of Leeds.
WARNES: Before Sylvan Goldman comes along and popularizes the shopping cart, shoppers are basically limited to what they can carry. So the cart - you know, the idea that Goldman invented it - well, carts have been around for centuries, for millennia, before Goldman. But what he realizes is that there's something he can patent and there's something he can popularize that actually takes that weight off of shoppers and allows them to glide through the store and transport things with relative ease to the trunks of their cars.
HOPKIN: The rise in automobile use and the increasingly widespread ownership of fridges and freezers were both crucial to the success of the cart, which in turn led to a thriving business in package design.
WARNES: Suddenly, you've got a kind of ability to design the commodity as something that can be quickly grabbed, scooped, dumped in the cart, move on to the next thing. So a kind of proliferation of impulse buys happens. So I do think it's really important in transforming the way we shop.
HOPKIN: Back at Science Museum Oklahoma, Alyson took me to see a bronze statue of Sylvan Goldman in which he's depicted standing alongside a shopping cart.
So it says, Sylvan N. Goldman, 1898 to 1984. Inventor of the shopping cart that changed the world. Oh, and look, there's actually some things in the shopping trolley.
ATCHISON: Yeah.
HOPKIN: So there's a carton, which could be milk, an egg box, a bunch of celery, and cereal. That's so funny. I just thought that somebody had thrown some stuff in there to keep it there. I didn't realize that was a part of the display.
ATCHISON: No, no. No, it's bronze.
HOPKIN: Goldman's family commissioned the Oklahoma sculptor Lena Beth Frazier to create this piece in 1985, the year after Goldman died.
ATCHISON: I just think it's interesting that they did choose the nesting one, you know, instead of the prototype one, to be commemorated with him.
HOPKIN: OK, so this is where it gets rather complicated. Sylvan Goldman certainly invented a shopping cart, the one based on the folding chair with two baskets. But although that creation doubled the size of things one can purchase during a single trip, it had drawbacks, not the least of which was that when all set up with baskets in place, it took up a lot of floor space.
ATCHISON: That's when Orla Watson got the idea for a nesting shopping cart, which is much more like the ones that you see today. And he applied for the patent for the nesting shopping cart. And Sylvan Goldman interrupted it, and he applied for his own patent for a nesting shopping cart.
HOPKIN: Do we know if he actually had been designing a nesting shopping cart, or was he...
ATCHISON: I don't know.
HOPKIN: ...Jumping on a bandwagon?
ATCHISON: Right.
HOPKIN: Yes.
ATCHISON: I don't know.
HOPKIN: As generally happens with new inventions, they get modified and streamlined over time thanks to multiple interventions. Here, it seems like the person we have to thank for the crucial innovation that allowed carts to nest - namely the rear swinging gate - was down to a Kansas City inventor called Orla Watson. Watson began testing his product in a couple of local stores, but his progress was hampered by problems in production.
In the meantime, and as Alyson just said, Goldman, who could easily have paid a visit to one of those test stores, filed a patent for his own, and some might say suspiciously similar, nesting cart. This resulted in much back and forth between the two parties, some of it quite bitter, but in the end, a compromise was reached. Watson received the patent for the telescoping shopping cart but granted Goldman a license to produce and commercialize it. In any case, let's leave the final word to Sylvan Goldman himself, as interviewed in 1977 by CBS reporter Charles Kuralt.
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KURALT: What would our country be like if you'd never invented the shopping cart?
GOLDMAN: Oh, I'll tell you, it'd be just like it is now because somebody else would have. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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