American Design Falters.

As new inventions were mass-produced, American industrial designers sometimes packaged them in familiar forms. For example, the phonograph cabinet, first patented in 1910, was a hodgepodge of curly French cabriole legs, a stout rectangular box, and a hinged mansard lid. In other cases they allowed the process of manufacture to dictate form without consideration of how the new invention might be used most easily. One example of such a product is the latheturned telephone, with its mouthpieces mounted on a simple pillar equipped with a hook for the earpiece.

European Designers Forge Ahead.

In the same years that American engineering was turning out new appliances with little consideration for form, European designers were employing styles related to Art Nouveau in a sensual melding of the ornate tendencies of Victorian art with the dictates of organic form to create beautiful, as...