Charles Harrison – An Industrial Design Giant

As we enter Black History Month, I will make note of an exceptional African American I met six years ago. Charles Harrison, a retired industrial designer, was brought to Virginia Tech in observance of Black History Month by the Colleges of Engineering and Architecture and Design. He did workshops for students and offered a public lecture. While he is not widely known, his work permeates American life. Few individuals in the world have matched his output. It is likely that everyone reading this has used one of his products.
            Harrison designed many products and some very famous ones. Perhaps his most renowned achievement was leading the team that updated the View-Master in 1958, creating the classic Model F View-Master. The View-Master, one of his most recognized designs and largest selling products, lasted over 40 years with the same design. In 1966 he got rid of an everyday nuisance—the early-morning clanging of metal garbage cans–by creating the first-ever plastic garbage bin. He designed the container so that several could be stacked one within the other, facilitating the transportation of many of them in one truckload. In his career, Harrison designed over 700 consumer products, including everything from blenders to baby cribs, hair dryers to hedge clippers.
            As would be expected, Harrison did not have it easy. In the 1950s with degrees from both the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and the Illinois Institute of Technology, Harrison was pursuing a rare career–in industrial design. It was an odd field for anyone, but especially so for African Americans, as he found out when he answered an advertisement by Sears, Roebuck, and Company. He was rejected and told why, because he was black, as Sears had a “no black” hiring policy at the time.
            Harrison continued to do freelance work until one of his former professors at SAIC, a Holocaust survivor gave him his first job at a design firm. There he specialized in designing all types of furniture and learned the technical and business parts of the trade. Over the next several years he worked for two other small firms. The second of these firms was where he modified the View-Master from a clunky 3-D apparatus into an iconic plastic toy suitable for use by children. Later, in 1961, Sears had changed its policy against hiring blacks and gave him a call. He accepted their offer and embarked on a prolific career in design. Over the next thirty years, he designed tools, appliances, televisions and more, including objects that you would find in every room of the American house, including the garage and the toolshed. One of his specialties seemed to have been the sewing machine. He estimates that he designed 8 to 12 sewing machines every year for about 12 years.
            He started at Sears as a designer and eventually became manager of the company’s entire design group. Sears, of course, was the largest retail store in the United States until Walmart surpassed it in 1989. During his career, Harrison and his buyers traveled all over the world to find manufacturers for the products they designed.
            Harrison, who became Sears’ first African American executive, retired in 1993. After retirement, he taught part-time at the University of Illinois at Chicago, SAIC, and at Columbia College Chicago. In October 2008, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement National Design Award by Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution.

Here is a “short” listing of some of the many products Harrison designed: 35mm cameras, AM-FM radios, baby cribs, back massagers, barber chairs, bicycles, binoculars, blenders, calculators, can openers, cassette recorders, circulating heaters, clothes hampers, coffee percolators, compact whirlpools, cordless shavers, dinette sets, electric scissors, electric toothbrushes, electric wall clocks, fishing equipment, fondue pots, hearing aids, hedge clippers, insoles for shoes, kitchen appliances, kitchen ranges, makeup mirrors, manicure tools, paint brushes, phonographs, portable bars, portable hair dryers, riding lawn mowers, shoe buffers, sleds, soda fountains, sprinklers, storm doors, telephones, television sets, toasters, tractors, waffle irons, wall unit shelving, wet mops, window guards, wooden desks.