He designed the modern plastic garbage can, and the world is a quieter, nicer place.
Until the early sixties a household can was round and made of galvanized steel. It dented when you dropped it, it rusted through at the seam, and empty it was heavy enough that hauling it to the curb was a two-handed job for whoever in the house got stuck with the chore.
And it rang. Every alley in America woke to metal on concrete and metal on truck, five or six mornings a month, before anybody in the house had eaten.
Harrison and another Sears man started asking whether polypropylene could be molded at that size. Nothing that large had ever come out of that process, so there was nobody to ask and no example to copy.
He drew it in 1963, rectangular instead of round so it would sit flat against a wall. He put wheels underneath, so a woman or a child could move it without help. (Has wheels and is cool!)
Then he took the noise out.
It went everywhere, into alleys and driveways and behind restaurants and schools, and it is the reason the bin outside your house has the shape it has. Harrison described the achievement without any ceremony at all.
"No more clang-clang of metal before breakfast."
That can was one object among hundreds, and he drew eight to twelve Sears sewing machines a year for twelve straight years. On a working day he could put one or two product ideas on paper every hour.
Blenders and baby cribs, hair dryers and hedge clippers, riding mowers, cordless shavers, barber chairs, transistor radios, the measuring cup you can see through. He made the Kenmore sewing machines lighter by moving them to die-cast aluminum, and by his own account practically every product in the Sears line passed through his hands at one point or another.
He rose from staff designer in 1961 to Sears Roebuck's chief of design.
He was a salaried designer, which meant the company owned the drawings. They went out into the world wearing the company's brands, and the households reading those catalog pages never learned whose hand was behind the objects arriving at their door.
In 1979, he was taken out of the design department, and promoted to Group Laboratory Manager. The purpose was to provide technical support to a specific merchandise group from the Chicago headquarters, but servicing Sears all over the world. He was the manager for a merchandising section, which included automotive, sporting goods, tires, and batteries.
In 1993 Sears shut the in-house design department down completely. Harrison was the last industrial designer to walk out of the building, after thirty-two years. He was the company's first black executive.
In recognition of his impactful and groundbreaking career, Harrison received the National Design Award for lifetime achievement from the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in 2008 and an honorary doctorate from SAIC in 2009.
Martha Stewart introduced him at the gala and told the room she had learned to sew on a Kenmore machine. He had drawn eight to twelve of those a year for twelve years, so the odds were good that the machine in her story had come off his board.
Charles Harrison had come back from the Army in 1956 with a bachelor's degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and two years of military drafting behind him. The Army had trained him as a cartographer and sent him to West Germany to help redraw the maps of a country that had recently finished tearing itself and half a continent apart.
He was the only Black draftsman in his topographic unit. He spent two years making a wrecked place legible again, and then he came home and could not get hired to draw a toaster.
I share stories like Charles Harrison’s because history belongs not only to famous products and brands, but also to the people whose hands shaped the objects we use every day, the designers.
